The Patriot

Gene Veith has another article on appreciating beauty. He quotes at length someone who describes his path of discovery as going from being an outsider to being an insider.

Listen to R. C. Sproul speak on the theology of truth, goodness, and beauty, especially beauty, in his talk “The Spirit in Creative Expression” available from the Renewing Your Mind web site. The talk was posted March 7, 2008.

The following excerpt comes from a commencement address by David Hicks.

Create something beautiful every day. A poem, a song, a love letter, an arrangement of flowers or a garden, a painting or a stone wall, a bird house or a lace curtain, an invitation or a thank you note. Beauty matters. Don’t assume you know anything about beauty. You probably know much less than you think you do. … Everything beautiful comes from the hand of God and has His signature on it. This is the beauty that speaks the truth. … Don’t put your head on the pillow without asking yourself: What beautiful thing have I offered in thanksgiving to my Creator this day?

Delivered at Westminster Schools, Augusta, Georgia, May 14, 2005.

At Covenant Academy, we hold to the classical values of truth, goodness, and beauty. Christians in general understand the importance of truth and goodness, but beauty is often under-valued.  Beauty is suspect, partly because it is viewed as subjective.

Gene Edward Veith recently published an article entitled Acquired taste in which he defends objective standards of beauty. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder to some extent, but not entirely. And the beholder can train his eye to appreciate what is objectively good. Veith gives this definition of beauty.

A work is beautiful to the extent that it displays at the same time both complexity and unity.

He goes on to explain how some examples of modern art fail to meet this definition.

In painting a black canvas has unity, but it has no complexity.  A canvas of random paint splatterings has complexity, but it has no unity.

Beautiful painting shows subtle detail and over-arching order. Beautiful music has a balance of repetition and variation at multiple levels. Beautiful mathematics has complexity and simplicity.

Francis Schaeffer had similar thoughts regarding beauty. He spoke of “freakishness in the arts” as a symptom of cultural decline. Freakishness is complexity without unity. It is arbitrary, disconnected from the created order. Schaeffer taught that the Christian worldview has room for both unity and diversity, ultimately rooted in the unity and diversity of God Himself in the Trinity. Other worldviews, and the art they inspire, have a more difficult time embracing both unity and diversity and often grab hold of one but not the other.

Beauty is vital. Works that combine both unity and complexity invite us to reflect, however indirectly, on profound truth regarding creation and our Creator.