The experience of beauty, perhaps because it is an experience, is often dismissed as something merely subjective. Beauty, so we have come to believe, is exclusively ‘in the eye of the beholder’, and thus we consider it to be a merely accidental, though possibly interesting flourish, on the facts of life. In the face of the experience of something truly beautiful, our tendency is not to proclaim, ‘this is beautiful’, or ‘this is sublime’, but rather to describe our feelings in the face of the experience. We might then say, ‘this is pretty’, or simply ‘I like this’.
We recognise that there has to be something objective to this experience, but perhaps because we are nervous about making objective truth claims, we tend to simply universalise our experience. We witness this explicitly in the now sadly common declaration that something is “cringe”, which is, I suppose was shorthand for saying that something is ‘cringeworthy’. This has developed to a simple declaration of a universalised sensation. All of this has the effect of evacuating reality of any deep objective meaning and reducing it to mere experience, even experience commonly shared. But the experience of beauty is complex. There is of course, some truth to the notion that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it’s just not exclusively so.
The thing about beauty is that beauty can be not just captivating, it can be confronting. It can arrest us, and cause us to stop, and to ponder the objective meaning of things. As Pope Benedict XVI noted, beauty can wound us – like an arrow that strikes the heart and clarifies the questions of my heart, giving me a glimpse, a hope, that these questions might in fact have answers, that life might have a meaning, a purpose.
The great Swiss-German philosopher and theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar noted that in in our modern world, ‘Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach’. Having relegated it to the realm of the merely subjective, we tend to succumb to the belief that it is not worth thinking or reasoning about. And so we concern ourselves with questions of public ethics and politics. Balthasar continues, ‘We no longer dare to believe in beauty, and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it.’
While we cannot completely quench our desire for it, we attempt to satiate the need for beauty with something that is merely titilating or fascinating. In other instances we fail to fully appreciate the beauty that is before us having fallen into a mental habit of reducing things to the sum of their parts and how they function, or simply neglecting to exercise the mental muscle of attention required to appreciate beauty, and so beauty passes us by while we scroll away on our phones.
Beauty, we’ve come to think, is just a luxury. Nice if you can get it, but peripheral to the necessities of everyday life. But Balthasar argues that
“Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.”
We need beauty. Genuine beauty. We need it as a way, as a guide to what is true and what is good. Beauty operates as a safeguard, and as a constant reminder of the transcendent horizon to reality, to our lives.
