"Rothschild, in a wall text, draws this moral from her show: 'The union of malevolence and beauty can occur; we must remain vigilant against its seductive power.' I disagree. We must remain vigilant against malevolence, and we should regard beauty as the fundamentally amoral phenomenon that it is."I disagree with the author’s conclusion. Beauty is fundamentally an attribute of God, and as such, holy, not amoral. Evil twists it, makes it dark, and turns it to serve its purpose. Like evil twists many good thing: sex, drugs, authority. Improper time, place, balance, etc., change them from right and good to perverted and wrong.
Friday, August 19, 2005
The New Yorker: The Critics: The Art World
My friend talked about a book discussing Hitler's aesthetics in his blog. One of the comments on it led me here: The New Yorker: The Critics: The Art World:
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2 comments:
I think when you talk about the evil that "twists [beauty], makes it dark, and turns it to serve its purpose", you hit on what the author was trying to say - not that beauty is immoral, but that it is amoral, and not inherently good or evil. While we can certainly praise God and his works as beautiful, to be beautiful is not necessarily to be holy. We need to distinguish between aesthetic qualities and virtue.
I wasn’t sure how to answer that. (Right! It took me a month and half!) Beauty has been so redefined in our culture. When you say that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, it makes beauty seem very relative.
But I looked up “beauty” in the Bible and came up with a lot. The first one is my life verse, Psalm 27:4. “One thing I have desired of the Lord, That will I seek: That I may dwell in the house of the Lord All the days of my life, To behold the beauty of the Lord, And to inquire in His temple.”
Psalm 90:17 says, “Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us, And establish the work of our hands for us.”
Psalm 96:6 says, “Honor and majesty are before Him; Strength and beauty are in His sanctuary.”
A lot of verses also talk about the beauty of holiness, like Second Chronicles 20:21 which says, “And when he had consulted with the people, he appointed those who should sing to the Lord, and who should praise the beauty of holiness, as they went out before the army and were saying: ‘Praise the Lord, For His mercy endures forever.’”
So beauty certainly appears to be an attribute of God. Probably more germane to the discussion is the question of what beauty refers to. If beauty is an attribute of God, it can’t be relative. Maybe it would be useful to compare it to love.
Love is an attribute of God. But human love can be very twisted, and very unholy. The Greeks divided it down to agape or God love, phileo or friendship/brotherly love, and eros or romantic/lustful love.
It would take more figuring than I have time for at the moment to see how beauty could be divided. Probably someone else has already done that. But it doesn’t change the fact that beauty is an attribute of God, that mankind (with Satan’s help I’m sure, he loves to destroy the good God has made) has degraded in many cases. Or that when we seek for or create beauty, we can find our ideal in God.
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