Restoring Beauty

 "May I reside here, in this, your house, everyday that I have, to encounter the glorious radiance of the most high, and to be at home, here in your presence".

Psalm 27:4.

So, this week, Andrew Klavan sought to address the monumental task of how we seek to see genuine beauty become evident once again in life and action in a manner which truly seeks to express something of the marvel of God's extravagant and pervasive goodness and truth.

Whilst I am delighted to see this head on approach to something that truly matters, I want to unpack some of what he stated, because it was both useful and troubling, pretty much in equal measure.

THE REASON

Andrew is certainly correct to seek to address the "slump" in our culture, and the need to see this addressed in a fashion that moves beyond the nasuiating limitations of politically correct culture. The recent massive success of the film, "Top Gun - Maverick', for example, which has taken over a hundred and fifty billon dollars at the box office states loud and clear that people are looking for something far more genuinely entertaining than the dross of the recent Disney films, Netflix and Amazon shows, that keep pounding the woke drum, but this shouldn't cause us to loose sight of the genuinely good film makers that are still very much at work in that genre. Directors such as Ridley Scott, Christopher Nolan, Guillermo Del Torro, and Denis Villeneuve, have found ways and means amidst the past troubled few years to continue to maintain and produce visual works that genuinely speak to the power and scope of cinema to tell human stories of worth and significance, so our examination of the arts needs to be nuanced by such considerations.

THE ROAD AHEAD

Society, as Lewis noted in the Abolition of Man, clearly has a pernicious tendency to turn us in upon ourselves. That indeed is a spiral to madness (hence, plenty of 'art' today that conveys just that), but good art always causes us to look outside of this vortex - to perceive the 'hand' of something or someone greater reaching in to take us into a far better place of seeing and understanding what and where we are. Such truth brings a depth of acknowledgement of our shortcomings and a greater truth beyond ourselves.

Mere images and appearances - the peripheral - is what has become key in our present fixation upon the immediate (our momentary wants), hence so much of our media is tellingly geared to the satiation of this. Nature's overt glory is therefore discarded because it "sings" of a far higher beauty, as does the very truth of the image within ourselves that we must impugn in order to 'protect' ourselves from hearing the explicit 'song' that the natural realm proclaims so loudly within and without (Romans 10:18).

The present moment reflects how all that is essential in respect to ourselves and our world becomes severed when we dissect our nature and existence by the scalpel of nihilism. Truth instead exposes the very nature of our soul and marrow as the explicit property of the divine. The popular error is indeed artistic annihilism - the incarceration of the person and the culture, as evidenced in the realm of such evil expressed, for example, in Germany in the 1930s.

There can be no doubt that such "death" has been at work in our society throughout our times, but it would be wrong to assume that this has been the only 'voice' at work in the West. Some of us have witnessed first hand the 'wind in the trees' of awakening and renewal in life and faith, and this has often lead directly to very genuine expressions of the life which comes down from on high to enliven our engagement with society and the creative aspects of existence.

THE ISSUE

The intention of beauty, he (Andrew) notes, is to essentially point to truth. Beauty is abused, then, when we seek to mutilate its inherent virtue to construe something 'as' beautiful which maligns and demeans us via our encounter with it (Genesis 3:1).

Our affections, our ability to use our faculties to visualise wonder, can either be a gateway to something genuinely rich and marvellous, or, if beguiled, to become enslaved by a wickedness that is our undoing. The David who wrote in the Psalms of the astonishing splendour of the 'fearfully and wonderfully' made human body, for example, was also the man ensnared by inappropriate desire when he neglected his vocation and surrendered to his propensity to sin.

Part of the problem today is properly defining beauty. The 'goodness' of this virtue, the video notes, is expressed in its consequences, but that does not mean that a valuable definition cannot be given.

Beauty is the means whereby what only 'appears' to be secular actually becomes a jewel which reflects the deepest expression of what is eternally good and true. Genuine beauty can therefore take what is naturally "dissolving" (pain, suffering, death), and bring a virtue and a value into these realms that is genuinely sublime and extraordinary.  Art, therefore, is 'good' when inviting us to look for, to discover, what is genuinely the most important, the most just, in what we can encounter in song or sculpture or moving images.

Beauty, then, seeks to express what is 'highest' in the realm we inhabit, but the encounter elevates us to beyond the merely temporal - it encapsulates a genuinely transcendent quality. In this manner, it is truly married to truth and goodness, because it is a threshold into what is essentially, vitally deeper and richer than the merely mundane.

RENEWING THE SECULAR?

Given the above definitions, can something that is contemporary (post-modern) be used in a fashion that conveys truth?

This surely depends upon the intention of those who are using a medium - what is it that they want to express?

In my younger days, many sections of the church stated that rock music was simply 'of the devil', but that simply was not the only statement to be made of such a genre.

We can so easily 'miss' the fact that God can take a stone, a stick, a bush, or a human embryo, and by filling it with Himself, make it an expression of extraordinary truth and beauty.

Whilst we can agree with Andrew that what we so often see and hear is truly degraded by the human condition, this does not prevent God from picking this up and using it for His glory.

There is no denying that modernism - which, as Andrew shows in his own book on beauty, really commenced in some of the streams which emerged at the time of the enlightenment - seeks to demean and expunge genuine beauty from life, but not everything that is part of present culture belongs in that stream, and therefore, the right place to start is to truly enjoy, advocate and value what is good (Philippians 4:8) - hence, venues like this (I hope), where people are encouraged towards this.

The wounds upon our civilisation are indeed deep, and one of the flaws of post-modernism is the manner in which it seeks to lie about the impact of these upon us, but beauty actually requires us to take a hard, comprehensive look at these evils, to engage with their relationship to us, in order that we might truly be broken and genuinely healed (Psalm 51:8).

Our "greatness" sprang from a moment when we were able to look back at the glories of the past and see these renewed through the cypher of Jesus Christ and Him crucified. The Renaissance is the twin of the Reformation, so when we see Martin Luther, industriously working with his pen to conform the faith back to the gospel, we see it marries to the work of Cranach the Elder and others, in their seeking to illustrate the freedom of what such words conveyed, and this is a very familiar pattern (look at the relationship between Moses and Bezalel).

Such majesty cannot help but generate the splendour of what followed.

The shock of the devastation of the world wars is indeed traumatic, but it would be wrong to say that our culture was simply entirely killed off by those events. The 're-invention' of the West was to say that something splendid derived from those ashes - the rise of Hollywood, of Rock and Roll and modern society, has all been looked upon, for better or for worse, as a turning of the tide against such atrocity.

SPECKS OF GLORY

It's imperative we understand this. Anyone who has seen a movie as good as Chariots of Fire or the Shawshank Redemption, or enjoyed the orchestral scores of composers like John Williams, or acknowledged the sheer artistry employed and expressed in numerous works by modern photographers and artists knows that, whilst post-modernism may drain the colour from contemporary society, it has clearly not entirely removed it. Shards of the excellence of this, our pre-(French) enlightenment days, clearly remain and illuminate some of what is still in view.

C S Lewis rightly discerned that when we are enthralled by such forms, it is not because these are inherently "vessels" which convey the totality of beauty in themselves, but they act as means whereby we are drawn to look beyond them to the source of all such whispers of something profoundly and eternally true.

What we encounter in such moments is something far above and beyond ourselves, and that is why we desire to return to such again and again. Our "gaze" merely comprehends (because we have been permitted to do so) something so much more than ourselves or the merely natural ability of our senses. We glimpse the nature of true wonder.

LESSONS FROM THE GREEKS?

In the middle of his recorded travels in the books of Acts, the Apostle Paul finds himself in the ancient hellenic capitol of culture - Athens. Unlike Rome's insatiable thirst for dominion, the Athenians sought to excel in seeking to reasonably understand the nature of existence, and this was particularly expressed in their methods of artistic representation. Paul walks amongst them, and taking an opportunity to address their thinkers, he notes that examining our form is useful, even necessary, if it leads us to recognise our profound dependance upon the one who made and sustains us.

Art may take us, in other words, towards a threshold, but it is only an act of divine inter-ventive grace which carries us over.

This was the vital lesson stated by Michelangelo towards the end of his life. The magnificence of art is empty before the profound revelation of God in Christ, reconciling us at the hill of the skull; the crucible of redemption.

DEEP INSIDE

Good art always reflects the naked truth about ourselves - that which we all know to be proudly true. The body in art alludes to that glory which is now so often marred or masked by sin, but when we allow the rightness behind such shades to become evident, when the body has become defined afresh by the resurrected flesh of Christ, then the true nature and value of God's handiwork is restored, and we can begin to look afresh upon the divine purpose and intent for what was animated and enlivened from dust.

What, therefore, makes art 'good' is not merely the immediacy it inherently contains to draw us, but it's ability, however distressing its content, to profoundly convey to us something essentially and crucially true about what is vital.

When we come to overtly good religious art, what is so profound is the manner in which this ties to something inherently human in respect to the manner of occurrence it portrays, but equally, additionally, the palpable embodiment of some divine 'word' it is seeking to convey (an expression, then, of the theology provided through this particular incident or scriptural passage). What is certainly natural becomes embued with an entirely deeper level of meaning and significance due to the depiction involving the recognition of the Most High being related to an event.

Beauty allows us to open a link between ourselves and what is true, what is good, what is virtuous and what is perpetually valuable in our realm of existence, and beyond this. It acts as a means to 'see' further than the confines of an existence merely defined by the mundane and the meaningless. If we loose the "upward" level that beauty is continually wanting to allow us to acknowledge, then we become dreadfully deformed and empty in our days here.

May the depths of beauty truly allow us to see well, and thereby recognise and know the hand that provides such a splendour.