This essay is a contribution to the inaugural Soaring Twenties Social Club Symposium, a monthly collaboration from STSC's writers around a set theme. Our topic in May 2022 is Beauty.
I've delayed the writing of this particular manifesto long enough. The reasons are mostly the standard self-conscious fear that crawls up out of any writer's mind as they face work not yet commenced, the fear of and imperfect and unworthy creation that does not render their subject in a becoming light.1 But this particular case has suffered from the added struggle to approach a topic that seems too important and massive to be dealt with in this sort of space. So I spent a month trying to marshal sources and construct airtight arguments, to prove to myself my case before laying it out for the world. This was simply fruitless, and I've discarded the effort. If you are expecting careful philosophical proofs and elegant logical expressions, laced with the best scholars and thinkers of history agreeing with me, you had best look to my friend who carries this out beautifully2 It is a noble work, and one which I am not skilled to carry out. So instead of trying to convince your mind, I am aiming for your heart.
I want to consider beauty, what it is, how we have perhaps begun to lose it, and what we might do to find it again. You might not agree with any of my definitions, or conclusions, but I hope that you'll spend just a moment with your heart open to see if my dart lands home. Don't fear the pain. It's just part of the experience humans face every time we dare to look upon the beautiful and contemplate the true.
Asserted: Beauty is the deep longing of humankind.
I warned you. No proofs are forthcoming. You know it to be true, your bones and spirit shake to this music and they have your whole life. The mother and the mystic, the theologian and the sybarite, the warrior and the artist, are seeking it while they spend each earthly day. We may not all seek beauty well or wisely, and many do not understand what they are truly longing for when they grasp at the pleasures of the flesh or delve into the depths of the mind. But if history teaches us anything it is that human creatures will dare almost anything for the safety and security of a walled hearth where they can eat and drink, watch their children play and their land grow, and enjoy their fill of love and memory. Every horror of theft, rape and murder stems at bottom from some desire for things like this, twisted up in our broken soul until it brutalizes others in our quest.3 I am not even making a religious assertion (yet), although I believe there are higher desires and better ends than this for a human to seek. But this one is universal, and we all know the pangs that accompany it. Why do we travel our whole lives from sunrise to vista to monument to achievement to celebration, hoping against hope that the next moment will give us a glimpse of something we secretly know we cannot grasp or contain? The fact that we cannot be content with beauty has never stopped our pursuing it to the bottom of bottles and the bitter end of relationships. Even though each sight of real, living and powerful beauty hammers us with a sort of pain that we can never fully describe, the experience leaves us thirsting for our next encounter.4
Asserted: Human-authored beauty occurs when Truth points to Reality.
If we are people who long to experience beauty, then outside of the natural beauties of land and sea the most common ground for us to encounter our longing is the realm of art. And here we seem to be a people cast away, afloat in a modern seething sea of shattered images and abortive attempts. Again, don't respond defensively or leap to a conclusion. This is not merely a call to Return to medieval styles of painting simply for the sake of emulating the historical. But I believe that an honest observer can sense in the human condition of our age an unsatisfied longing for beauty, and in increasing inability to produce with our hands and minds new tributes to our muse. Beauty in art is a finger pointing joyously towards the Real, no matter how subjectively ugly the specific object of interest may be, crying out " There, there it is! The creation of the Uncreated!" This is not simply a call for representational art, since some of the acknowledged masters of past movements were most skilled in their ability to twist and warp the Real so as to heighten its effect and point out more strongly its power. Nor am I simply calling for some specific aesthetic I prefer, a subjective demand for and end to morose art and a return to nice things. Beauty is not simply attraction or niceness; there is a certain ferocious beauty even in Spielberg's cinematic rendition of humans being reduced to offal on Normandy sand or the fearsome insanity of Picasso's Guernica.5 The common point, the vital element, is Truth, and the creation of a spiritual connection between the human mind and soul and the thing that we are pointing to, even if we point obliquely.
If you accept this definition of beauty, then I think it shouldn't be difficult to accept the claim that our present artistic age seems to be almost a desert for those thirsting for it. Destroying the interplay between subjectivity and objectivity in art produces (and has produced) either mindless and meaningless abstraction or useless and limp kitsch. We must have rules, and break them, for the seduction of artistic beauty to take place. Efforts to dismantle the concept of an artistic canon notwithstanding, measure the heights of our current generation against even the pedestrian efforts of past times. Choose your medium and select your best examples, and I argue that you will come away wondering how our generation has failed. I am not simply shaking my nostalgic finger at others, I implicate myself. A society that cannot create beauty or even understand beauty is a sick society, and we all share the symptoms. We are living in artistic dark ages, surrounded by the dazzling feats of our ancestors but mournfully watching them crumble, keenly aware of our own inability to recreate or revive their achievements. Most of the creations populating modern art galleries disturb not because of their daring, but because of their lack of spiritual orientation.6 Art that is actually without Truth cannot be profane, it can only be absurd. Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" is profane because it assumes at a certain level the truth of the crucifix, not simply because of the jar of urine. Most of what we create now doesn’t even aspire to such levels. Time spent in current galleries or present cinemas is entrance into a disorienting world without philosophical or spiritual orientation, a place left to cackling hysterically at the silliness of it all after everything that gives "it all" value has been systematically carted away or graffitied over. Most modern art isn't even truly absurd but merely parasitical, bleaching away the greatness of past art movements while offering nothing of itself.
Alright, that's enough pessimism for one of these I think. But you know that at least something I've been going on about is true. You can feel the lack of profound emotional and spiritual connection in much of the art you consume. Be honest: that's why we're consuming it. Because it's safe. It won't force uncomfortable emotional presence onto us, demand our attention and satisfy our longing to understand and consider what is Real. The binge-able and snack-able delights we fill ourselves with are precisely designed to not sate us in the way a shatteringly beautiful masterpiece must do. Instead, these fill us for another night, spanning the hours between our final meal and our bedtime scroll with cozy enjoyment.7 We all fear to face Truth, and so we are far from being able to enjoy Beauty as we ought, much less to create it.
Resolved: To know what is Real, and tell what is True
The only way out is through. If you look around and seek fruitlessly for Good, if you despair over the frail attempts of your own keyboard and canvas, you must have courage. If I were you, I would start out with the people who made the things most beautiful, things that move us most deeply. Ask them what they believed, what things were moving in their hearts to produce such splendor. Immerse yourself in all the truly beautiful art they created, as much as you can stand. We've spent so much time telling each other that we're alright, insulated and packed away from anything Real, that going back will cause us pain.8 Because exposing ourselves to Reality is dangerous, and Reality reveals our own inadequacy and weakness. If you are called to reveal the fundamental attributes of the world with a pen or a camera or a brush, you'll have to get used to having your heart broken and your soul exposed. You might have to question your dearest assumptions when you face what truly transcends them. But you can't make anything right until you're right. You can't even bear to look at good things until you know what Good is. Our whole age is waking up and realizing in a panic the futility of much we have proclaimed confidently, trying to stem the fountain of chaotic absurdity welling out of our collective heart. What happens next will probably be a time of awkwardness and suffering as we reacquaint ourselves with many things that we used to know and believe.9 But it could be the awkwardness and suffering of love and birth, if we can bear it. It could produce joy.
WGMI 😎
Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come? ~ C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most human, is still soaked with the sense of exile. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien
The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back. ~ C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
On the morning of the third day there were thunders and lightnings and a thick cloud on the mountain and a very loud trumpet blast, so that all the people in the camp trembled. Then Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God, and they took their stand at the foot of the mountain. Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke because the Lord had descended on it in fire. The smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled greatly. And as the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses spoke, and God answered him in thunder. The Lord came down on Mount Sinai, to the top of the mountain. And the Lord called Moses to the top of the mountain, and Moses went up...When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, with the two tablets of the testimony in his hand as he came down from the mountain, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. Aaron and all the people of Israel saw Moses, and behold, the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come near him. ~ Exodus 19:16-20, 34:29-30
One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple. ~ Psalm 27:4
Further Reading
Roger Scruton, A Short introduction to Beauty
C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, Till We Have Faces, Surprised by Joy, and The Weight of Glory
G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
There are several essays still waiting in gestational purgatory in my notes for similar reasons. I would like to think this period of delay makes the final result better, but I suspect otherwise.
I wish I had learned this lesson so much sooner, and I hope anyone creating on their own learns it too. Get around people who make things similar to what you’re making, but with a very different style or approach. Get used to the fact that you don’t have to be (can’t be) an omnicompetent master. There is a lot of freedom and relaxation once you recognize your own lane and can enjoy it.
I am much less confident in this last sentence than the rest of the paragraph. While I am firmly convinced in beauty’s universality, in the fact that all human beings can instinctively understand and identify it and are seeking it out, I don’t know that I can be so dogmatic that this is the motivation for all human activity, including every grievous sins. History shows us that some people genuinely do desire ugliness and brokenness for their own sakes. But overall I think the point still stands.
The inability extends to the author as well. I’m not sure I’m even able able to understand or articulate why beauty seems to always be accompanied by this pain, but I know that I’ve experienced it. The constant experience and longing was one of the instruments that brought C.S. Lewis to Christianity, and he described his feelings of “Northerness” in Surprised by Joy:
It is difficult or find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton's 'enormous bliss' of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to 'enormous') comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what?...Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse...withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased...In a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else...The quality common to the three experiences...is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again...
If I were a more well-cultured person, I would offer extensive and varied artistic examples throughout. Unfortunately, here we are.
I had a true spiritual experience once on a rare (for me) visit to an art gallery, specifically the Hirshhorn modern art museum in Washington D.C. I remember walking through exhibit after exhibit and feeling unaccountably disturbed, almost like a nausea or vertigo. I couldn’t understand why until I viewed in quick succession an installation of massive canvases which the artist had painted on using nude women’s bodies covered in his favorite shade of blue, followed by a darkened room in which were hung four silver-process photographs of seascapes. The incredible feeling of relief as I entered the seascape exhibit surprised me. I realized that this, not representationalism or any aesthetic quibble, was what distinguished true and untrue modern art for me. The seascapes were pointing towards truth, although in a minimalist and abstract way. The blue canvases were pointing everywhere, and nowhere.
I wish I had been able to articulate this for myself much sooner in my life. Realizing that I was purposely selecting short-form entertainment instead of movies because I knew the movies would be emotionally engaging, or nonfiction instead of fiction books for the same reasons, was troubling.
This is one of the great truths of Lewis’ work The Great Divorce, which emphasizes that for all our human chatter about desiring the spiritual world and seeking God, we are truly a race so bent up and corrupted that we fear and flee His presence unless we are extended special grace: 'I wish I’d never been born,’ it said. ‘What are we born for?’ ‘For infinite happiness,’ said the Spirit. ‘You can step out into it at any moment…’ ‘But, I tell you, they’ll see me.’ ‘An hour hence and you will not care. A day hence and you will laugh at it. Don’t you remember on earth—there were things too hot to touch with your finger but you could drink them all right? Shame is like that.'
I truly believe that we are entering a time of spiritual revolution, a period in which dry and despairing human souls reach out again for the spiritual reality that they first discover in true beauty. I am not entirely looking forward to this age, because I feel that many will not grasp onto Truth and Goodness but will instead hold on tightly to the experiences they have when they pierce the material veil for the first time. I pray for myself and for you that we are strong enough for our times. We have been born into a world of the warlock and the psychonaut, the pagan mystic and the omnireligious, and none of them will put up for one moment longer with the safe and tired creeds of blinkered secularist materialism. God knows whether this age will see a flowering explosion like a garden, or unchecked proliferation like a cancer. The shadow-people are venturing out into Reality again. We hope in His grace.