Cross-posted on Wondering Fair

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” wrote John Keats in 1819. This celebrated line, still admired as poetry, rings somewhat untrue today. In an age when beauty is often achieved by untruth – Photoshop editing, misleading camera angles, manipulated statistics – and when truth is often not beautiful – the world’s hunger, meaningless tragedies – the connection Keats noticed between truth and beauty seems today tenuous at best.

Still, our idea of beauty carries a direct relationship to our ethics. Contemporary eco-philosophers have noticed, for example, that though a person may appreciate the beauty of a mountain range, or of an endangered tiger, this appreciation of beauty does not necessarily lead to a desire for conservation of one’s idea of beauty. If we think of beauty only in terms of our own subjective experience, and not in terms of beauty being embedded in something outside ourselves (i.e. the animal, or flower, or mountain range), the act of preserving beauty turns in on itself. Beauty becomes only subjective. Our primary concern is to sustain our experience of the sublime, not to promote life outside of us.

A different perspective arises when we appreciate beauty as something given to us, not arising from inside ourselves. It generates a consideration of beauty which does not get lost in its own subjective sphere, but which also propels us outward, to active engagement in the world. In a dense but interesting comment on a passage by theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, David Moss observes,

Where we can no longer read the language of beauty so, for Balthasar, the witness of creation as created becomes untrustworthy and open to abuse… In short, those transitory experiences of the truth, goodness and beauty of the cosmos are intelligible only by way of reference to a transcendent order of Being that is absolutely true, good and beautiful.[i]

In other words, only when we recognize objective beauty, truth and goodness in the world, beyond our own subjective experience of it, can we really be moved to preserve it and to admire the work of their creator.

Among the wide variety of theories of beauty competing for our attention (and operating underneath many contemporary cinematic plotlines), one can make a good case for the “wheels coming off” when social understandings of beauty ceased being based on knowledge of a creator God. The celebration of beauty which remains possible within a nihilistic understanding of the world is deeply problematic, and as Moss suggests, open to abuse and even untrustworthy. To affirm God’s act of creation of the world, with all its beauty and ugliness, provides a stability for beauty that allows us to appreciate it in the context of love and relate beauty to truth.

Jeremy Kidwell

Cross-posted on Wondering Fair

What does it mean to worship? And where to do it?

For us the activity of worship has become a private affair. Even some agnostics don’t seem to mind that people go about their Sunday mornings engaged in acts of worship, as it occurs comfortably behind closed doors. Occasionally religion spills out into the public space as, in the example of some Christians who fight to keep public monuments of religious significance (the ten commandments, or statues of the cross) in the public space (a courthouse, city center, etc.) in America, or Muslims women who strive to wear the burqa in France. We tend to agree with this relegation of the religious to the private sphere, and often acknowledge it in practice, going about our daily work with only perhaps a furtive prayer or generic expression of virtue, but nothing so peculiar as to strike a secular co-worker as an explicitly religious expression.

This division of life into two spheres – public and private – and the further relegation of the religious life to the private sphere has roots in various thinkers and writers across the modern period, but this is a division that is ultimately incompatible from a Christian point of view. Christian worship is, as one theologian (Bernd Wannenwetsch of Oxford University) has recently put it, a Political act: to acknowledge God as the one creator and ruler over everything relativizes every human form of government, and has profound ethical implications in every sphere of life. This fact was perhaps more obvious in the early church as there was a well-worn precedent for “private” religious worship. Rome was relatively tolerant of religious diversity in its empire, provided that worship was relegated to the private space. As long as one’s personal religion remained private, the public space was open for some occasional deference to imperial religion and the state gods which was required for citizenship.

What was remarkable about early Christians is that they refused what was an otherwise comfortable settlement for many other cults of the day. They recognized that the sort of worship that their relationship with the Creator invited them to participate in was wholly encompassing, and as a result, as Wannenwesch puts it, “martyrdom was inevitable, since the ekklesia [church or ‘Christian community’] was bound from the beginning to celebrate ‘political worship’. (148)” Their worship of Jesus blocked their worship of the emperor and the gods, and martyred they were.

There is a sense in which contemporary Christian worship today does not always express the fullness of this reality, but at some point it becomes inevitable. The God we celebrate as being incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ, does not desire a convenient sort of settled relationship, the sort of tepid hug you share with a distant acquaintance. Rather, we are invited into a relationship best represented by a full-on embrace. We are given the gift of life with all its fullness, and this gift is best affirmed by a whole-hearted worship which does not fail to shape all the other dimensions of our lives, private and public. Christian faith transgresses and subverts these boundaries, and invites us away from lifestyles of fragmentation to a daily experience of wholeness.

Jeremy Kidwell