Beauty Is Truth, Etc.

This week I ended up talking about beauty in religious worship, which is actually something I’ve never put any thought at all into before *sarcasm*. No, but seriously, it was interesting to listen to what people from different backgrounds talk about it, as well as trying to articulate what I think in a rational fashion devoid of facial expression and hand gestures – you know, using words.

I guess the main point of what I was trying to say is that the experience of beauty really depends on synergy more than anything else, a synchronicity between your ideas and beliefs and the aesthetics you encounter. I mean, if you’re in a Calvinist church or something and you think that images are idolatrous, a stained glass window of the Nativity at your local parish isn’t going to strike you as beautiful. If you find it in a Roman Catholic church, where representation of religious iconography through didactic art is highly prized, then you will think it’s beautiful, because it matches your idea of beauty in religious worship. It has to do with expectation, what you think you’re in for: if I went to my local Anglican parish and the priest chanted the Mass in Latin, used incense and wore embroidered vestments from the 17th century, I wouldn’t exactly be overcome with a sense of beauty so much as I would be intensely confused…on the whole, it would be more distracting than affecting. So yeah, I guess I think beauty lives in the connection between a person and their expectations, in the collision of the two within an experience.

I keep thinking about the concept of the Sublime that the Romantic poets used – the idea that there is an overwhelming experience of beauty, for them connected to nature, within which a person encounters the Divine. One feels awed, terrified, exhilarated, faced with one’s own smallness in the presence of something so much greater and stronger than oneself. It’s the feeling of standing in front of a large waterfall, beauty and terror mingled together in the experiential realization that what you are encountering is so much greater than yourself, that this place has been touched by the hand of God, that there is something so heartbreakingly beautiful that it cannot be comprehended.

For me, that feeling of awe is what I think beauty is in religious experience. Because there are a lot of things that are pretty or quaint, cute or impressive; what I’m searching for is to be opened up, faced with terrifying exhilaration in a moment of feeling that there is something so Awesome, so Beautiful, that I cannot help but be both small and overjoyed at the same time.

During the Reformation, while the Reformers were out arguing for the truth of their theology using the Bible, the Roman Catholic Church composed music (as well as of course maintaining her other sweeping artistic accomplishments) in the belief that the music would convince people of the truth of her own theology. Because something so beautiful must be true, because the experience of its beauty could leave no doubt, because – in religious expression – beauty and truth are the same.