Why Beauty Matters

                                                            A lovely gift from my students

It may seem curious to some why I am so interested in the topic of Beauty.  Some would attribute my concern to the fact that I am an artist, a painter, and I am sure that does in some way factor into my concern with its decline in the culture.  But I believe it has far more to do with the fact that I have been a teacher of young people for many years and also because I am a person of Faith.  Over the past several years I have been making a study of Beauty as one of the Great Ideas of Western Civilization, and of course, you cannot study the history of the Idea, or Ideal, of Beauty without sadly noting its decline in the culture, and then coming to understand the impact of its decline on society and on individuals, especially on young people.  I have been able to watch closely what has been happening in the minds and in the hearts of our youth.

Well, you might say, you are indeed a teacher as well as an artist, and you also happen to be a teacher of Literature and Rhetoric, which would necessarily put you in daily contact with the great classics of the Western World and with abstract ideas like Beauty, Truth, Goodness.   It’s your job, for heaven’s sake, to be concerned about such things!

But why should the ordinary person who doesn’t spend his or her time studying and teaching these things be concerned about the decline of Beauty and of aesthetic standards in art, architecture, music, literature, and such?  Surely, this type of concern should only be of interest to those who teach such subjects, or to philosophers or perhaps artists or intellectuals, one might think.

Is it truly a responsibility of all thinking people, especially people of Faith, to pay more attention to what’s happening in the general culture and to be conversant to the point of being able to take a stand and even to defend that stand out in the marketplace of ideas?

As long as we are taking a stand for Truth and Goodness, isn’t that enough?  Surely, Beauty is not a co-equal idea with those two,  surely it is not as significant as Truth and Goodness?

One thing I have come to understand in my study and in my work with young people is that those three great virtues are inextricably linked in a trinity of sorts, a mysterious relationship in which they are mutually interdependent to the degree that Truth needs Beauty in order to lead to Goodness.  In the faith community, we have elevated Truth, then Goodness, over and above Beauty and given them attention that we have not paid to Beauty.  And both Truth and Goodness have suffered from our neglect of Beauty.  Somehow we’ve forgotten that in a mysterious and meaningful way, Beauty is an attribute of God, and that we approach Him through the Beauty of His Holiness.

One of the books I have read in my study is Beauty, by Roger Scruton.  Scruton is a moral philosopher and a man of Faith.  He can explain the consequences of our indifference to Beauty far better than I.  Here some helpful excerpts from his book:

“In an age of declining faith, Art bears enduring witness to the spiritual hunger and immortal longings of our species.  Hence aesthetic education matters more today than at any previous period in history.”

He explains how Art throughout history has been a been a repository of our symbols and images of our Christian heritage:   “Even for the unbeliever, therefore, the “real presence” of the sacred is now one of the highest gifts of art.”

But at an alarming rate, he believes our culture is falling into an unprecedented decline, as evidenced by the degradation of art, and the conflation of art with pornography and gratuitous violence.

As Scruton explains, “True art is an appeal to our higher nature, an attempt to affirm that other kingdom in which moral and spiritual order prevails. . . . It is the real presence of our spiritual ideals.  That is why art matters.  Without the conscious pursuit of beauty we risk falling into a world of addictive pleasures and routine desecration, a world in which the worthwhileness of human life is no longer clearly perceivable.

    “Through the pursuit of beauty [in Art, in Literature, in Music, in our general culture] we shape the world as a home, and in doing so, we both amplify our joys, and find consolation for our sorrows.   Art and music shine a light of meaning on ordinary life, and through them we are able to confront the things that trouble us, and find consolation and peace in their presence.

. . .

So there, if we can find our way to it, is the remedy.  It is a remedy that cannot be achieved through art alone.  In the words of Rilke's Archaic Torso of Apollo: “you must change your life.”  Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter;  and we live that way because we have lost the habit of sacrifice and are striving always to avoid it.  The false art of our time, mired in kitsch and desecration, is one sign of this.

To point to this feature of our condition is not to issue an invitation to despair.  It is one mark of rational beings that they do not live only - or even at all - in the present.  They have the freedom to despise the world that surrounds them and to live in another way.  The art, literature and music of our civilization remind them of this, and also point to the path that lies always before them: the path out of desecration towards the sacred and the sacrificial.  And that, in a nutshell, is what beauty teaches us.

© Roger Scruton 2009. Extracted from Beauty, published by Oxford University Press

Note: At the top of the column on the right under “Significant Links” you will find a link to my website where I have placed videos of the BBC production, “Why Beauty Matters,” in which Scruton discusses the relationship of the Arts and Faith, as well as the decline in the Arts and its impact on our culture, which he says is becoming secularized at a rate unprecedented in the history of the world.   A great program . . . it’s almost like a crash course in the history of the Arts!

Make yourself a cup of tea and watch . . . it's about a combined total of 60 minutes or it can be watched one or two parts at a time.
__________________________________________________