"B" Is for Beauty
We continue our divine alphabet. After saying he is accessible, we now say God is beautiful, indeed, he is beauty itself. But this does not mean we have seen God in himself and found him good-looking.
Rather, God is beautiful because he is the source of beauty. We don’t know what it means for God, in himself, to be beautiful. But we do know that God is the source of all beauty in the universe. All beauty comes from God, and that means God must be supremely beautiful—even though we do not know what it means for God to be beautiful!
(The situation is different if we think only of Jesus: we see him in his human nature and he thus reveals what true human beauty is. But the claim is that God in himself is beautiful, and we do not know what it means for, say, the Father to be beautiful.)
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If I tell you that I have a bad apple, I have not given you positive information—you won’t know how it is bad. It would be quite a different thing if I told you I had a red apple or an eight-ounce apple or a juicy apple. In any of those cases, you could see in your mind something of what the apple is. But a bad apple, you don’t know what makes it bad. All you know is, the apple isn’t all it should be. The apple falls short of being a good apple.
A good apple just is an apple. But a bad apple is in some way less than an apple.
It might be worm-eaten. It might have been on the ground for awhile and have started to rot. It might have been half-eaten by a grandchild then left on the bookshelf for a week. Or it might have been dropped into wet concrete and now be part of the sidewalk. Or it might have been injected with poison.
Badness gives us no positive information. If something is bad, all we know is that there has been some kind of loss of goodness.
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Ditto for ugliness. Ugliness is a mark of sin. By contrast, to have a scar on one’s face, for example, is not ugliness. One can bear one’s burdens in such a way that disfigurements become beautiful. Christians know this whenever they picture Jesus whipped, or crucified. Jesus’ bloodied body—indeed, his resurrected body with its scars—is beautiful, because he is himself pure and good. There is no ugliness in him.
Think of how you might tell someone, “That’s an ugly thing to say.” What you mean is, it’s sinful, it’s cruel or unfair or something similar. Sin is what’s really ugly. And of course, in God there is no sin.
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We return to beauty. Why are the Rocky Mountains majestic? Because God made them beautiful. Why are the first steps of children awesome? Because God makes them beautiful. In nature, in a child, in music, in art, in a well-crafted constitution—wherever there is beauty, God is the reason it’s there.
That’s why it is true that God is beauty: he is the source of beauty. Whatever is good or true or beautiful comes from God—and that’s why we say God is good, God is true, God is beautiful. It’s not that we know something about God in himself; rather, God is beauty because all beauty comes from him.
And that, friends, is why we desire him. “One thing have I asked of the Lord; one thing I seek; . . . To behold the fair beauty of the Lord” (Ps 27).
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What Theologians Read. At the recommendation of a friend, I have been reading Home: A Short History of an Idea, a 1986 book by Witold Rybczynski. Readable it is, and literally provoking of thought. It helps us see how “privacy” is a new thing, unknown in homes of as recent as four centuries ago, and with privacy, intimacy, even the sense a husband and wife might have of themselves as a couple. This is important—I am pondering still its implications—for methinks the rise of privacy in the home may be related to the way marriage has eclipsed friendship as our principal locus of intimate sharing. The book is fascinating also for its discussion of room specialization, bathing, lighting, cleanliness, furniture, windows, ventilation, and much more. I recommend it as a helpful prologue to numerous questions of theological anthropology (i.e., the “doctrine of man”).
Out & About. This Sunday, January 19, I am to preach at the contemporary services at Incarnation, 3966 McKinney Ave., Dallas: 9 and 11:15 a.m. and 5 p.m.
The Good Books & Good Talk seminar will discuss A Canticle for Liebowitz on Sunday, January 26, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at Incarnation. You still have time to enjoy this sci-fi classic and join our conversation.