Art and Music (eBook)

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WHAT DO WE MEAN BY THE WORD BEAUTY?

It isn’t the likeliest place to find art. The new ballpark is hemmed in on three sides by traffic and on the fourth by a garbage incinerator. The smells of these peripherals are driven out, it’s true, by those of flat beer and roller-warmed hot dogs, but this can hardly be said to draw the art-appreciation buffs, who, we’re told, prefer wine and cheese. And yet it is there that park designers put a statue of a beloved home-run hitter. No doubt he was amused. The ordinary fellow from an ordinary place, who spoke plainly and lived his life without pretention, now stands 7.5 feet tall in 750 pounds of bronze. A pigeon, unconvinced by the likeness of a batter’s high-velocity swing, balances quietly on the cap, leaving an untidy mess. And the boy and his grandfather who stand there on game day know that the statue is beautiful—from the pivot of the ankle to the visionary, skyward glance over Sixth Street.

We begin with beauty because it is what makes art, art. When people call something “art,” they’re saying two things, really: first, that somebody made it (for we don’t call accidents “art”), and, second, that its appearance has the potential to reward those who pay attention to it. That is, it can be appreciated for its beauty. If we put a tribal ceremonial mask or a Louis XVI secretary desk in an art museum—indeed, if we use the word art to describe a matching outfit and shoes or the perfect baseball swing—it’s because we believe that in addition to whatever other functions these things have, they are also beautiful. They provide aesthetic delight. When the main purpose of a made object is to reward aesthetic contemplation, we call it “high art” or “fine art.” We begin with beauty, therefore, because nothing—neither art nor an approach to art—can be evaluated without a sense of what it is for. Although certain philosophers quibble over identifying beauty as the purpose of art, this is only because they fear some people’s usage of the word beauty may be too constrictive. But ordinary people have always known that the reason we draw and sing is to please viewers with beautiful drawings and hearers with beautiful songs.

Such consensus, however, does not make the idea easy. Beauty has been a central problem in Western thought since the days of Plato and a problem that non-Christians, especially, have difficulty solving. Darwinian materialists may be satisfied that they have found a plausible explanation for the peacock’s iridescent plumage. They find it somewhat harder to explain quite why the peahen finds iridescence especially sexy. And if her tastes pose some problems, ours pose even more. The materialist cannot explain why a human soul responds as it does to the night sky or to the sound of the sea—or, for that matter, to Rembrandt’s Denial of Peter in the Rijksmuseum or to Bach’s “Gratias agimus tibi” in the Mass in B Minor.

When the artist Makoto Fujimura began studying traditional Japanese nihonga painting as a graduate student in Tokyo during the late 1980s, he was not yet a Christian. One day an assistant professor came into his studio unannounced, looked at the painting Fujimura was working on, said its surface was so beautiful that it was almost terrifying, and walked out. Recalling the incident decades later, Fujimura asks, “Do you know what my response was? I immediately washed the painting down. I couldn’t take that. I just didn’t have a place for that comment, because, being honest with myself, I felt, if that’s true, then I don’t have a place in my own heart for beauty that’s almost terrifying.”1

We begin with beauty, frankly, because it drives us to consider the Christian intellectual tradition, which alone gives real answers to the question of how beauty—the source of pleasure—can also terrify. After briefly considering the classical and postmodern views of beauty that dominate our culture, this first chapter will argue that Christian doctrine alone provides a satisfactory explanation of beauty and, thus, a satisfactory explanation of art.

A DESCRIPTIVE DEFINITION

Dictionaries provide descriptive, not prescriptive, definitions. We may or may not like such definitions. We may want to tweak them to conform to what we believe words ought to mean. But there’s no doubt that the editors at Merriam-Webster describe rightly when they say that by beauty, we mean “the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit.”2 This may or may not tell us what beauty is, but it certainly tells us what people mean by the term. Whenever anyone speaks of “beauty,” at the very least he is referring to the capacity of an object to please those who apprehend it.

THE CLASSICAL VIEW OF BEAUTY

In ancient times the equivalent Greek word, kalos, worked the same way.3 Since beauty is considered to be in the thing perceived, the classical view concludes that beauty is objective. It is an attribute of the object. Therefore it must be something that can be empirically studied and even measured, as leading Greek thinkers tried to do. The outstanding fifth-century BC sculptor Polycleitos wrote a famous book, now lost, called the Kanon, in which he published the numbers of perfect beauty. They were all simple ratios. The analogy to music excited the Pythagoreans, who inferred great significance from the fact that vibrating strings produce harmonious sounds when their lengths are measured in simple proportions. Classical architects planned buildings not with blueprints or elevation drawings but with numerical formulas. All this assumed that beauty is uniform, that all beautiful things are beautiful in the same way. Aristotle taught that “the chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree.”4 Plato taught not only the uniformity of beauty but also its absolute nature: implicit in the Republic and Phaedrus and explicit in the Symposium is a conflation of the good and the beautiful. The beautiful is the good. In such a worldview beauty becomes the very purpose of life, and aesthetics provides the basis for ethics.

This has been the most influential aesthetic position in Western history. Whatever we may think of it, everyone can at least agree that many beautiful things do fit Aristotle’s analysis: the symmetries of the human face, for example. Moreover, one can only be thankful for the countless beauties that classicists have dreamed up over the centuries, from the formal clarity of a Botticelli mural to that of Jefferson’s Monticello. If we divorce the Parthenon in Athens from its original function to house the goddess, we can treat it as an unparalleled architectural achievement, which in its own way reveals the glory of man’s Creator. But make no mistake: not only were the masterpieces of classical antiquity made in the service of idols but also the classical vision itself, at its purest, is an idol. When form is made absolute, when—like the media-bewitched teen starving herself before the mirror—we devote our lives to the pursuit of some created formal standard, the result is not beautiful at all, but wicked and ugly. Hear C. S. Lewis’s warning against aestheticism: “These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers.”5

But this is not the only critique of classicism. The classical view of beauty may be dominant in the Western tradition, with neoclassical movements peculiar to every era, but every era also produced its own alternative to the classical vision. And it’s easy to see why. Every reader, surely, can think of things he knows to be beautiful, even though they are not ordered or not symmetrical or not definite: a thunderstorm, say, or a clear, blue sky. How are we to explain the beauty of these? Nineteenth-century romantics, to cite just one alternative, saw the sublime—that which fills us with awe—as a higher aesthetic category than those of classicism. They preferred the Swiss Alps to English formal gardens. Yet neither romanticism nor any other reaction against classicism has provided a viable explanation for all human experiences of beauty. Can a scheme that accounts for our reaction to Victoria Falls and the Pleiades also account for the aesthetic value of something as comfortable and domestic as a lullaby or a quilt?

THE POSTMODERN VIEW OF BEAUTY

Who, then, can tell what beauty is? We’ve only mentioned the classical position and, in passing, the romantic critique of it, but of course every culture and every worldview has its own aesthetic values. How could any one explanation account for all instances of beauty? In the pluralistic 1980s and 90s the problems of beauty came to seem insurmountable. Indeed, the descriptive definition seems to contradict itself. Read it again. Beauty is “the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit.” The first half locates beauty in the thing perceived, whereas the second half links it to pleasure—which is something...