The Divine Abundance: Part Six

(Continued from Part Five)
So Beauty is real, present, independent, giving, bestowing, playful and creative. It is also diverse, copious, and harmonious. With Allah as God, only red is beautiful. All other colors submit in inadequacy. But with a Triune God ruling the heavens and earth, a rainbow of colors are considered equal in richness and beauty. Red and Blue can stand together and equally declare God’s glory in Beauty. But our God is three separate and distinct units, having no commonality. In like manner Red and Blue do not stand apart like in a debate, vying for the win. They are more like the two lines of music that when played together, harmonize. When something is beautiful, the individual aspects of that beautiful item work together to make it so. Take a beautiful tree. You do not separate the trunk from the branches, or the leaves from the ground its planted in. Every part plays its line in harmony. This is a microcosm of how the world works. There is a multiplicity of colors, textures, tastes, aromas, sights, sounds, that all work together in creation to glorify God. In their right created context, they are beautiful. This stems from the God we worship. Again, you cannot separate the creation from the Creator. A work always reflects its author.

Beauty is real, present, independent, giving, bestowing, playful and creative, diverse and harmonious. Beauty also carries an aspect of distance. Distance does not necessarily mean far away. It simply means space, and spatial relationships. In terms of our God, He is infinitely far, transcendent, and wholly other, and by the same token infinitely near, immediate, and within. Beauty therefore has these attributes as well. A painting perhaps best exemplifies this. To look at a painting one can see and touch the canvas, paint, frame, etc. In that sense it is near, close at hand. But it also has an aspect of distance, in that it takes you somewhere. From a Japanese bridge to a plaza in 18th Century Italy, to ancient Egypt (as with the pyramids). Beauty, in other words, is dimensional. Beauty has both the ability to transcend space and time, but also to locate one in a certain space and time. It not only remains beautiful through different cultures and era’s, but also takes the beholder and locates them in a different context. As I mentioned, this happens most readily with paintings, but architecture can have the same affect, both civic and landscape. Beauty brings the far near, and brings the near far away.

Beauty is real, present, independent, giving, bestowing, playful and creative, diverse, harmonious, and dimensional. Lastly, Beauty has context, and cannot be beautiful, at least in the same way, apart from its surroundings. To relate this directly to our God needs some clarification. God would still be God apart from His people, technically. But He Himself has chosen to irrevocably unite Himself to us, to identify Himself by us. Christ is now forever in human flesh. That cannot and will not be undone. To separate Him from that flesh would in some sense, hypothetically of course, diminish His beauty. In like manner, creation has context. The beauty of the trees in the mountains of eastern California could not be appreciated in the great plains of Nebraska. But in their context, they are some of the most sublime sights one can ever see on this earth. Likewise a Bach Cantata played at a hockey game, just does not fit, nor would the beauty be fully communicated and appreciated. Just because something works here, does not necessitate it working there. This is another way of joining the form/content debate. Form matters. The content is affected by the form. A cheesecake in a springform pan will look and taste different than a cheesecake in a meatloaf pan. The cheesecake needs its own specific context to function as it was meant to. Beauty works the same way. Beauty identifies with something. The point here is that the ‘something’ is important.

From this discussion, we have now a specific set of standards to judge beauty. These are objective standards that do not depend on taste. Beauty is real, present, independent, giving, bestowing, playful and creative, diverse, harmonious, dimensional, and within a specific context. Next time we will look at how if one of these aspects is distorted or maligned, the object no longer is beautiful. But for now, beauty is important, and how we understand it will affect how we live and relate with one another. And it happens whether or not we believe it.