I am still plowing through Herman Bavinck’s Essays on Religion, Science, and Society, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. If you enjoy theology and philosophy, this book is for you. While learning about the Covenanters and the more general foundations for their thinking on a Christian’s role in the world around him, I somehow took a left turn and wound up reading about Christian aesthetics. Providentially for me, the aforementioned Bavinck book has a short essay entitled “Of Beauty and Aesthetics”, in which Bavinck tries to briefly put forth a framework for thinking about aesthetics, from a Christian perspective. Of course, we realize that God IS true beauty, and the only beauty in the world is the reflected beauty of the Lord. It’s a simple but powerful thought.
Bavinck wraps up his essay tying the experience of beauty to the grace of God, in a beautiful and moving section:
And the beauty always awakens in us images, moods, and affections that otherwise would have remained dormant and not even known to us. Beauty thus discloses us to ourselves and also grants us another, new glimpse into nature and humanity. It deepens, broadens, enriches our inner life, and it lifts us for a moment above the dreary, sinful, sad reality; beauty also brings cleansing, liberation, revival to our burdened and dejected hearts.
We cannot express in words the valuable gift the Creator of all things has granted to His children. He is the Lord of glory and spreads his beauty lavishly before our eyes in all His works. His name is precious in the whole earth, and while He did not leave us without a witness, He also fills our hearts with happiness when we observe that glory. Beauty and the sense of beauty respond to each other, as the knowable object and the knowing subject, the religio objectiva [responding] to the religio subjectiva. Truly, awareness of beauty cannot be fully explained as “empathy”; when observing and enjoying true beauty, it is not man who bestows his affections and moods on the observed object, but it is God’s glory that meets and enlightens us in our perceptive spirits through nature and art. Humanity and the world are related because they are both related to God. The same reason, the same spirit, the same order lives in both. Beauty is the harmony that still shines through the chaos in the world; by God’s grace, beauty is observed, felt, translated by artists; it is prophecy and guarantee that this world is not destined for ruin but for glory - a glory for which there is a longing deep in every human heart.
The next time you are enjoying a beautiful sunset, or strolling through a museum looking at classic art, thank God for the capacity to truly experience beauty.