“The world is a beautiful place – to be born into – if you don’t mind happiness – not always being – so very much fun – if you don’t mind a touch of hell – now and then – just when everything is fine – because even in heaven – they don’t sing – all the time – The world is a beautiful place – to be born into – if you don’t mind some people dying – all the time – or maybe only starving – some of the time – which isn’t half so bad – if it isn’t you – Oh the world is a beautiful place – to be born into – if you don’t mind – a few dead minds – in the higher places – or a bomb or two – now and then – in your upturned faces – or such other improprieties – as our Name Brand society – is prey to – with its men of distinction – and its men of extinction – and its priests – and other patrolmen – and its various segregations – and congressional investigations – and other constipations – that our fool flesh – is heir to -” [i]
Thus wrote Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1955. The world then was in the throes of a new existential bipolarity. A world war had ended, but the world was divided between the Red and the Free. There was the sustained chill of a cold war that threatened at any moment to become red hot. Optimism was ripe, and so was fear. From the de rigueur grey business suit to the pragmatic of Niebuhr’s morality the too real divide betwixt black and white created a grisaille world. This evidenced itself in a heady utilitarianism that sometimes spilt over in to the comedic, as when it was, reputedly, suggested that dust covers be added to the hems of the draperies in the White House. Yankee sensibility sought a world hegemony before the cold handed fist of communism. Carefree happiness was always looking over its shoulder for a bomb, and so it was never really carefree. Ambivalence cannot be sustained. It could not here be sustained in part because suppressed was pragmatism’s dark side, its unacknowledged shadow: a moral and ecological vacuity. This made for the charge of hypocrisy, and there was, as always there is, a younger generation ready to set out the gravamen. Beatniks and Bohemians left the grey world for darkened coffee houses and a bright new society. Better drugs would make their successors not Hep-cats but Hippies. The world, however, had its own momentum. While ersatz world wars played out in smaller theatres, everyone knew the war of the worlds was not ended, merely, as was so much else, pragmatically suppressed. So it was last century. But so it has always been in one form or another. The scenes change, the actors come and go, but the plot of human history is as constant as the plots of soap-operas. The issue of the day is this: human history has reached a pivotal point wherein it has bucked heads with evolutionary history. The contest is now twixt Man and Earth, because Man has dared to imperil himself by defying the beauty of Earth.
The world is a beautiful place. The majesty and mystery of it surround us. Why do we not honestly see it? Why do we not truly live it? Why do we not allow it to inform us, transform us? Is it because beauty itself is bipolar? Is it because we have not the eye to realistically see the beauty around us, and begin then to compensate our need for beauty with false notions of beauty which, being false, disappoint us in the depths of self, and so rouse us to ennui, anger, aggression?
Plato theorized that of the numerous eternal ideas dormant within the soul in its earthly entrapment beauty was the first to be reawakened. It was roused from its slumber by the encountering of beauty in the world, which in turn moved the soul to desire beauty in itself, in its eternal pureness. It thus moved man to know the beauty resident in truth and in goodness, and so in virtue. Plato understood desire [eros] itself is bipolar. It can stimulate toward transcendence, and in that a satiation of desire; it can inflame a mere wanting in search of continuous gratification. The thirst for beauty, the desire for the beauteous, can clearly stall, and become a mere covetousness. That basal wanting objectifies the beautiful as a compensation for a deficiency, a lack of energy in the psyche. Some sink deeply into an obsession, into an unbridled compulsion for the acquisition of beautiful things, or beautiful bodies, or beautiful experiences—and let it be noted well that such experiences may be as often spiritual as material. Aristotle taught beauty was an objective quality, a matter of integral harmony. Yet the attunement to that order and balanced definity had to be observed, and to be learned. In the pragmatics of this world beauty depended upon the eye of the beholder to be able to behold it, and to that end the eye–the inner eye–needed to be trained. To see the beauteous, to know truth, to understand goodness, and to incarnate them, one needed to be schooled in the transcending qualities of this world.
Anyone gifted an education in the classics will know that Cicero, with characteristic Roman pragmatism, opined that matters of “taste” cannot be debated [de gustibus non est disputandum]. But is that true? It makes beauty a subjective matter, a matter of taste. Certainly, the Renaissance mind thought the Gothic a vulgarity. The Impressionist thought the Romantics lacking. Most had little regard for the emerging Cubists. If one manifests a taste for the Classical world, can one also appreciate the artistry in the high Victorian? Can one love 19th century Italian opera and still understand a quest for an aesthetical voice in the grunge bands of the 1990s? How encompassing is the idea of beauty? Is beauty simply a matter of taste? Or, as Plato and Aristotle taught, is beauty the standard that empowers a transcendence, a move toward integration—personal, social, and global?
Theology has delicately ignored the topic. Religion has not. Religion has always looked to art, to the beauty of setting, sound, movement, and dress to conjure either inspiration or its dark-side, that holy “fear,” that trembling awe before the majesty of being. Religion, as a discipline of word and action, exists in part from the instinct, or more accurately the apperception, that beauty assists health, virtue, integration. Those cultures that have their roots in the world’s great religions, the great historical cults, know that as well. Their palaces, pyramids, monuments, parks, squares, fountains, and public ceremonies were created to create a space for the experience of beauty, for an authentically encompassing and animating vista in the service of personal and social identity and integration.
The great philosophical transcendentals of goodness, beauty and truth are in this age relativized. Goodness, once a moral quality, is confused with the eternal perfection of an action, a measurable quantity. Thus, good deeds are subject to critique from every possible perspective of time-space extension. Truth, once a harmony of mind and reality, has become confused with functionality and practicality. Eternal truths are denied, and thus the truths in the care of religions are denied. They are denied because they are taken as literal statements and not as exemplary statements of the eternal truths of the mythopoetic psyche. Beauty, being commercially confined to things physical, is left wholly to the relativity of taste. Taste, once a learned sensitivity, a worldly wisdom, is now become wholly a judgement of which everyman is dicast. Thus, we ask: is there no longer any informed, studied, honed, polished, socially accepted, objective basis for our judgements of the true, the good, the beauteous?
Western culture emerged from a rich cultic centre: Christianity. The moral centre of that cult is the inviable value of each individual set within the embrace of a global egalitarianism and a cosmos redeemed from the folly of ego-man. That nucleus is still unfolding, but the appreciation of beauty toward the sustenance of that has been fading since the neo-iconoclasm of the Reformation movement. Art, indeed, any embellishment of the ordinary of life, anything sapping of the capacities for sensation and emotion were suspect and supressed as forms of a bedevilling eroticism, depravity, evil. The waning of an appetite for the beauteous set in motion by that iconoclasm has caught up with social expression in its own bipolar suppressive way. Great leaders were once wont to ensure their domains were studded with places and spaces to inspire identity, confidence, and cohesion among the populace. Now, practicality and functionality seem more important than inspiration and aesthetical alimentation. Bottom-line financial concern deracinates things considered merely pretty to behold. Art and pageantry are a wasting of money. That leaves the public not only wanting but wasting. Without something set out to elevate, society sinks into lethargy, and therefrom in order ennui, discontent, disorientation. Society becomes like unto its environment, something deprived, desolate, and because man is social, something de-socialized and eventually anti-social. We must, indeed, dispense those prudent practicalities of life. We must provide shelter and nourishment for them in need. We must treat the ills of body and mind. We must attend to them sequestered by illness or circumstance. We must bury with reverence the dead. We must minister to all these necessities of the body, but in all these things enjoined upon us by gospel, by the morality of goodness, by the rational truth of our intimate sociality, we must be attentive also to the spirit and its needs. We must all these things do in an atmo-sphere that authentically knows beauty, both within and without. That is the injunction of holiness, of the Spirit in whom the roots of truth and goodness abide.
It may be difficult for some to appreciate the necessity of beauty to make a people enlivened, envisioned, and virtuous, but there can be no doubt that the ugly is received as a dis-ease, something to be covered over, hidden away, done away with, or more positively something to be repaired or restored. Yet the ugly can act as a protesting symptom of the dis-eased, of the de-socialized and the anti-social. In this the lethargy, discontent, and disorientation encountered in society can be understood, at least in part, as a manifest of the surrender of beauty to the mind-set that we need simply to get along with the brute practicalities of life, the bottom-line viability of this or that. As every artist of pen, paper, brush, chisel, movement, or voice knows quite well, life is not merely a matter of practicality. Man without beauty to surround him, to inspire him, is no more than a lump of clay. A city filled with every practicality, and no sense of art, of artistry, of beauteous spaces and places available to all for all, is a drab entity encouraging a drab existence—and worse. Yet, how little does the importance of beauty about us register in the politics of cities, states, and individuals. A society needs its grand vistas, its harmonics of sight and space. A society needs to know its roots, and so it needs monuments and moments to acknowledge and to celebrate its history. A society needs fountains and flowing waters to remind it of that innermost thirst for the roots of our tellurian origins. It needs trees and plants to rehearse and reaffirm the nature of our nurturing Earth. It needs festivals and feasts to teach the soul of the joyous plenum of the dazzling light that dwells within. Today, who cares to dress “up”—be it oneself or our shared spaces? Beauty is tossed aside for the sake of not caring about how we look, how we eat, how and where we interact. Being casual is hoisted up as the standard of authenticity, and gestures of respect, of curtesy, of “making something special of it,” of etiquette are deemed pretentions. Learned exchange is tagged but a posturing of the elite. Education was once about being conducted into knowledge. It muchly has fallen to “influencers,” the host of whom are undeveloped souls clinging in compensation to egos in search of an affirmation of a person that has failed to form. The glorified belching “inflow” of individual opinion saturates and sinks the rational platform on which rests the agility to gather into self the learning of ages, the nutrients of worldly wisdom. This new faux-knowledge needs no depth, no testability. Value and surety rest now upon an opinion set upon a pedestal set upon the sands of pretense. Most horrifyingly, some from among these puffed-up egos of empty souls screech their pertinacious persiflage and catch up other equally empty souls into their orbit. Propaganda, that grand commercialization of “what I want you to believe,” is embraced because it is a false beauty—something “grand” in its simplicity, something seductive in its actual base-less-ness. It is, however, but a duplicity, a crutch for a crippled society. Truth is disregarded because the de-socialized mind cannot bear it, cannot ingest it. Truth is too rich a nutrient for the shrunken mind, the shrivelled soul.
Let it be patent about pragmatics. Despite the value of every bit of green within a city, a plot of grass with a tree or two is neither a garden nor a park reminding us of the paradise Earth holds in its promise. An open space before a building is not a piazza inviting the making of a society. Despite the good of every place people of faith can convene, an auditorium with a table and a cross is not a sacred grove, a holy cave. Despite the glowing pride of parents, a child pounding on a piano is not touching upon the harmonics of our being. Despite the infatuation and mass psychic inflation that might be roused by the teenager—in fact or desire—hopping across a stage and setting off a barrage of electronically embellished sounds, art here is not. A public display of social commentary—be it in sound, upon a canvass, or some other platform or medium, is commentary, no more. Such may well be adept toward its end, but it is not art, and it probably will not be beauteous because beauty does not comment on things. Beauty finds the trace of the eternal in things—their truth, their goodness, their life, their soul. That does not mean every piece of art is pretty, simply that art is beauteous in that it evokes our truth, our vitality, our pain and our glory, our communion of being human, terrestrial, and cosmic.
We all instinctively feel the gravity of beauty. We seek to express it, to surround ourselves with it. The striving for beauty is usually within the confines of the culture or the subculture because one learns about beauty from the culture that enfolds. Some may by way of protest seek out the ugly, but few are so demented as to purposefully strive to create the ugly. Those who feel their lack of endowment seek out the deft among us. Designers and decorators and celebrities become the definers of beauty, and because they, like so much else of our world, have been commercialized, they too often are no more than self-promoted, well promoted, sophists claiming the title of sophisticate. The test of the beauteous is its fruit. Does it rouse to being something more than the fashionably bedizened banalities of the everyday plodding of existence? Does it elevate the soul or merely the ego? Does it give way for growth and integration, or does it merely cloy some sense, stroke some wobbling of ego?
This decrepitude regarding the creation of beauty is systemic. Religion, once so vibrant a seat of beauteous sound and sight, of wonderous narrative and image, has become the home of the commonplace, the colloquial, the conversational. Earth, the paradise around us we have for ages denied, is wasted in our care-lessness. We wag our heads at our mediaeval ancestors who emptied their chamber pots out onto the streets below, but we dump into streams, and rivers, and oceans our waste, our trash, and even entire shipping containers of goods from ships too greedily over-stacked. We squeeze every ounce of material profit possible from every venue imaginable without concern for the viability of world and society, for the spirit of others, for the life, the very soul of this Earth. We censure the smoker who endangers his life, but we cling numbly to habits and gadgets and mechanisms that endanger the Earth. Like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car, we are frozen in an unspeakable fear of what is happening. We, with neurotic frenzy, wring our hands and turn about in circles, accomplishing little or nothing. On this sphere of races too many among us blindly cling to a hegemony of centuries past. While, thus, we sing “we are the world,” at the root of it we unwittingly mean the “white” world. We—all–too often in subtle ways disregard everyone and everything that is not “us,” that is not “me,” and in that we—all–demean ourselves and the Earth.
If anyone would ignore the insight resident in the notion of an Original Sin, think well here. Original sin is none other than that declivity to ignore the sociality of our being, our existential and essential need to live in harmony not only one with another, but with those highest possible ideals personified in God, and with this Earth of which we are integral, responsive, and responsible part. Ego has lost us one another and is fast losing us both ideals and the Earth. When will we authentically, realistically acknowledge the unspeakable beauty of life, of Earth, of other? When will we—as individuals, as societies, as nations–stop asking about the moment of “me,” of ego, and stop to lavish love on life, on Earth, on one another? Only when we can acknowledge their inestimable and enduring beauty, their spiritual nature, their capacity for the transcending and everlastingly satiating, their intimately sacred and shared-creatureliness. And that only when we have acquired the eye trained and honed for the objectivity of beauty.
It may be objected that not all are at fault, not all are equally at fault. No. The doctrine of our original sinfulness speaks of the species and its sinfulness. By not only commission, but also by omission, negligence, complacency all partake of the declivity, corruptibility, and culpability of the species. All have sinned because all are sinful. All are tainted by self-interest, self-preservation, selfishness, and so by care-lessness. Thus need we redemption, need we that light that summons us back to an origin beyond sin, to that origin which is the sacred act of creation itself, that divine Word revealing not only world and self, but the Wisdom, the Power, and the Creativity that ever precedes us, transcends us, resides at once the nascent and the glorious in the depths of us, and seeks to perfect us within the flow of time.
Every Anglican of a certain generation knows the chant of “the beauty of holiness” and how often it seems to be more about the beauty of where we thus sing than about the holiness to which we are called. Beauty is not a virtue, but we are not inclined to be virtuous in a world wherein song is disharmonious, and “art” in general is but commentary or common. Such is, in essence, exactly the floor and noise of the factory that well toned souls such as Blake have railed against. Such exactly is the loss of taste, of sapience, which makes us but cogs in a machine without soul, without the spirit to soar, without the vision and active faith to lead us to become whole, to become holy. Beauty may reside as an attribute with-in holiness, but there is no holiness with-out beauty in its material encounterability.
We need, thus, again close the shops, turn off the screens, and find a sabbath time and place of rest. We need a time to rest the soul from the press of the practical and pragmatic. We need again come together in places and spaces that are something more than pedestrian. We need places and spaces that inspire. We need again to find the sound, not only of harmony, but of silence. We need again find our earthly roots, our psyche’s inner sun and its caves of Lascaux. How can we pause to savour the beauty of being alive when all we are feed, all we are shown, is the means of mean existence?
In the Gospel according to Matthew Jesus tells the tale of a man who set out a great feast. Among them there was a man who did not dress for the occasion. He was cast out into a place starkly deprived of the pleasantries of life. Life is a feast we are invited to attend fittingly. We must treat it as thus for ourselves and for all others or we face being lost to it, its glory, its substantiality, its wonder, its ability to inspire, to vivify. As for our religion, there are many things we need address in this ever more pragmatic and secular world, but beauty cannot be ignored in that for which we advocate or in that which we do—either cultically or socially. How else then can we ask of anyone to say: “We thank Thee for all the benefits and blessings of this life”? Be it great or small, civil or ecclesial, a society that ignores beauty, that does not surround itself in the beauteous, that does not create the beauteous, that does not pass-on the sapience for the beauteous is a society dishonouring itself and making itself diseased. A life not adorned is a life not adored.
To see beauty, as to see goodness and truth, we must be schooled, exercised, inspired. Education needs again focus on the arts. Religion needs again find the beauty of expression and action. Cities and states need again find room to celebrate our histories, our commonalities, our ideals. Beauty is not a matter of taste. It is an objective reality that summons to something more, something transcending of the moment, the place, the person, the society. It is not a mask, a mascara, to disguise a sagging ego. The objectivity of beauty needs be held sacrosanct by both church and state if it will ever inspire true subjectivity and growth. Objective vision and exercise are the prerequisite of that subjective leap, and that subjective leap the proof of the objective.
In the Gospel according to John we read of a woman who brought an urn of fragrant oil to anoint the feet of Jesus, and Judas[ii], playing the card of practicality, complained of the financial truth that here was spent something that could have aided the poor. An act of moral rectitude, of goodness, was critiqued because the beauty of the act was ignored. Truth is about more than bottom-lines. Goodness about more than its possible unforeseen consequences. Beauty is about more than the eye of the beholder. Beauty, goodness, and truth were long listed as the meta-physical transcending qualities of being because they were well understood as the qualities that elevate life and give it scope to grow healthier and well. In this world we will never transcend parsimoniousness unless we acknowledge—deeply—their objective value for life, for our shared life in this our shared world. That is the truth and the goodness resident in the beauty of wholeness, of the holiness to which we all are called. To that end, let us end with the optimism of Mary Susanne Edgar: “God, who touchest earth with beauty…Turn my dreams to noble action…Make my heart anew…”
[i] From Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Pictures of the Gone World.
[ii] The Gospel according to John goes on to note that Judas thus speaks not because he cares for the poor, but because he is a thief. He, being in charge of the apostolic finances, has been helping himself. He is the puffed-up ego suffering both its sense of inferiority that needs that cash to make himself feel more, and its sense of superiority that allows him to think he knows better than the rest. For all his “sense”, for all his feelings, he is bereft of vision, of faith—in himself, in Jesus, in the gospel of forgiveness his master, Jesus, preaches. He is therein doomed to the mere semblance of propriety, and when the crisis of his life emerges he has no realistic place in life to turn. His death by suicide is the manifest of the fragment of ego masking a desolate soul. It is a sombre warning to the church and to all. Years spent walking with Jesus as his disciple did not reach that psychic hole within that needed only to understand it was beloved, that it was an abyss awaiting, under the wings of the spirit, a creation and the very reality-making affirmation: “It is good.”
In addition to the gospel the Johannine community bequests us three epistles and Revelation. In the epistles we learn there was among the churches founded by John resistance to or outright rejection of the founding authority. That thwarting activity is given a name: anti-Christ. It is a thrust to defraud the world of the work of the Christ and his true disciples. It is not then surprising that we read in the gospel created by this community that Judas was a thief as well as a traitor. In this he is presented as the archetype for the blind force that stands opposed to the divine intent of universal salvation.
The apostle Paul had located that antagonism in heaven before the world began. Satan and his cohorts had rejected the divine plan to bring the proposed creation into the life of the divine, rebelled, and now continue their insurrection within creation. In the prologue of the Johannine gospel that antagonism is simply pre-set within the world, in those that “received him not.” The church in this world is, thus, always beset by them that would rob it of its truth, its spirit, and its Lord because it is “in the world.” John underscores the fragility of the church and the potency of this frustrating power. In the person of Judas he presents them entrenched in the very founding apostolic college.
In the final work of the Johannine community, Revelation, there is examined the spiritual journey of soul and of the church both of which must confront the moral ambivalence and anility of being-in-the-world. This journey is mapped out upon a dramatically cosmic stage. Thus, we read it as: “there was a war in heaven” [Cf: on The Apocalyptic Book of Revelation, January 2013]. The anti-Christ force here takes on gargantuan proportions. The sheer moral hideousness of this power dissolves any sense of person or soul, and emerges simply and starkly as “the beast.” The stage is thus set in the seeming favour of this monstrous force. There proceeds a battle amongst the forces of the soul for the soul: id with its want for “me” and its supremacy; super-ego, born of id and world experience, seeking a path of pragmatic acceptability; and spirit seeking wisdom, seeking the incarnation and revelation of the presence of Creativity’s cosmic providential and salvific power. The power of the id plays out in an orgy of spilt blood and revenge too often today surrendered to and glorified in the violence of films and “games”, while the serene power of the celestial spirit maintains itself and the constancy of its purpose. The id, that “daemon,” that mysterious inner me-asserting power, balks against the Order of this world, the Lord of this world. It needs be tamed. There, indeed, is a war, a series of battles, to set the soul in order, to allow the inner most print of creation and promise to emerge glorious. It is only when soul can overcome that destabilizing “daemon” relentlessly set upon the glorification of “me”, and release its spirit into another, into “diakonia” (service to, openness to other) that that self-same spirit can utter the capitulating and final creative word before the Eternal Truth of the soul: Thou, come!