Why beauty and sacred art are needed now more than ever

I thought I would go a bit deeper into this idea of beauty, really drawing from the tradition of philosophy and theology. As mentioned, I’m an art history and curatorship student, and I’m just a lover of all things beautiful, I’m an artist and an author myself, so I’m dedicated to gifting beauty onto the world through art. This branch of philosophy, aesthetics, is explored by Dietrich von Hildebrand, who breaks this idea into two types of beauty, primitive beauty and the sublime. Primitive beauty is that which is detected by our senses, a created thing with qualities like shape, colour, form, and sound. Within that, we see different types of beauty, mathematical beauty, like the Fibonacci pattern in nature, in galaxies, even in the proportion of the human face, which Renaissance artists used when measuring their canvases because they wanted us to have this aesthetic experience just by looking at proportion. Then we have musical beauty, visual beauty, and even moral beauty, what Fyodor Dostoevsky touches on, where goodness and justice actually create an aesthetic experience within us as humans.

Then we move to the sublime, and that’s that which surpasses our aesthetic capacity as humans. It draws us into the metaphysical, the spiritual realm, so you might sense beauty in a person, and that’s also their goodness. The transcendentals are all linked, beauty, truth, and goodness, and ultimately they reveal the truth of who God is. But we’re all products of postmodernism, and it’s shaped the way we think without us even realising it. We’re very focused on the subjective, I like this because of the colour, or I don’t like this for my own reasons, and some would even argue that there’s no such thing as objective beauty anymore. But in my own studies I’ve come across this really amazing collision where science is actually supporting philosophy. Neuroscientist Semir Zeki, through neuroaesthetics, found that in all humans, regardless of race, gender, or culture, there’s an aesthetic experience, with increased blood flow and dopamine released in the medial orbital frontal cortex when we encounter objective beauty. It’s fascinating, and it affirms what’s been said in philosophy and theology, especially through the argument from desire, every natural desire is for something real, and the human desire for perfect beauty is because we have a desire for the full contemplation of God, the beatific vision.

We are actually programmed to desire beauty, even biologically, we experience pleasure when we see something beautiful, and yet we can never fully satisfy that desire here. It doesn’t matter how many artworks you see, how many sunsets you look at, how many beautiful moments you experience, it’s never going to be enough, because ultimately that desire is directing us toward God. And so when we look at art in a contemporary age, we know now that art doesn’t have to be beautiful. You come across artists, like Piero Manzoni, who pushed this idea and presented works that reject beauty altogether, saying this is art. So where do we go from there. As artists, especially as Christian artists or people seeking truth, goodness, and beauty, we have this privilege and this huge responsibility to actually give the world good art, art that reflects the nature of God again. Because culture is forming us, whether we realise it or not. As it says in Bible, Philippians 4:8, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things. And that’s what sacred art allows us to do, it draws us into contemplation, into stillness, into closeness with God, in a world where we are so distracted.

So I guess this is the challenge, for both the creative and the consumer. For the creative, are you just going to be another contemporary artist, caught up in self, ego, and subjectivity, or are you actually going to partner with God and point people toward truth, beauty, and goodness. As Pope John Paul II writes in his Letter to Artists, 1999, artists are those who are passionately dedicated to the search for new epiphanies of beauty, and that the divine Artist passes on to the human artist a spark of his own surpassing wisdom, calling him to share in his creative power. That’s something we’re all invited into. You see it even in history, like the first cave paintings 30,000 years ago, where humans created beyond just survival, showing that there’s something innate in us that wants to create. As the Catechism says, art is a freely given superabundance of the human being’s inner riches. So for the consumer, it’s also a call to be more critical, not just asking do I like this, but is this drawing me toward objective truth. And for the creative, it’s the same question in a different form, are you going to use what you’ve been given to inject beauty and truth back into a culture that is, in many ways, losing it.

G r a c e xx

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4WIsT_7CJI