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Beauty: Path to God or Monkey Brain?

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Does beauty point to the existence of God? Or can we explain it away as a “spandrel,” an unintentional side effect of natural selection? And if beauty DOES point to God, what role should it play in Christian evangelization… and liturgy?


Speaker 1:

You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Joe Heschmeyer:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So today I want to explore a different kind of question. So if you’ve been following this, you’ll know that other than a digression I took last week, I’ve been doing a five-part series on answering atheism. These are five answers to the problem of, “Is there a God?” Based on the theology of Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Benedict the 16th, and I’m turning now from some of the headier arguments he had where we looked at existence itself. We looked at the meaning of life. We looked at the intelligibility of the universe and of science. All of that stuff was deep waters. Today I’m going to look at something that may be more immediately accessible, the idea of beauty. Does beauty prove the existence of God?

As I said, it’s the fourth of the five weeks. Next week we’ll continue in a certain way in this theme, but looking at a very different kind of beauty, which is the lives of the saints. So one of the things I found really interesting in preparing for this is that Ratzinger actually thought these were the most convincing arguments, that the intellectual arguments always left people a little cold or often left people a little cold. In his words, he says, “The only really effective apologia defense for Christianity comes down to two arguments.” Now notice that he’s saying, “If you want really effective apologetics, it’s going to commend to two arguments. Number one, the saints the church has produced, and number two, the art which has grown in her womb.” Now, we’re only going to look at the second of those today.

That was really fascinating that these last two weeks, the beauty and saints, these were the two arguments he found most effective, most convincing, and he explained why. He says, “Better witness is born to the Lord by the splendor of holiness and art which have arisen in the community of believers and by clever excuses, which apologetics has come up with to justify the dark sides, which sadly are so frequent in the church’s human history.” In other words, you can maybe intellectually see why contingent things need something necessary and you can see why the created world needs a creator. You can see why the empty tomb is a pretty convincing explanation for Jesus having arisen from the dead and that Jesus says He’s going to leave us the church, and all the evidence points to that being the Roman Catholic Church. You could follow all of that stuff logically, and then you can see all the ugliness, has happened in Catholic history and be left totally cold and say, “Something must be wrong in the logic.”

That’s his point. That if all of our arguments are simply arguments from the head and we don’t engage the heart, we don’t deal with ideas like goodness and beauty, there’s something incomplete, which is not to say the arguments of the head are wrong. They’re true. They’re in pursuit of the truth. God is good, true, and beautiful, but if we only attend to God as true and ignore the good and ignore beauty, then we’ve got a very incomplete defense of Christianity. I think that’s his argument. In fact, that in those dark moments when you may be dealing with human sin, scandal, and tragedy, it’s the arguments of the heart that are the most effective. That when you see a really ugly, rotten Christian, the best antidote to that isn’t a syllogism. The best antidote to that is a saint. That’s the argument. I think he’s right about that, by the way.

Nevertheless, there is a place for the intellectual arguments, and I’m even going to take these arguments of the heart, which, in some way, are very visceral. You get them or you don’t. Either beauty draws you out or it doesn’t. Either the holiness of saints draws you out or it doesn’t. I’m going to nevertheless make those into syllogisms, and hopefully I’m not doing an injustice to Ratzinger’s thinking here. But here’s how I would put the beauty argument, the first premise is that if God did not create the universe, there would be no beauty. The second premise of beauty in fact exists, and that leads to the conclusion that therefore God did create the universe. That the only real explanation that you can give for beauty is a beautiful designer, a God who designs beautiful things and designs beautifully. The obvious counter to that from an atheist perspective is that evolution is somehow responsible for it.

So the variant title for this episode is Beauty: Monkey Brain or a Path to God, because those are broadly the two major categories of explanation. So in the first category, the monkey brain explanation that is going to explain where beauty comes from, I would turn here to Rhett Diessner’s book, Understanding the Beauty Appreciation Trait, which seeks to understand from an evolutionary perspective why beauty exists. He does a very good job of briefly summing up the state of the field. He says, “Several major evolutionary theorists think that the arts are byproducts of evolution.” In other words, not that we have a beauty gene that was naturally selected for, but that natural selection created a sort of byproduct. It was an unintentional thing that beauty exists, even from an evolutionary perspective.

So for instance, if you have a species and it’s in an environment where everything around it is green, say, and some members of that species are born green and some are born blue, the green ones might survive longer than the blue ones, so they’re able to reproduce because the green ones find it easier to hide from predators. So it isn’t that the blue was disfavored because it’s ugly. The green was just more adapted to the environment. That is a simplified way of how the theory of natural selection works, and we see plenty of examples of this in nature.

Now, notice, though, there’s nothing like that for beauty. There’s no gene where it’s like, “If we had beauty, then we would survive better.” And we’ll get into the problems with that. So Gould, Lewontin, Stephen Pinker, these guys think, “Okay, sure, natural selection doesn’t favor beauty as such, but maybe it favors things where beauty is an unintentional byproduct. That while it’s not favoring beauty as a trait itself, it’s favoring some other trait that indirectly leads to beauty.” And so Gould and Lewontin apply an architectural metaphor. They give the name spandrel to this because in architecture, like in the building of a cathedral, you’ve got arches and columns, and because of the shape of an arch, it’s not like a total rectangle. So it leaves a little chunk of roughly triangular space, and these are often beautifully decorated.

If you go into a church, you see an archway, and then you see another archway. That area in between, the spandrel, may be really beautiful. So, as Diessner explains, spandrels are typically not load-bearing, but are often used for decoration, hence the metaphor. In other words, the artist, or excuse me, the architect, didn’t start by saying, “I need to find a place to put this angel.” No, it’s, “I need to make an arch and column, and oh, look, I’ve got this leftover space. Why don’t I make an angel here?” So the spandrel isn’t the reason for the design. The spandrel is a consequence of the design. I hope that makes sense. That’s what a spandrel is. It’s a fancy way of saying kind of an accidental side effect, a byproduct of evolution. That’s the argument that natural selection favors certain traits and beauty is a byproduct.

So let’s ask that question. Does natural selection explain beauty? Now, you’ll notice in the original kind of explanation, they’re looking at the human appreciation of beauty. But I want to actually start with the animal appreciation of beauty, and I want to look at the bowerbird because this one has a unique role to play in the history of the debate around beauty in evolution.

Speaker 3:

In the rainforests of Irian Jaya, male Vogelkop bowerbirds have been encouraged to create colorful gardens. Generations of hens have become connoisseurs of art, bestowing their sexual favors only on the owners of the most lavishly decorated courts. Every season, males construct elaborate bowers. These are highly decorated with all manner of natural treasures, which are displayed in the hope of gaining the approval of a passing hen.

Joe Heschmeyer:

So you’ll notice even in that description, it sounds kind of weird that generation after generation of evolution have made these female bowerbirds, the hens, who are connoisseurs of art. So the male bowerbirds spend a tremendous amount of time on the really ostentatious creation of bowers. Now, I want to be clear here, these are not the nests that they’re living in. These are just places for them to meet female bowerbirds, and the females don’t come to live with them either. This is a transactional exchange, we’ll say. But the male members of the species will spend a very long time, like years, building these really ornate bowers, gathering not just beautiful things, shells, beads, and seeds, but even they’ll find blue string and human artifacts that they’ll incorporate into these bowers, which again, they don’t live in. They’re just creating these really elaborate or neat means of attracting the female.

So the evolutionary question is why, and there’s actually a great article about this in the New York Times magazine. Ferris Jabr, or Jabr, has an article called How Beauty is Making Scientists Rethink Evolution, and he looks at the bowerbird because he says it defies traditional assumptions about animal behavior. It’s a creature that spends hours meticulously curating a cabinet of wonder, grouping his treasures by color and likeness. He single beakedly, I like that phrase, builds something far more sophisticated than many of the more celebrated examples of animal toolmaking like the stripped twigs at chimpanzees use to fish termites from their mounds.

In one scientist’s description, it’s nothing less than art. In fact, I think many people trying to describe what they’re seeing here refer to it in terms like art. But Ferris Jabr says, “Look, this isn’t affront to the normal rules of natural selection. Adaptations are meant to be useful. That’s the whole point, and the most successful creatures should be the ones best adapted to their particular environments.” So if you are in an environment where the leaves are really high up than having a long neck is an evolutionary adaptation that’s beneficial. So the creatures with long necks are more likely to survive than the creatures with short necks. All that makes sense. But he asks, “What is the evolutionary justification for the bowerbird’s ostentatious display?”

Now, not only does it lack any obvious value outside of courtship, and you can’t just say it’s good for courtship because you’re begging the question. The question is, why would a species favor this kind of elaborate courtship behavior? Because outside of this one area, it’s not clear how it’s beneficial. But more than that, they also actually hindered the bowerbird’s survival and his general wellbeing. They drain precious calories. They make him much more noticeable to predators. If you’re a bird that’s spending a great deal of time making an ostentatious, colorful display, it’s kind of the opposite of camouflage. Like you’ve built a little series of blue shells leading up to your bower. It’s not going to be hard to find you. You’ve really made yourself noticeable. Of course, the bowerbird is just one example of this. The bowerbird is striking because it’s not a particularly beautiful bird itself. It’s doing this thing that is colorful and gaudy and beautiful and intricate. But as Ferris Jabr points out, numerous species have these conspicuous metabolically costly and physically burdensome sexual ornaments. That’s the biological term for this.

He gives several other examples. That the bright elastic throats of anole lizards, the Faberge abdomens of peacock spiders, that curly, iridescent, ludicrously long feathers of birds of paradise, that none of those are the traits you would expect to see on the basis of natural selection. So to reconcile that kind of beauty in nature, that kind of splendor, with the utilitarian view of evolution, biologists have favored the idea that the beauty isn’t merely decoration. It’s code. So this is the other theory. So you’ve got the spandrel theory, and then you’ve got what we’ll call the code theory. It’s not necessarily an either or, but the code theory is maybe more specific. Spandrel says, “Maybe there is something, a reason or something as what’s really favorable, and then beauty is a side effect that doesn’t really explain animal beauty.” The bowerbird doesn’t show signs of great intelligence, but it still clearly has an appreciation for beauty. So when we look at this animal beauty, then we say, “Maybe it’s a code.”

So the code theory is this, ornaments evolve as indicators of some other advantageous trait. That if you’re able to make really elaborate displays or do really elaborate dances or something else, this signals to potential female partners that the male has health, intelligence, and survival skills, and this is favorable to passing down good genes. So a bowerbird with especially bright plumage might have a robust immune system, while one that finds rare and distinctive trinkets might be a superb forger. So in this case, beauty doesn’t confound natural selection. It’s very much a part of it.

Now, you may be thinking, “Joe, are you going to attack Darwinian evolution?” And I say, “No, I’m actually going to cite a pretty famous Darwinian for why that theory just doesn’t really make a lot of sense, a fellow by the name of Charles Darwin.” Darwin actually believed his theory of natural selection didn’t account for beauty, and he says as much, numerous times. As far back as the origin of species at the beginning of this part of his career, he says, “I willingly admit that a great number of male animals, as all our most gorgeous birds, some fishes, reptiles, and mammals, and a host of magnificently colored butterflies, have been rendered beautiful for beauty’s sake.”

It’s really striking language. It really goes against the stereotype of Darwin. He is not saying beauty has this evolutionary advantage on natural selection grounds. He doesn’t believe that. The research we’ve done in the intervening century and a half since then seems to support that. It is not clear that a bowerbird that has a really ostentatious display or any of these species that have the really ostentatious displays have better genes in some ways than the ones that don’t. We just don’t see that in the evidence. So the idea that the code theory is what explains this doesn’t seem to match up, and the spandrel theory doesn’t seem to explain it either. Like, what is the trait that this is a weird byproduct of? Ignore, again, beauty in humans, but beauty in bowerbirds are in these lower animals.

Now, the scientist who’s done the most work on this, to my knowledge, is a scientist by the name of Richard Prum, and he has a book called The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World. So he’s picking up Darwin’s argument and saying that Darwin, rather than modern Darwinians, that Darwin actually has a better argument. He doesn’t just look at the bowerbird. He looks at a number of other animals, and you can look at his book for a much longer treatment of this, but in an essay in natural history, he looks at the peacock, and he says, “If natural selection is driven by the differential survival of heritable variations…” In other words, natural selection just means if you’ve got two traits, A and B, and individuals with A are able to reproduce more and survive until they can reproduce, then you’ll get more and more of A in the population and less and less B. Hopefully, that makes sense.

He’s like, “Okay, if that’s the case, that’s the standard theory of natural selection. If that explains beauty, what do we do with the peacock’s tail?” Obviously, it doesn’t help the male peacock to survive. If anything, the huge tail is a hindrance, slowing him down, making him more vulnerable to predators, and Darwin was especially obsessed with the peacock’s eye spots. Before we get to why Darwin cared about it, I wanted to just point out, if you’ve ever watched a peacock run, and we have them, I guess, at the zoo here in Kansas City, and when you’ve got small children, they inevitably chase the peacocks. Then you see this is a giant.

Imagine an airplane that had something like peacock feathers on the back. It would be a tremendously slow, probably impossible-to-fly plane because it’s not aerodynamic, it doesn’t help any of the normal things a bird has feathers for. It’s gaudy. It’s ostentatious. The peahens, the females of the pea fowl, don’t have this, and they don’t seem like they’re missing anything that would be helpful for their survival. It seems like quite the opposite. The peacock has this beautiful but totally unwieldy set of plumage. So what is going on there? From a natural selection, it’d be hard to imagine anything less suited for natural selection than a giant, colorful, glowing display that says, “I’m bad at running away.” But that’s basically what the male peacock has.

Now, Darwin was interested in another dimension. The eye spot looks remarkably like the eye, hence the name, and Darwin had argued that the human eye could be explained as a result of many small incremental functional advances over time. So Darwin had a theory of evolution for the formation of the human eye, but in that, each advance slightly improves the ability of the eye to detect light or to distinguish shadows, to focus, to create images, to differentiate between colors, and so on, all of which you can imagine, “Oh look, now the eye can do this.” That makes it more likely you’re going to survive. But if you tried telling a similar story about where the eye spot comes from, it doesn’t make any sense. What function do the eye spots on a peacock serve?

So get really specific, not just why does the male have this beautiful plumage, but why those eye looking spots? They’re not helping him detect predators. They’re not helping him evade predators. They’re not helping him do any of the normal things that we think of in terms of evolutionary adaptation, and Darwin realizes this is a major hindrance to his general theory. So in 1860, he writes to an American friend, another botanist, Asa Gray, and says, “The side of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick.”

So I already mentioned the origin of the species, as I believe, 1860. So it’s earlier, 11 years later, he writes a book called The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex in which he focuses on this head-on, and he comes up with another theory of evolution, which is less famous. A lot of people have heard of natural selection. Not as many people realized that Darwin distanced himself in this one area from natural selection.

As we already saw, he didn’t think natural selection explained something like the peacock feather. He thought there was a second distinct independent mechanism of evolution, which he called sexual selection. Just make sure we’re getting these terms right. Natural selection, as Prum explains, results from differential survival of heritable variations. That’s a fancy way of saying if you have A, and you’re more likely to live and I’ve got B and I’m less likely to live, then you’re more likely to have descendants and pass on A, I’m less likely to live and pass on B. So over a long enough span of time, there’s a lot of A and very little, or maybe no, B. Makes sense? I hope so. I can’t actually hear you from here.

So natural selection deals with that. Then sexual selection, the second one, is a result of differential sexual success. That, really, beautiful peacocks are more likely to reproduce than really ugly peacocks, but that doesn’t deal with survival in the same way. You’re not more likely to live. You’re more likely to reproduce. Within sexual selection, Darwin makes a twofold distinction, and the first is what he calls the law of battle. So some individuals in the species, usually the male, are stronger in some way. You’ve got a larger body size. You’ve got weapons of aggression like horns, antlers, spurs, and this can also involve sexual control over individuals of the opposite sex. That a more menacing male can rape female members of the sex, for lack of a better term. That’s one mechanism.

The other is what he calls the taste for the beautiful, in which the female, usually a member of the sex, chooses the mate based on some innate preferences, that they prefer the really beautiful peacock to the ugly peacock. So Darwin hypothesized that mate choice had resulted in the evolution of ornamentation features that are pleasing to the senses, songs, colorful plumage displays of birds. If you’ve ever seen elaborate bird dances, they’re incredible, the brilliant blue face and hindquarters of the mandrill. As Prum notes, and this is the most important thing to take away from this, Darwin’s theory of mate choice was explicitly aesthetic. That the reason these beautiful things are favored evolutionarily isn’t that there’s something in them that makes the children healthier or that it makes you more easily able to avoid predators or something like this. No, no, it has nothing to do with your lifespan. It’s that you’re more attractive. That’s it. It’s aesthetic. That the females of the species find you more attractive if you have certain features.

I’m getting back from here. Darwin described the evolutionary origin of beauty and nature as a consequence of the fact that animals had evolved to be beautiful to their own species. This meant that the females particularly were active agents in the evolution of their own species, unlike natural selection, which largely emerges passively from external forces like geography, climate, predators, competition. Sexual selection is a self-directed process that the members of the species themselves are saying, “These are the traits we find beautiful. These are the ones we don’t.” So that’s the major distinction. Natural selection, “If you’ve got X trait, you’re all going to die, and if you’ve got Y trait, you’ll live.” Sexual selection, “Oh, we like X better than Y, so we will favor males or females with X rather than Y.” And so Darwin describes the females of having a taste for the beautiful and then aesthetic faculty, and he describes males as trying to charm their mates.

That’s Prum’s description of Darwin. I think that is a correct one if you read Darwin himself and The Descent of Man. He talks about this, and again, it’s pretty explicitly aesthetic. He has to assume there is such a thing as beauty. He says, “When we behold a male bird elaborately displaying his graceful plumes or splendid colors before the female, whilst other birds not thus decorated make no such display, it is impossible to doubt that she admires the beauty of her male partner. If female birds had been incapable of appreciating the beautiful colors, the ornaments, voices of their male partners, all the labor and anxiety exhibited by the latter in displaying their charms before the females would’ve been thrown away, and this it is impossible to admit.”

In other words, Darwin doesn’t think this is a span. He doesn’t think this is some weird side effects. He doesn’t think this is a coat where the beautiful thing signals to the woman or to the female that this is a male capable of producing strong, viable children or that the male’s more likely to stick around if he’s got a beautiful bower. The male bowerbird doesn’t stick around. So none of those theories seem to work here. Darwin, instead, his theory of sexual selection is that the birds actually have a sense of beauty, and they favor some things as more beautiful than others, and that’s it. Not because of some deeper explanation, but notice that in this theory you have to account for their being such a thing as beauty and that even an animal has some appreciation of beauty.

That’s a pretty remarkable thing to acknowledge or concede. That makes it look like beauty does exist. You’ll often find people today who argue that beauty is merely subjective, and the arguments are almost invariably bad. What I mean is, the arguments are usually like, “People’s taste in beauty differs.” De gustibus non disputandum est. In matters of fit taste, there is no dispute, “Hey, you like chocolate, I like vanilla.” And we’ll take that kind of approach to beauty, but that doesn’t… It’s not a very strong argument logically. Let’s just put it that way because you could also say, “You think the world is flat and I think it’s round.” Or whatever, fill in the blank. There’s plenty of issues of truth on which people disagree.

So the mere fact that two people disagree or that several people disagree doesn’t mean there’s not a right answer or that some answers are better than other answers. Certainly, if it was, you like Beethoven and I like hearing instruments thrown down the stairs, someone would say, “Yeah, I think one of those answers is actually better than another.” There may be some tough ones. Is Beethoven better than Mozart? But then there’s some not-tough ones, like, is Beethoven better than listening to an orchestra fall down the stairs? That’s the kind of thing that there is such a thing seemingly as beauty. If Darwin is right, there’s even a sense that animals can detect something of beauty, at least in one another.

Now we’ve looked here briefly at animal beauty. This still leads to this whole other area of beauty, like the wonder we have at the stars. There’s no obvious evolutionary benefit on either natural selection or sexual selection grounds. Now notice, I want to make sure I’m getting this point very clear. Sexual selection doesn’t explain the appreciation of beauty. Sexual selection presupposes the appreciation of beauty. If there was no appreciation for beauty, there would be no species evolved to be beautiful to one another. That the appreciation of beauty has to actually be prior, as strange as that is to say. Hopefully, that’s clear. But something like the beauty of the cosmos, where you look up at the sky and just are overawed with appreciation, that doesn’t work from a natural selection perspective.

If you’ve got two members of the species and one is stargazing and the other one is looking for predators at night, the other one looking for predators is probably going to outlast the stargazer. Just like the beautiful peacock’s tail, this appreciation for beauty doesn’t seem to increase the likelihood, you can avoid external threats, but neither is it clear why it would lead to greater sexual selection. What is the actual explanation for why our appreciation of the cosmos would’ve anything to do with rates of sexual procreation?

So all that’s to say, the standard theories about this don’t seem to hold up. The usual evolutionary explanations, that this is a spandrel, that is a code, or even Darwin theory of sexual selection, even though I think Darwin is the one of these three groups coming in the closest. Even sexual selection presupposes the existence of beauty, and we haven’t really explained where does this beauty come from. So if we’re asking the question, monkey brain or path to God? The fact that even monkeys and lower animals like birds already have an appreciation for beauty, there’s something deeper going on here, which is why I want to suggest we take seriously the question that this is a God-given appreciation.

Here, I want to turn from Charles Darwin to another 19th century thinker, Edgar Allan Poe because Cardinal Ratzinger and Edgar Allan Poe sound remarkably like each other, and I think this is coincidental, or at least in the sense that I don’t think Ratzinger was basing his thought off of Poe, but I think they’re both tapping into something true and beautiful. In his book, The Spirit of the Liturgy, Cardinal Ratzinger explains how all of this works philosophically and theologically. That the beautiful and the good, ultimately the beautiful and God, coincide. “Through the appearance of the beautiful,” he says, “We are wounded in our innermost being, and that wound grips us and takes us beyond ourselves. It steers longing into flight and moves us toward the truly beautiful to the good in itself.”

So there’s two traits I want to draw out from what Ratzinger has said about beauty. Three, sorry. First, that beauty is tied to the good. We believe God is the true, the good, the beautiful. Second, that there’s a wounding in beauty, and this is something where if you don’t have a deep appreciation for beauty, you can kind of miss this dimension, but this is something that people with a more artistic streak regularly talk about, that there’s a weird sort of sadness in the midst of tremendous beauty, and it’s this sadness that I think Ratzinger is trying to explain. The third is that it draws us out. That the woundedness helps to create in us a longing for a beauty beyond the beauty that we see. That it’s a hunger for the truly beautiful.

So almost the way if you’ve ever, maybe, gone a long time without eating, it’s embarrassing how many of my analogies involve eating. If you’ve ever gone a long time without eating and then you have a small meal, you often find, not only are you not satisfied, you suddenly find yourself ravenously hungry. Beauty works the same way. That earthly beauty can create in us a ravenous appreciation for wanting more and more and more beauty, but it doesn’t satisfy the hunger that it creates.

Now, as I say, rat singer sounds like Edgar Allan Poe, who says something remarkably similar in his book, The Poetic Principle, and I have to imagine poetic was a pun on Poe, whether he wants to admit it or not. Anyway, in the poetic principle, Edgar Allan Poe, who’s deeply an artist, we know him as an author of horror stories, but has a tremendous sense of beauty, and he describes it like this, he says, “There’s an immortal instinct deep within the spirit of man, which is plainly a sense of the beautiful, and it’s this spirit, this sense of the beautiful, that administers to man’s delight and the manifold forms and sounds and odors and sentiments amid which he exists.” In Poe’s words, he says, “We have still a thirst unquenchable to allay, which he has not shown us the crystal springs. That this thirst belongs to the immortality of man.”

Then he says, “It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescient of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle by multi-form combinations among the things and thoughts of time to attain a portion of that loveliness whose very elements perhaps that pertaining to eternity alone. So,” Poe says, “When by poetry or by music, we find ourselves melted into tears. You’ve ever had that experience of just being profoundly moved by a song or by a poem. We weep then not through an excess of pleasure, but through a certain petulant impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now holy here on earth that once or forever those divine and rapturous joys, which through the poem or music we attain, but brief and indeterminate glimpses.”

In other words, when you have that really profound experience, it can be a painting, it can be a poem, it can be a song, whatever it is, where you’re just moved and there’s something in you saying, “I want more, and this thing has awakened something in me that it can’t satisfy.” What’s remarkable is, we see this even at these remarkably young ages. So if you want to divert yourself from this, wait until the end please. But there are these YouTube videos of toddlers and even babies hearing sad songs and being moved to tears by the song.

What’s more remarkable is, they’ll even, when they’re old enough, ask for the songs, or they’ll have their mom singing, and they’ll start to cry. But crying, it’s not like they’re upset, but the way an adult would. That there’s some kind of appreciation even when, like, what heartbreak have they known in their life? What is this resonating with, in terms of any kind of emotional experience? I don’t know what they could say, but it’s awakening something, and tremendous beauty can have that effect. That’s a woundedness that Ratzinger talks about, but there’s a way in which we can be left a little unsatisfied.

Now, we’re going to return to that when we think about the maybe Socratic approach, if you will, what Plato has to say about beauty. But I want to just offer that because, for many of us, if we don’t have an orientation towards beauty, we can miss it. So with that in mind, I want to say a couple words. If all of what I’ve said is true so far, then I would suggest beauty has an important and underappreciated role to play in evangelization, and I want to suggest it has this role to play in a couple of ways.

First, I want to look to what Saint Augustine says, and in one of the most famous passages of the confessions, he says to God, “Late have I loved You, beauty so ancient and so new. Late have I loved You. Lo, You are within, but I’m outside seeking therefore You, and upon the shapely things You have made, I rushed headlong. I misshape it.” Now, I love this passage. It is incredibly poetic, incredibly beautiful. The structure of it is really brilliant, but the notion is, God is the source of beauty and is Himself infinite beauty. He’s also the cause of beautiful things. While this infinite beauty is present within us and wants to have a relationship with us, we can become so caught up on all the other beautiful things that He has made.

So Augustine says, “You were with me, but I was not with You. They, the beautiful things, held me back far from You, those things which would have no being were they not in You.” Yet the infinite beauty continues to beckon, “You called, shouted, broke through my deafness. You flared, blazed, banished my blindness. You lavished your fragrance, I gasped, and now I pant for you. I tasted you and I hunger and thirst. You touched me and I burned for Your peace.” And it’s very much the language of a lover, and it’s very much the language of someone wounded by this encounter with beauty. That is what we should ultimately expect and experience. If this is true, I think a few things follow.

First, we should see the relationship of created beauty to the beauty of God. That one thing that we may be failing to appreciate is the need to cultivate a sense of beauty. Now, can that go wrong? Of course, and it does in Sin Augustine’s case, but unless you have that sense of beauty, then you won’t appreciate God as beautiful, ever ancient, ever new. So here’s where I want to turn to what Plato, or more specifically, Socrates, quoting Diotima, says in Plato’s Symposium.

He describes this as something called the ascent of love, and that you have a particular love and then you come to appreciate beauty in others, and then it goes higher and higher and it goes up until the lover appreciates laws and institutions and goes on to the love of science that you may see their beauty. Diotima describes this as drawing towards and contemplating the vast sea of beauty. He’ll create many fair and noble thoughts and notions and boundless love of wisdom until, on that shore, he grows and waxes strong, and at last, a vision is revealed to him of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere.

Plato’s Symposium is one of the foundational texts of Western civilization in a real way. It is hard to overstate its impact or its importance. It’s describing this experience that hopefully you’ve had of you find one area and maybe you study it and you get good at it, and rather than just satisfying your intellectual curiosity, when you see the beauty of it, you’re then led to the beauty of something else and then something else and something else. So it awakens this tremendous fascination, this curiosity, this love, but it’s being driven by this sense of beauty that you’re wanting to go deeper in this mystery of all of these different beautiful things, including things that many people on the outside might find completely uninteresting, like the beauty of a legal system, the beauty of laws, the beauty of concepts, the beauty of science.

All of these things together form what Diotima calls the science of beauty everywhere. That is a faculty that I would argue is today dulled for many people and needs to be awakened and is awakened by encouraging people to be passionate about things and then, rather than washing their passions, helping them to steadily go higher and higher and higher. You’re passionate about one thing. Let’s see if you can get passionate about something else as well and then awaken more and more of that appreciation of beauty, create a larger and larger space in the heart. That’s one way, I think, we can apply the concept of beauty and evangelization that we need to awaken the sense of beauty. I’ve alluded to, and Augustine’s alluded to, the way that the beauties of the world can draw us away from God. But even here, I would suggest there’s something we can take from this.

So Bruce Marshall, I believe he’s a Scottish author in the mid-20th century, had a book called The World, the Flesh, and Father Smith, and in there, one of the characters says, so Father Smith is like a priest detective, kind of like Father Brown in G.K. Chesterton’s stories, one of the women in this story says to him that she believes that sex is only a substitute. Excuse me, that religion is only a substitute for sex. Father Smith says in response, he prefers to believe that sex is a substitute for religion and that the young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. I regularly go back to that line.

When you see someone in sin, whatever sin, it doesn’t have to be sexual, any kind of sin. It’s worth asking, “What is the good? What is the beauty that’s being pursued there?” And rather than simply condemn it, figure out how can this maybe be redirected, reoriented. How can we show them what they’re really looking for is God? Because if what we believe about the true, the good, and the beautiful is right, then all of the young people ringing the bell at the brothel are subconsciously looking for God, and that needs to be awakened. That they’re looking for relation that they’re not going to find in fornication but that they will find in God.

Cardinal Ratzinger, back in 2002, talking to members of CL, put it this way. He says, “Today, for faith to grow, we must lead ourselves and the persons we meet to encounter the saints and to enter into contact with the beautiful. That’s our mission, in terms of evangelization, in part, to help awaken and direct the sense of the beautiful.” So I know that part is not going to be super helpful to atheists who are watching, but I wanted to make sure as long as we’re talking about beauty, we need to talk about that. The other thing we need to talk about is the notion of taking beauty seriously. Here’s why. In that same 2002 meeting, Cardinal Ratzinger says that he’s often affirmed his conviction that the true apology of Christian faith, the most convincing demonstration of its truth against every denial are the saints and the beauty that the faith has generated.

Now, we already heard this earlier, but I wanted to focus on that language, not just beauty, but the beauty that the faith has generated. There’s a sense in which beauty as such points to God, there’s another sense in which Christian beauty particularly points to God. In 2010, in a homily, as Pope, Benedict XVI said that beauty reveals God because, like Him, a work of beauty is pure gratuity, calls us to freedom and draws us away from selfishness, that precisely because beauty isn’t functional. Beauty is simply delightful. This actually tells us something about God.

He did not have to make a universe that was beautiful. Everything in terms of the evolutionary kind of systems that people hypothesize about works just as well without beauty. If all of the peacocks in the world looked interchangeably gray, they would survive just as well as they’re surviving by everything we’re seeing. There’s no utilitarian functional explanation that really works to account for beauty. That instead, there’s something gratuitous to beauty. It’s just there because it’s beautiful, and that’s why the entire universe exists because God wanted the beauty and goodness of the universe. If we lose sight of this, that’s tremendously dangerous. So in the same year, I believe a week later, Benedict said to the Pontifical Counsel for Culture that our incapacity… Or excuse me, the incapacity of language itself to communicate the profound sense and beauty of the experience of faith can contribute to the indifference of many people, especially the young, that can become the reason for estrangement.

Quite simply, there’s an element of the faith that you can’t adequately put in words. So when you see a beautiful church, one reason it exists is because the church architecturally says something that a sermon or a homily, by its nature, cannot, and that all of our propositional claims failed to adequately express the grandeur of God in such a way that a magnificent cathedral is able to do. Okay, if all of what I’m saying here is true, then one thing that follows is, there’s this relationship between what we believe about God and what we believe about beauty. I would argue that we see this in a few different places. One place we see this is in Pablo Picasso.

Picasso, when he was 15, made a beautiful painting, and it’s about the relationship of science and charity. He’s a thick person, and she, I think it’s he, is attended on the one side by a doctor who looks kind of dour, and on the other side by, I believe, a nun or at least a nurse wearing old school nurses who looked like nuns, a nurse attending with tea. It says something, like there’s an actual statement being made wordlessly about how simply attending to the symptoms isn’t really enough, that science is not getting to the depths and the core of man. By all means, you want the doctor at your bedside, but you also want someone actually caring for you and tending to you. There’s a statement made about the human condition, and it’s profound. It’s a 15-year-old, and what’s more, the painting is beyond what 99.8% of us could ever hope to accomplish.

Then you flash forward about 50 years, and you’ve got late Picasso and Picasso’s work. He has now lost to faith, and his work shows it. It’s no longer beautiful. It’s still masterful in a certain way. It still takes a certain aspect of genius to be able to make ugly things that are this compelling, but it’s lost something profound. If you were to simply hold the two paintings upside by side and someone had never heard the story of Picasso, didn’t know about cubism, didn’t know any of the 20th century art movements, I think it would be safe to say they would look at the first one and imagine that was the work of the mature artist, and the second one was the work of the beginner, but the opposite is true.

So that’s one place we see it with that loss of God. There’s also a loss of a certain kind of appreciation of beauty, even in the artist, and I think we see this in several places. Picasso is just one obvious example because he had been a believer and became a non-believer. But when you look at the art, think about it this way. Actually, I’ll turn to my second example because I’ll tie it into the atheist thing because one of the places we see this most profoundly is in Rome. By the time you’re seeing this, I’ll actually be on a plane to Rome.

Rome is incredible because it’s full of these gorgeous churches that are built when people had none of the modern conveniences we have today. We appear to be utterly incapable of making anything as beautiful on that kind of scale. So you have people, even non-Catholics, even non-Christians, who come from all over the world just to bask in the beauty of it. The fact that modern culture cannot, with all of its resources, create the rival of that is a tremendously damning indictment that we’ve lost our sense of the beautiful or we’ve lost something that allows us that we can still appreciate the beauty of Christian art, but we can’t recreate it. We can’t create a rival to it. Nothing we create comes anywhere close to it. You see this, I’d say, most profoundly in the visual arts and in architecture.

But the second example I was going to turn to was Josh Buice. I don’t know how to pronounce his last name. It looks like juice with a B. It had a childish, petulant Twitter post. It seems like that’s kind of on point for the genre, saying, “We’re celebrating Reformation Day 506 in Rome, Italy. We decided to wear our Luther shirts for the occasion.” And then parentheses, St. Peter’s Basilica. Then he hashtags at Reformation Day, Reformation, because Josh and his wife have gone to Rome. To show that they’re really proud to be Protestants, they’re wearing shirts about Luther while basking in the beauty of these Catholic churches. The best response I saw was from a Catholic who just says, “No one takes his wife on a vacation to see Josh’s church.” And then shows his church, which is banal and ugly, and isn’t the kind of place one would want to spend more time than necessary.

Here’s the thing. St. Peter’s Church is so beautiful, you will travel across the world to go be there. That is the draw of beauty. It works on Protestant pastors. I can tell you, I’ve seen atheists go into churches like this. I’ve seen Buddhists. I’ve seen people from all over the world simply wait outside in line at St. Peter’s Basilica. Remember, first of all, there’s a line outside this church. How many churches today have lines outside of them and how many of those churches have lines with people who aren’t even Christian in many cases, who may be wearing smug Luther shirts in many cases, and yet there’s something in the beauty of Catholic art that they cannot escape? The point here isn’t just that Josh has an ugly church. The point is that there’s a reason Josh has an ugly church, and there’s a reason the Catholic Church is beautiful.

Now, saying this, I’m not going to just go into the trap of triumphalism, as if every Catholic Church is beautiful. Clearly, that’s not the case. We’ve not been immune from this deafening sense, this kind of growing numb, if you will, to beauty. The Pontifical Council for Culture warned in 2006 that liturgical illiteracy among artists chosen to construct churches is a problem all too widespread. Many of the people making modern Catholic churches have no appreciation for beauty themselves. They don’t understand the language of liturgy, they don’t understand the language of architecture from a Catholic point of view. So the churches that they create show that. They make amphitheaters that are comfortable to sit in but don’t have any of a Catholic liturgical sense to the architecture.

Nevertheless, even when that kind of education has been lost, we have enough of an innate sense of beauty that we gravitate towards the truly beautiful churches. You can tell on a certain level, simply by the popularity contest, which churches are most beautiful because they’re the ones people go far and wide to go to and visit. This tells us something about God. It tells us something about beauty. Benedict XVI puts it like this, talking particularly here about the liturgy, he says, “The relationship between creed and worship, we see it in a particular way in the rich theological liturgical category of beauty. Like the rest of the Christian revolution, the liturgy is inherently linked to beauty. It is veritatis splendor, the splendor of truth. The liturgy,” he says, “Is a radiant expression of the Paschal mystery in which Christ draws us to himself and calls us to communion.”

I love this line. He says, “As Saint Bonaventure would say, ‘In Jesus, we contemplate beauty and splendor at their source.'” If we really believe that Jesus is the source of beauty, beautiful, ever ancient, ever knew, then why in the world wouldn’t the liturgy be incredibly beautiful? If God is true, good, and beautiful, and you said, “Today’s church service is going to be good and it’s going to be beautiful, but I’m not going to say anything true.” People would say, “You’re out of your mind.” Or if it’s, “I’m going to have truth, I’m going to have beauty, but I’m not going to have any goodness.” That is not something you can dispose with. So likewise, why in the world do we imagine we can keep truth in goodness and dispose of beauty?

In Benedict’s words, he says, “This is no mere asceticism.” In other words, we’re not just doing pomp and circumstance for their own sake, but the concrete way in which the truth of God’s love in Christ encounters us, attracts us, delights us, enabling us to emerge from ourselves and drawing us toward our true vocation, which is love. That beauty draws us towards love in this profound way. Then we see this in an obvious way with romantic beauty. But this is true in general of beauty. There’s this relationship between beauty and love. So to take love seriously without taking beauty seriously is shortsighted, and it’s not likely to work.

“Jesus Christ,” Benedict says, “Shows us how the truth of love can transform even the dark mystery of death into the radiant light of the resurrection. Here, the splendor of God’s glory surpasses all worldly beauty.” Even something as ugly as the cross is made beautiful by Jesus. That is a profound revelation, and it’s why you can have, for instance, a beautiful cross in church. It’s not beautiful because it shies away from the reality of the cross, but precisely by leaning into the reality of the cross, that depicting this objectively horrifying, horrific depiction creates something tremendously beautiful.

My wife, many years ago, was a babysitter for a wing of the Saudi royal family, and they were doing a behind-the-scenes tour, I believe at Epcot, and the five-year-old princess sees a giant crucifix that was a prop and a movie. My wife thinks it’s The Exorcist. I’m not sure it was The Exorcist, some movie in any case, and she asked her mom, “What is happening to that man?” And she’s really horrified. Her mom knows my wife is Catholic. So she asked her to explain. So my wife gets to basically preach on the beauty of the cross to a five-year-old Muslim girl.

It was a good reminder, as my wife would explain in just remembering the horror of the cross, that there’s something that we can become maybe numb to it because we see and talk about the cross in so many different ways to remember. This is actually something horrific, but it has nevertheless been made beautiful by Jesus Christ in his self-sacrificing death. That’s something that we can and should revel in and delight in. As St. Paul says, “I preach Christ in Him crucified.” We don’t shy away from this at all. So turning back to Benedict, he says, “The truth, beauty, is the love of God who definitively revealed Himself to us in the Paschal mystery.”

So the last story I want to share, my former professor, Dr. Lawrence Feingold. He’s a Thomistic philosopher and theologian in St. Louis, Kenrick-Glennon. He grew up a non-practicing Jew. He wasn’t particularly religious. He was basically an agnostic or an atheist, but he was a tremendous artist. So he fell in love with Christian art before he ever became Christian. That the realism of Christian art spoke to him in a way that the distorted, dissonant, and abstract modern post-Christian stuff didn’t.

So he’s living in Rome, and he finds himself in the Sistine Chapel before Michelangelo’s last judgment. All these tourists are in there, and they’re taking their pictures and they’re doing their touristy things, and here he is asking himself, “But is it true?” Christian art had created this tremendous experience of beauty, and from the bowels of Christianity, as it were, arises all of this incredible beauty in a way we don’t see other religions or non-religions capable of producing. It led him to a kind of contemplation, a moment where God could break in precisely through beauty in a way that mere reason hadn’t, despite him being a brilliant philosopher.

So all that’s to say, we should take beauty tremendously seriously. So to return to the argument, as I’ve put it, if God did not create the universe, there would be no beauty. None of this makes sense without God, and yet beauty exists, therefore we can be confident that God did create the universe.

Next week, we’ll round out this series by looking at a particular kind of beauty, the beauty of holiness, and how it makes sense of the saints, and we’ll look at a couple saints in particular, just how you need beauty and you need an appreciation of the saints. Ultimately, from an atheistic perspective, it’s very difficult to explain how and why the Saints did what they did. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.

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