An Eye for Beauty – Part 1 – The Sense of Beauty

It can be very easy to miss or overlook important teachings of Scripture, especially when they are mentioned en passant.

One such important teaching is found in Genesis 2.9: “And out of the ground the LORD God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.”

Now there wouldn’t appear to be much of doctrinal or practical significance in this one verse. It’s merely a description of one aspect of what God was doing in the days that He created the heavens and the earth.

But this simple statement about the making of plants and trees tells us two important things about human beings: We need to eat, and we need beauty.

How well we know that we need to eat! God made human beings to grow strong in their bodies through sound nutritional practices. Plus, He built into our bodily systems a pang to remind us when it’s time to eat. If we don’t eat, we could starve, or at least wither. God knows we need to eat, and we know it, too.

But God also made us to grow sound in our inner persons, one of the components of which is aesthetic in nature. Just as we can be malnourished where food is concerned, or even sickened by a diet of the wrong food, so our souls are impoverished and even wounded when we fail to attend properly to our need for beauty. We need beauty like we need food. Most of us won’t fail to eat when we’re hungry. But what about feeding the aesthetic needs of our soul?

In his lovely book, History of Beauty, Umberto Eco lavishly demonstrated that, while people throughout the ages have differed in their understanding of beauty, there has never been a culture without a sense of it. He wrote, “Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country…”

In other words, beauty, from a worldly perspective, is in the eye of the beholder. Eco spoke for most people in our day when he insisted there is no such thing as an absolute standard of beauty by which we may determine whether created objects are truly beautiful. That’s for each person to decide. What matters, Eco argued, is that everyone in every culture has a sense of beauty, and more, a need for it, which they seek to satisfy by one means or another.

With that much of his argument we can certainly agree.

Evolutionist Denis Dutton agreed, and he sought to demonstrate that this sense of beauty is a part of the evolutionary heritage of the race. He believed, as most evolutionists do, that the human being’s ability to make and appreciate beautiful things is, along with much else, “a component of the astounding architecture of mind that was achieved by evolution.”

I have no doubt that genes have something to do with the human disposition to enjoy and the ability to make art. However, I’m quite certain that DNA cannot explain the differences between Rembrandt, say, and me. Something else is at work, and the Scriptures are quite specific about the source of artistic ability and the sense of beauty.

According to the Bible, it’s clear that God gives the gift of making art to some people more than to others, as we see in the case of Bezalel and Oholiab, for example (Ex. 35.30-35). At the same time, it is also true that God has given to all people the ability to enjoy and receive edification from beautiful things. We were made for beauty. We require it, and therefore we should give ourselves as diligently to seeking and consuming beauty as we do the food we eat each day.

The sense of beauty—and the need for it—is part of what it means to be the image-bearer of God, for, as God was able to create trees beautiful to look at, so men, made in His image, are able to appreciate and enjoy their beauty.

To neglect this aspect of our lives, or to leave it undeveloped, is thus to wound our souls and to consign ourselves to something less than full and abundant life. People can never get away from a sense of beauty—it’s why we smile to hear a favorite song or look sometimes with wonder at the night sky. But we mustn’t simply allow the aesthetic component of our souls to take its own course, or to be shaped and fed merely by the spirit of the age.

Human beings were made for beauty; Christians, redeemed by Jesus Christ, must seek to redeem this sense of beauty, to build it up and strengthen it, and to employ it in seeing and making the world anew in the Kingdom and righteousness of God.

Today, as you begin to consider the importance of beauty for your life in the Kingdom of God, make a point to notice and pause before something beautiful. Stay there until you delight in the beauty you see. Then give God thanks and praise for it.