“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is one of the more pleasant sounding little lies of modernity. It is attributed to the writer of light Victorian-era romantic fiction, Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, and first appeared in her best known novel, Molly Bawn. Though from County Cork, Ireland, Mrs. Hungerford, whose works were popular on both sides of the Pond in her day, was not a Catholic; she belonged to the so-called “Church of Ireland,” which is an Anglican (Episcopal) institution and is therefore Protestant. She was born in 1855 into a family that was part of the Protestant Anglo-Irish gentry, her father being a clergyman, “Canon Fitzjohn Stannus Hamilton, rector and vicar-choral at St. Faughnan’s Cathedral in Rosscarbery,” as we are told by Wikipedia, which also kindly informs us that her fiction had nothing about it that raised the eyebrows of polite folk in the Victorian era.
It seems that, in her day, in lieu of the crass impurity and lurid details of later literature that passes for “romantic,” her oeuvre consisted largely of flirtatious dialogue that was inoffensive to Victorian sensibilities. Her commercial popularity likely owes itself to the fact that her works reflected the bourgeois banalities of her time.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” should probably be assessed in this light. It is not a radically Marxist or deconstructionist approach to aesthetics as we might expect from a modern university professor teaching a course in, say, “Postmodern Feminist Literary Criticism.” While not that malignant, it is, rather, trite and shallow. But it is still wrong.
Yes, on its peripheries there are certain subjective aspects to beauty, which is why two people who have refined aesthetics may have different tastes, a truth captured in the phrase de gustibus non est disputandum (“there is no disputing about taste”); hence, two lovers of real music might argue over whether Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony or Dvořák’s New World Symphony is the better of the two. (I’m a Dvořák man, myself). But to reduce beauty entirely to the subjective is, in the realm of aesthetics, a damnable lie.
Why is Mrs. Hungerford’s observation so damnable? Ultimately, because God is Beauty.
Beauty is objective in character, participating in the qualities of the other two transcendentals commonly listed alongside it: truth and goodness. Like truth, it is perceived by the intellect. Like goodness, beauty is enjoyed by the will. This tells us that beauty is itself eminently rational, not merely emotional.
There have been many efforts made to define beauty. Saint Thomas said that “Those things are beautiful which please when seen” (pulchra sunt, quae visa placent). This definition is really based upon the effect of beauty and does not get at its essentials; for, as Saint Augustine had pointed out more that eight hundred years earlier, “Things are not beautiful because they please, but they please because they are beautiful.” But, when Saint Thomas lists these three constituent parts of beauty, he gets to the marrow of his subject:
- Integritas or perfectio rei — integrity/perfection or completeness of the whole
- Proportio debita partium — harmonious relation of its parts or due proportion
- Claritas — clearness, luster, splendor, radiance, or clarity
First, God is complete and perfect in a radical way; His is the very fullness of Being from which all created being has received its existence. He is Goodness Itself, utterly complete, completely perfect.
Second, while God has no “parts” to be in harmony (He is the most simple Entity in existence), He has many attributes or properties, yet these are only logically distinguished from one another and even from the Divine Essence. This means that He has the greatest proportionality of all things in existence because all of His various and diverse attributes — e.g., His aseity (self-existence or “being from Himself”), holiness, justice, mercy, omnipotence, omniscience, benignity, beneficence, etc., which are only logically distinguished from His Essence — are all one in Him. That is a radical harmony of attributes such as exists in no creature.
Third, God is very clearness, luster, splendor, radiance, or clarity — so much so that Saint John says of Him, “God is light, and in him there is no darkness” (1 John 1:5).
Another Augustinian definition of beauty is “unity in variety,” which touches on the second of Saint Thomas’ three attributes of beauty, above. Now, concerning this notion of beauty, Monsignor Joseph Pohle says that there exists “no greater variety than that implied in God’s infinite perfections; nor a more intensive unity than the identity of the Divine Essence with its attributes.”
The German Jesuit neo-scholastic theologian, Father Josef Kleutgen, S.J. (1811-1883), provides his own definition of beauty as “the goodness of an object, in so far as this, perceived by the mind, affords pleasure.” This captures what I said earlier about the intellect perceiving beauty while the will enjoys it, which means that beauty has something in common with both truth and goodness.
If Father Kleutgen is right — and he agrees here with Saint Thomas — then this is applied to God in a supereminent way in the beatific vision, where the saints perceive God’s infinite goodness and are thereby given such exceeding delight that they are made blessed and happy and joyful beyond compare in that supernal vision.
No wonder Saint Augustine lamented in a justly celebrated passage in the Confessions, “Too late have I loved Thee, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new; too late have I loved Thee!”
God is “Essential Beauty,” meaning that, just as He has His being from Himself (ens a se), so is He pulchritudo a se — Beauty from Himself, which leads Monsignor Pohle to utter this mouthful: “Consequently, He is substantial, subsisting, aseitarian Beauty.” (“Aseitarian” is a fancy adjective meaning “from Himself.”) God is also “Primordial Beauty,” and “All-Beauty,” as His beauty entirely exceeds every kind of created beauty. Saint Gregory Nazianzen captures this truth in his ironic statement that God is both “all beauty and far beyond all beauty.” Further, He is the Source and Exemplar of all created beauty because every created beauty derives from and reflects the Divine Beauty. Saint Hilary and Saint Augustine agree that God is both the creator and source of all beauty. Saint Augustine notes that, “No beautiful objects would exist outside of Thee, had they not received being from Thee.”
In light of these reflections on Divine Beauty, the lovely words that Fyodor Dostoevsky put on the lips of Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin in his wonderful novel, The Idiot, take on a more poignant meaning: “The world will be saved by beauty.”
While we say of God that He is “Beauty Itself,” the Incarnate Logos is also rightly called beautiful, not only in his Divine Nature, but even in His Sacred Humanity, which was prophesied thus by King David: “Thou art beautiful above the sons of men: grace is poured abroad in thy lips; therefore hath God blessed thee for ever. Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O thou most mighty. With thy comeliness and thy beauty set out, proceed prosperously, and reign. Because of truth and meekness and justice: and thy right hand shall conduct thee wonderfully” (Ps. 44:3-5).
While Jesus was no doubt beautiful in appearance — the most perfect specimen of masculine beauty — what is meant primarily here is His moral beauty, His peerless holiness. This makes all the more poignant that Passion prophesy of Isaias: “There is no beauty in him, nor comeliness: and we have seen him, and there was no sightliness, that we should be desirous of him: Despised, and the most abject of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with infirmity: and his look was as it were hidden and despised, whereupon we esteemed him not (Isaias 53:2b-3).
For God’s glory and our salvation, Beauty Himself was made ugly in His Passion. Yet, in His triumphant Resurrection and glorious Ascension, that Holy Face which was beaten and spit upon shines radiantly and saves us:
- “Convert us, O God: and shew us thy face, and we shall be saved” (79:4, cf. vs. 8, 20).
- Ah me! for whom Thou diest,
Hide not so far Thy grace:
Show me, O Love most highest,
The brightness of Thy face. (Hymn, “O Sacred Head, Sore Wounded”)
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Given what we have said about beauty being rational (even if elevated to the supernatural order by grace), certain things follow. That which merely appeals to what is base in man — our lower passions — cannot be beautiful. It might be arresting, tantalizing, titillating, alluring, evocative, tempting, etc., but it is not beautiful. In the performing arts, the plastic arts, the literary arts, etc., that which simply scratches an itch cannot be given the noble name of beauty.
This has clear implications for much of what passes for art in our times.
The words of the great Russian novelist quoted above became the subject of a few lines of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s lecture, given on the occasion of his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, just over a century after Dostoevsky wrote them:
One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: “Beauty will save the world.” What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes — but whom has it saved?
There is, however, a certain peculiarity in the essence of beauty, a peculiarity in the status of art: namely, the convincingness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable and it forces even an opposing heart to surrender. …
But a work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force — they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.
So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through — then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar TO THAT VERY SAME PLACE, and in so doing will fulfil the work of all three?
In that case Dostoevsky’s remark, “Beauty will save the world,” was not a careless phrase but a prophecy? After all HE was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination.
And in that case art, literature might really be able to help the world today?
Of course, the answer is yes. Literature and all the arts — if they be beautiful as well as true and good — will help the world today. This is a powerful argument for us to reconsecrate the arts to the glory of God and the service of religion, restoring them to the place they had in the Ages of Faith.
But that sublime beauty that we call sanctity — not merely the icon or statue of a saint, but the original — that is what will really save the world.
Let us not forget that, in all dogmatic rigor, we truly say that one of the effects of grace is that it “beautifies the soul.” Beauty really is id quod visum placet — “that which being seen pleases” — and this even applies to God, who looks on the soul in grace and is thereby pleased or delighted, which is why Saint Thomas calls sanctifying (or “habitual”) grace, gratia gratum faciens: “grace which makes pleasing.”
Upon the baptized soul, the Father looks and says of it what He said of His Only-Begotten Son when the sacrament of regeneration was instituted by Our Lord standing next to Saint John the Baptist in the Jordan: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17). Luther, Calvin, and company did not believe this, which is why the Council of Trent taught against them that “Justification is not only the remission of sins, but also the sanctification and renewal of the interior man through the voluntary reception of the grace and gifts whereby an unjust man becomes just and from being an enemy becomes a friend, that he may be an heir according to hope of life everlasting.”
“The most beautiful of the sons of men” radiates His beauty unto us so that we might be, as He is, beautiful to His Father.
In this light, we might look at the fourth Beatitude — by which the soul hungers and thirsts for justice (holiness) — as a desire for supernatural beauty. The words beauty and beatitude only accidentally resemble one another in the English language; they are not etymologically related. However, there is a higher coalescence of meaning. The Beauty ever ancient and ever new is lovingly beheld by the blessed, who are themselves ever beautified in Heaven by His glory as they were on earth by His grace.
So, in an exclusively ironic sense, maybe Mrs. Hungerford wasn’t entirely wrong when she wrote, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Those who behold Beauty Itself in the Face are thereby made beautiful. The beauty, though, is not limited to their their resurrected eyes, but radiates to the entire person — body and, especially, soul.
South Rose Window from the Chartres Cathedral. Image credit (cropped from original): PtrQs, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
