Today, I want to share from a book from a time I first began my pursuit to learn to draw and paint in a more academic way. At that time, I had many questions and had not given much thought as to why I even wanted to do art. I had wondered what was beyond the thought of someone simply liking a scenery or to fill wall space, but could not understand in word form the why I had a desire to draw and paint, or even what the importance art can be to another who is viewing. I just did it. I knew there was more, but for what ever the reason, I had not touched on the topic to understand better the why’s or have deeper understanding about the creative nature in itself. Before I had begun reading this book, I had been taking art lessons from an instructor who really helped direct me in the direction I was longing to go with my art. I appreciate his wisdom he has shared, and among one thing he brought up was the quote, “Art is a part of your nature. Nature is God’s art. Therefore, Art is the collaboration between God and man.” Knowing that God is beautiful and can only create beauty, I find where I can now proceed into quoting from the book upon this topic of beauty.
“Isn’t truth more important than beauty? I can imagine many people protesting against my emphasis on the value of beauty. The most common protest runs something like this: Aren’t truth and intellect more important than beauty and imagination Aren’t facts what we need? Isn’t it trivial to speak of the arts in terms of beauty and pleasure? I am not, of course, building my entire case for the arts on their beauty and artistic competence.
Is truth more important than beauty? I think the answer is a very qualified “yes”. Surely religious truth is more important than artistic beauty. People will be eternally saved or lost on the basis of their response to truth, not on the basis of their artistic experience. But once we get beyond the matter of religious truth, I would begin to quibble with the common assumption that truth is more important than beauty.
It is not at all true the facts one learns in disciplines other than the arts are necessarily more important than the ability to enjoy the arts. Behind the usual assumption is the premise that facts are important because they are useful, while enjoying artistry and beauty is useless. But not all facts are as useful as is claimed in our computer age, and beyond that, I would appeal to human nature to support my claim that people have other important needs besides factual knowledge. The experience of beauty is one of them.
Matthew Arnold was right when he defended a literary education against the encroachment of science by appealing to human nature. ““When we set ourselves to enumerate the powers which go to the building up of human life, we find that they are the power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, and the power of social life manners.”” Arnold then made the convincing point that ““human nature is built up by these powers; we have the need for them all…..Such is human nature.””
Isn’t beauty irrelevant? Some will object to my emphasis on beauty by asking, Isn’t artistic beauty irrelevant in an age of great social problems? Shouldn’t people generally and Christians especially devote themselves to solving social problems instead of pursuing the arts? The attitude implied by such questions is of course partly right. The arts are something people cultivate after their basic needs for survival have been met. They are a form of enrichment and refreshment.
But more needs to be said. We are hardly ever faced with the absolute alternatives of combating social problems or pursuing the arts. Whenever we have to choose between enjoying artistic beauty and showing compassion to someone in need, we should of course do the compassionate act and forget about artistic beauty. But over the long haul, this is not the kind of situation people face. Nearly everyone’s life gives an abundant opportunity to enjoy art as well as serve one’s fellow humans. In fact, to encourage others in the wise use of leisure is increasingly an act of compassion.
Furthermore, I would dispute the common assumption that the arts are irrelevant to the solution of social problems. Many social problems have arisen precisely because our society has not taken the time and expanded the energy to be truly artistic and to value beauty. It may sound simplistic, but it is true that some inner-city problems will be solved only on an aesthetic basis. If our society would not be concrete jungles, and our streams would not be polluted.
Our practical modern world has regarded beauty as an extraneous luxury, and we are left in horror at the kind of world this attitude has produced. If we look honestly and deeply within the human spirit as created by God, we will find a hunger for beauty as well as for truth and righteousness. Have you ever seen some pf the drawings done in the concentration camps of the Second World War? And if we look beyond the human spirit to the God of the Bible and the God of creation, we will conclude that God does not regard beauty as the unnecessary pursuit of an idle moment.
The perversion of beauty. All that I have said about the Bible’s approval of beauty needs to be qualified. Many biblical passages make it clear that beauty can be used in evil and destructive ways. Beauty was created or given by God and is good in principle. Like any of God’s gifts, it can be perverted to a bad end by fallen people. That is why one of Dostoyevsky’s literary characters can say that beauty is the battlefield where God and the devil fight for the human heart and why Aldous Huxley can write that ““as a matter of plain historical fact, the beauties of holiness have often been matched and indeed surpassed by the beauties of unholiness.”” What we are talking about, is, the abuse of something, not its inherent nature.
Beauty in the Christian Perspective. The Bible treats beauty as something that has value because God made it and delights in it. If the modern secular mind scorns beauty, that is simply one more evidence of where it has gone awry. To people who reluctantly admit that modern art, music, and literature possess the usual elements of artistic form and beauty ““if you want to see them there,”” my reply is simple: My Christian world view has given me “antennae” to notice and value artistic beauty.
A missionary who faced the question of how beauty related to her life in a foreign culture came to a similar conclusion. Did not a life of service in India mean living in squalor and ugliness? Margaret Ho wrestled with the issue and came to this conclusion. “I believe my attitude towards beauty and order, as reflected in my home and lifestyle, says much to the people around me about the God I serve. Therefore, I want to refelect……something of artistry, the beauty, the order of the One I’m representing, and in whose image I’ve been made. To me, sacrifice does not mean ugliness.” If, a in a Christian view of things, everything that God has created is not self-contained but points toward Him. Ralph Waldo Emerson was not quite correct when he wrote that “Beauty is its own excuse.” But surely Emerson came much closer to the truth than have many segments of modern culture, Christian and secular alike.