Have you ever noticed how everyday things—like lamp posts, public buildings, or London’s famous red telephone boxes—used to be made with more attention to aesthetic beauty compared to their modern counterparts?
If you’ve ever seen photos of Perth from the early twentieth century, you’d know exactly what I’m talking about. Buildings with stone façades in High Edwardian architecture, similar to the Perth General Post Office, have now been replaced by endless rows of glass-and-concrete monstrosities. It seems that, as time went by, beauty has become less and less important in how we make and do things.
In large part, this is due to our culture’s increasing shift from idealism to pragmatism, from prioritising objective values and principles to focusing on subjective utilitarianism. As a result, we now see Beauty as an optional luxury—mere decoration—rather than an essential part of how we should live, think, and create. If what we make is pretty, then good. But if it’s not pretty, then at least it works. Form and function have become separate—and sometimes competing—forces.
But all this is a symptom of a deeper tragedy. This loss of appreciation for the place that Beauty should have in our lives has been accompanied by—and indeed resulted from—our society’s increasing abandonment of biblical spirituality in favor of secular materialism. (And by “materialism,” I don’t mean the pursuit of wealth but rather the perspective that all there is in this world is what we can see, touch, and measure.)
It is not surprising, therefore, that this loss of Beauty is a symptom that a society is also losing its appreciation for the two other transcendental qualities that flow out of God’s being—Truth and Goodness.
It’s easy to see that we have been steadily moving away from objective standards of Beauty.
For example, contrast 16th-century painter Caravaggio’s brilliant use of chiaroscuro—the contrast between light and dark—with a recent piece, Comedian, by fellow Italian Maurizio Cattelan, which consisted of a real banana duct-taped to a wall. Granted, while a Caravaggio painting would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, Comedian only fetched a 5.2 million dollars—but still, it was a banana duct-taped to a wall… It shouldn’t have been worth five dollars. More than anything, it was a poster child for the extreme subjectivity with which our postmodern society has come to view the very nature and definition of Beauty.
How is this connected to our society’s move away from Truth and Goodness?
Truth and Goodness are invisible qualities, but their presence is made known by Beauty, which has visible and tangible qualities. Every true and every good thing is, in a way, a beautiful thing. Scripture tells us that God’s invisible presence is revealed to us in His beauty and in the beauty of His creation:
- Psalm 19:1 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands.”
- Moses’ face shone after meeting God, as did Stephen’s before the presence of Christ before he died. The face of Jesus himself glowed in resplendent beauty at the Transfiguration.
- Psalm 29:2 says, “worship the Lord in the beauty of His holiness.”
The Goodness of God is manifested in his beauty, even when it is expressed in forms that Man would consider lacking in earthly beauty—the cross of Christ being the ultimate example. The cross—that wretched, ugly instrument of death—became, for us, an object of utmost Beauty because God chose it as the means for enacting his greatest goodness.
“He had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
and no beauty that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected[b] by men,”
Isaiah says about Christ, the Suffering Servant, in Isaiah 53.
God’s goodness is the very source and standard of beauty. This is why any human attempt to make beauty subjective is no less than an attempt to place Man in the place of God.
God’s truth is expressed in beauty. Truth and beauty are inseparable.
Whatever is truly good will also be beautiful and true. Whatever is truly beautiful will also be true and good. If beauty is to be measured by an absolute standard—that which is God’s—then something that is not true cannot be beautiful because God is truth.
It is not surprising, then, that the same postmodern worldview that most vehemently denies absolute standards of beauty—those to whom what is defined as “beautiful” can only be subjective and relative—would subject the truth to the same treatment. The same people who declare that a banana stuck on a wall meets their definition of beauty would bristle at your suggestion that it is not even art—and claims that that’s just “your truth”.
Those who would say this are, again, placing themselves in the place of God because just as they have claimed the right to dismantle objective truth and/or redefine it according to their own will, they now do the same to beauty.
A lie cannot be beautiful, because God—who is the truth and from whom beauty flows—is not in it. This is why ugliness in culture—that is, the absence of true beauty—is not merely a style choice but a symptom of a society’s spiritual state.
Truth. Goodness. And Beauty. They are all interdependent and connected.
This is why we in Classical Christian Education not only seek to understand Truth and live out Goodness, but also seek to embody and create Beauty. We understand that Beauty is not just an optional extra—a luxury—but an essential part of God, and therefore an essential part of who we were created to be as the bearers of His Image.
As this world moves further and further from God, it will become more and more ugly. And this ugliness it will call beautiful, not because it has redeemed what is ugly as God has done at the cross, but because its perverted mind no longer has a true and objective concept of what is true or what is good—and therefore what is beautiful.
What we do in this school—students, parents, and teachers alike—seeks to follow the biblical purpose of education: to help the child to know and love God, and to help conform the child to Him and to live by those eternal qualities that flow out of him. This is why Beauty is also at the centre of what we teach and learn at Coram Deo, for by knowing what is beautiful we also live out what is true and what is good.