Man's desires and God as Beauty

12/1

While beauty brings about peace and joy, any exposure we have of it is accompanied by discontentment. All encounters with beauty seem to only be teases. Why is this the case? I’m going to go back to C.S. Lewis. Let’s think about desire. Human beings desire beauty. I don’t mean humans desire to be beautiful, i.e. look attractive. I mean there is a deep desire in all our hearts to watch the proverbial sunset forever. We desire to not only witness beauty, but also partake of it. We wish to share in beauty eternally. Not only that, but we wish to engage beauty fully with others. The beauty we sensually experience in life has two significant problems: it is temporary and limited. Sunsets are beautiful, but they are not beautiful enough to satisfy what we long for. The sun inevitably sets, and we can never see the entire extent of the sky or horizon. 

I agree again with C.S. Lewis when he suggests that humans do not have desires that cannot be fulfilled. Every hole we seem to have in our innermost being has a perfect fit that fills the void completely. For beauty, there must be something that satisfies our longing. Things we call beautiful only contain traces of the real Beauty, or maybe act as pointers back to that ultimate puzzle piece our spirits lack. 

Some may stop here and question the implications of the conclusion I point to. If there is some ultimate, eternal sunset, who is to say it will always captivate us? What if we grew tired of constantly staring at the sky? What if its effect wears off, or our hearts grow a tolerance to the perfect beauty? I doubt these questions have merit. Like I said, the beauty we long for is eternal and ultimate. I don’t think it would be possible to exhaust something infinite. If we were able to tire of this beauty, I feel that means we had experienced everything the beauty had to show or offer. The nature of infinity does not allow for us to understand its entirety. If someone were to suggest to me that a thousand finite beauties were better than one infinite beauty, I would suggest that person weigh a thousand to infinity. 

As I have gently asserted, I believe there is an ultimate Beauty. It is some noun that perfectly satisfies our insatiable thirst we discover we have after seeing a sunset. If your mind is anything like mine, language like “ultimate noun” hints at God. In the first class, Dr. Redick asked me if I knew what Beauty was. Ashamedly, I replied “I don’t know.” After taking time to reflect, I now know without a doubt. In class, I was confused whether or not Beauty was God Himself or something of the Lord’s creation, some distinct entity that satisfied our longing and pointed us to God. The latter option seems unnecessary and unlikely. If God were to create some thing that perfectly met our desire of Beauty, we would only recognize that it was beautiful because it reflected the perfect, holy, ultimate God. In other words, we would only know it was beautiful because God was beautiful, thus making God our standard of beauty. Additionally, I cannot imagine a place where man could encounter both this theoretical creation called “Beauty” and the Lord, and focus on anything other than God the Father. 

I realized that what I was attempting to do with separating "Beauty" from God was make "Beauty" God in its own right. I was simply renaming God. Instead, I should have realized that God is Beauty, and not try to make Beauty God. For God is far more than beautiful; He is also loving, just, powerful, wise, and all the other qualities we attribute to Him.