Nor, having fallen, bear greater pain than this,
That we live always in hopeless desire.
Dante, Inferno
veryone agrees that there is such a thing as beauty. We do not agree on why it exists, but the fact cannot be denied. We cannot look at an autumn landscape, or a beach sunset, or city lights from a hill without feeling an aesthetic reaction; that is, that it is beautiful. Nor can we look at a landfill or a roadkill or a slum without feeling an aesthetic repulsion; "It's ugly!" we exclaim. We are drawn to the articulate grace of a poem, the lyrical sweetness of a song, the perceptive emotional power of a tragic play, and our reaction is not (or not merely) "How true!" but rather, "How beautiful!"
Why are some things beautiful? We could answer by looking at some typical objects considered beautiful. Thomas Gray's famous poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" is beautiful not least because of his graceful use of simple language in lines like these:
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
The repetition of the beginning sounds (alliteration) in the words "plowman" and "plods" underlines the imagery of the tired man walking, as does that of "weary" and "way", which also happen to alliterate with "world" in the next line, tying the two lines together. It is the plowman's "way" that is said to be weary, rather than the plowman himself, a simple metaphor that further underscores the meaning and contributes to the elegant simplicity of the first line. The juxtaposition of "darkness" and "me" highlights the solitude of the narrator in the dusk he describes, and involves him in the story.
Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" is famous for the ringing martial music of its lines:
Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
The galloping meter of the lines suggests the running of the cavalry horses, and the last word, along with later lines like "Cannon in front of them / Volleyed and thundered" echoes the thundering of hooves and guns down the valley.
Why are some things beautiful? Let us look at music. The melody of Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring moves up and down the scale with a pleasing regularity and sweetness, and the calm harmonies and the suggestiveness of the title give us delight. The roaring finale of the 1812 Overture gives life to, and amplifies, the image evoked by the title. Music and lyrics work together to prompt swelling feelings of pride in anthems like "America the Beautiful" and Gilbert and Sullivan's "He is an Englishman," or to move the feelings to pensive reflectiveness or even lonesome melancholy, as in the black spiritual "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" or even the Eagles' classic "Desperado."
Consider the dramatic arts. We discover deep aesthetic satisfaction in the emotional power and universal truths revealed in the portrayal of a great man's downfall: Oedipus brought low by the juggernaut of fate, Arthur by his toleration of corruption among his friends, Macbeth by a fatal weakness in his own moral constitution. We note the brilliant poetry, the inspired choice of the playwright to suggest, rather than to depict everything. .
But all of these simple analyses provide only a partial answer to the question "Why are things beautiful?" Someone might point out that all my examples are from the Western "canon" of great art, and that very different things might be considered beautiful in Eastern cultures, or that even people in our culture might disagree with my examples. I would agree and observe that it makes no difference. The important fact remains that all people in all cultures at all times and in all places believe in Beauty, no matter what its particular manifestations are.
When, in our search for a more complete answer to our question "Why are things beautiful?" we get pushed behind the explanation of the technicalities of a particular work of art to the deeper issues of the very existence of a sense of beauty, basic worldview issues arise. How can we account for our belief in Beauty and, more importantly, for our belief that it has significance? In other words, it is pointless to talk about beauty if the concept and our feelings about it are meaningless_which they are, of necessity, in a cosmos without a personal, transcendent, yet near-to-us God who can and does reveal to us the meaning of things. That is why the Christian can speak with confidence and intelligence about such intangibles as beauty in art_why he needn't be bogged down in relativism ("who's to say what's beautiful?") and why he can be certain that his sensations of beauty in the world have real significance and are not simply the chemical products of mindless, meaningless evolution.
This is also why it is only Christianity which provides an adequate accounting for things like aesthetics. In no other religion, in no other conception of God, is He a real person, distinct from and sovereign over all of creation, yet able and willing to be near to humans and to reveal to them the truths that they seek but can never find in the subjective prisons of their own finite perspectives.
All this is not to assert that non-Christians cannot know beauty (that would be absurd) or explain why they think things are beautiful (obviously they can) or feel that their sense of beauty is significant (certainly they do). What they can never do is to give an adequate account of why they know or do or feel those things. For few honestly believe that man and his art are only "sound and fury, signifying nothing." But that is exactly what we are without God.
