Part 1.
Getting reality wrong is dangerous . . . as I learned after mistaking our closed sliding glass door for an opening. Getting reality wrong in big things is even worse, as I discover whenever I break God’s laws. Morality is real and so moral mistakes damage men’s souls.
If beauty is real, then mistakes would be also very serious. If my favorite music, art, and entertainment are ugly, and ugliness is not just an opinion, then my entertainment might be killing my soul.
That is an explosive idea.
I suggested this once at a Christian college and immediately heard groans and saw rolling eyes everywhere. “Like, who are you, to like tell us what is bad?” It was irritating since my Mom had told me this would happen . . . all that Monty Python-inspired cynicism I had used on her was now being turned on me.
Christians should be careful. Our relativism about beauty and art is exactly like secular relativism about morality. When we tolerate cheesy religious art, because the message is good, then the message may be helping us while the art kills us.
When speaking at a secular college, the same reaction comes when I suggest that some moral standards are “absolute” and not just made up by people. Unlike their secular peers, Christian students have no problem with objective morality or with the existence of truth (at least in theory). These were good kids and serious Christians.
Objective Morality and Objective Beauty Similar
But beauty? Beauty was something they choose. It makes them mad to imagine losing this freedom in just the same way their secular peers are angered at the thought of losing moral autonomy.
The comparison should concern them, as it began to concern me. If I create my own morality, then it has no meaning outside of me. My moral standards cost nothing to create, but are worth nothing to others. In the same way, if I am totally free to choose what is beautiful, my choices will be meaningless to anyone but me. This feels wrong in both morality and aesthetics. Real morality cannot be just “about me and my needs.” I often act morally for the good of others. Beauty that only I can understand is lonely. Something beautiful that I can share, because of a common standard of beauty, makes another beautiful thing: the communion of two people looking at one beautiful thing.
Radical individualism is impossible in a community. Men and women, as Aristotle pointed out, are made to live in community. Some individual moral decisions are simply intolerable as are some aesthetic ones. There are some acts no civilized community will tolerate just as there are some paintings no community would long tolerate in public spaces.
As a result, while proclaiming that beauty is subjective, a matter of taste, society and the church will often try to find ways to control expressions (desires) caused by it.
The Danger of Irrational Desire and Subjective Beauty
Beauty creates desire and desire is dangerous. Beauty can appear anywhere and at anytime. Sometimes it provokes desires that are inappropriate or dangerous to a culture. If a man sees a beautiful piece of jewelry, then he might desire it for his own. This desire, if not checked, can easily overwhelm him and lead to covetousness or worse. What can be done about this?
The educated man who understands beauty and the different manifestations of it can develop appropriate desires. He can learn that this jewelry is beautiful, but beautiful in a way that should provoke an appropriate response. His thinking it is beautiful is not wrong; he is just misapprehending it as the sort of beauty that he should own.
But what if beauty is not real? What if it is “in the eye of the beholder?”
If beauty is just “in my head” there is nothing to learn except acceptable responses according to society. Beauty is not a reasonable field of study, but an irrational opinion. The only way to deal with subjective beauty is self-discipline. Self-discipline helps the outer manifestations of the inappropriate desire, but it cannot deal with the desire itself.
If a man thinks some jewelry is beautiful and believes “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” then one way to suppress dangerous desire would be to deal with his opinion about the jewelry. Since society would frown on him stealing the jewelry, and since his desires will remain unfulfilled, he must try to repress his desire. He will try to convince himself that the “jewelry is not so hot anyway” as means to achieve this end. In this, he will either be doomed to failure (the jewelry really is beautiful) or he will succeed only by denying reality.
If an inappropriate desire is caused by subjective beauty, then people’s opinions about what is beautiful are part of the “problem.” Society tries to control certain unacceptable manifestations of desire, but the desire will keep coming back because the beauty that provokes it is really there. Ignorance of the nature of beauty and how to handle it will undercut any attempt to deal with it well.
Instead of learning about beauty, we learn about avoiding personal behaviors that can give offense. Beauty, if it is objective, never changes from culture to culture, but what gives offense (even gross offense) can change from day to day or person to person! This ends in terrifying legalism not liberty since there is no “real standard” to impose.
Aesthetic discussions regarding clothing are an example of where things have gone wrong. Instead of beauty, the focus weirdly becomes modesty . . . keeping people from “stumbling” as a result of attire.
My Nana dressed to be pleasing to God and her husband, but I dressed to please the culture and avoid scandal to American Christian sub-culture. Not only is this unhelpful in controlling vice, but it misses real beauty. The eye-rolling college students were amazingly modest for twenty-first century Americans, but all of them wore the same standard grunge that looks good on almost nobody.
Modesty is actually subjective, changing from person to person or situation to situation. Clothing can be modest and also ugly! If beauty is real, then a “modest” but ugly dress, might be very harmful.
When my daughter was small, I tried an experiment with her. We googled the phrase “Mormon prom dress” and took a look at the sites. Mary Kate looked at the dresses with horror, “These dresses are very modest, but they are not very beautiful.”
(I have been told by Mormon friends that there has been a real improvement in this area since Mary Kate was little, so I don’t know if this test will still work!)
It was clear to her that the main goal of the dress designers had been to meet culturally subjective standards of modesty. Mary Kate wanted to be beautiful, not merely modest. Modesty is the absence of a vice while being beautiful is reflecting the Divine nature.
In my own life, I realized that I was hostile to considering objective beauty because I feared it would lead to the forced wearing of Mormon prom dresses by my date, would mandate listening to ugly but wholesome Christian music, and uplifting but hideous art. After discussing it, I realized that the eye-rolling college students thought that “objective beauty” was just a philosopher’s way of getting ready to talk about modesty or bad ideas in their music!
Nothing could have been further from reality. Objective beauty would allow modesty to shrink back to its role as part of manners . . . and make the idea of “ugly goodness” the obvious oxymoron it is.