Mr. M,

There was a great deal in your last letter to talk about, but I think it is most important to address what you said about beauty in order to make my position, indeed my conviction, more clearly understood, as it is the topic at hand that I think presents the most serious moral relevance. Before I begin moralizing, however, it is fitting to preface the following as containing many seedling ideas that I hope to mature by exposing them to the scrutiny of dialogue.

First, it is important to establish that all that exists finds its being by participation in the ground of being, which is God. Thus it is that all which exists is, as God called it in the beginning, good, by virtue of its participation in the ultimate Good. So the goodness of beauty is a substantial reflection of its participation in the energies of the Divine, and therefore the moral importance of our understanding of beauty rests with our notion of things’ relationship to their Creator.

Here is the fundamental moral issue I sense your view could lead to with regard to that premise: if the appearance of physical beauty is itself inherently good, it can only be so by participation in the Good. Therefore, a person who is good-looking participates more fully in the Divine, and is therefore better than an ugly person in terms of worth, value, and virtue. I do not accuse you of thinking this, but on the view of the Good I have briefly sketched, this is a logical necessity of your argument for the appearance of beauty. But we know that our Lord, He who participated fully in the Divine, “Had no beauty that we should look on Him.” It is the lowly and foolish things of this world by which God confounds the wise. Surely we’d agree that to imagine that our Lord Jesus must have needed to be handsome or physically fit or high-IQ rather than gentle, lowly, and wise in order to embody Divinity is the height of foolishness. Again, I don’t mean to insinuate that you hold such an opinion, only to attack the danger I am wary may creep up behind your view.

Further, this is not a dismissal of the good things in this world, but an attempt to properly locate and delimit their actual goodness. You observe rightly that it is more important to be virtuous than beautiful, but surely if virtue is the mark of holiness, then what you refer to as beauty is truly of no worth at all in comparison. Holiness is our lifeline to the ground of being, our reconciliation to our Divine Origin, union to the Source of Beauty itself, without which our only future is eternal destruction. Any so-called beauty that does not lend itself to holiness is therefore worthy of scorn rather than affection. That is what is at stake morally in this question.

Follow me, then, back down from heaven to the street-level. A picture is worth a thousand words, so consider some of the excellent work that has been done photographing environments that might fit your working definition of “ugliness.” Consider the example of this photographer, in whose work I find there is a gentle sublimity, or consider the myriad samples of street photography shared online.

The task at hand is to sift out whether such depictions are simply a trick to make the ugly look good or a perspective that allows the viewer to actually see better, that is, to see something that was invisible before, but nonetheless real. A camera does not operate by creating or adding anything to the world — other than its own presence, of course, which is really, importantly, just a perspectival extension of the presence of a human viewer — it can only capture and crystallize the light it finds already extant. Critical to the function of a camera, though, is focus. Focus is the technological analog to attention, which is the principle whereby we distill mere sensation into perception. As a camera can “make something look good” by a change in its focus rather than a change in the subject, so we can only extract beauty from the world by giving the right attention to it. I say all of this to call attention to the camera, to the lens, to the frame through which you are examining the world. Beauty does not come to you in a vacuum. It comes to you via yourself. That is, whether right or wrong, for better or worse, each one sees ugliness where he does because of where he looks for beauty and where he doesn’t. We are often more disposed to find beauty in the antique because of who we are, not what it is.

I want you to walk through the wardrobe I feel I’ve found, to look for the magic where you don’t expect to see it. Modern London, with its smog and noise and industry, was still, in fact could not stop being, a gateway to Narnia for Lewis. Is the ugliness real? Perhaps. But not as real as the beauty it conceals. We do not create beauty so that we can see it, we see it so that we can create it. If a sculptor cannot see the latent beauty inherent to a block of marble, he will never be able to draw it out into a formal expression. The raw material is good because God made it. The artist does not create ex nihilo, as his Creator does. We do not add beauty to the world from nothing. We can only channel and amplify the beauty that is already there. Anything we mold must first be mined.

It is on this understanding that I previously built my case that superficial beauty is not inherently good. If we accept the Boethian notion of evil as a privation or corruption, then we must understand that all evil parasitically depends upon good for its subsistence. Nobody, for example, believes a lie that is utterly antithetical to the truth. The most potent lies are those wrapped in so much truth as to make the corruption undetectable. So, it is not only not good, but in fact dangerous to hear the words of the Serpent and say, “Well, at least there is some truth to it,” because it is precisely that measure of truth that makes the poison taste sweet rather than deadly. Similarly, I consider it dangerous to say that there is something always and inherently good about the appearance of beauty, because that appearance is precisely the guise that evil will always wear if it is to have any effect. My contention was not merely that there is a deeper beauty that is superior to superficial beauty, but rather I think that the very essence of beauty must be deeper than the appearance, otherwise the appearance is not real beauty at all, it is a trap.

By way of rather serious example, America has built (and been built by) the most elaborate ruse of beauty ever constructed. The web of the pornographic industry in which so much of the West, indeed the whole world, is tangled runs on this principle. It is the exploitation of the beauty of the human form by a grotesque, soul-depriving corruption. Yes, the beauty of humanity is real, but I’m sure you’ll agree it would be despicable to suggest that the beauty of porn is real at all, no matter how aesthetically appealing or even how comparatively high-brow. Indeed, it is precisely the hijacking of visual appeal that makes pornography addictive. Nobody would ingest the poison if it tasted like poison. Sweetness is not inherently good, because sometimes it is a lie. Some things are supposed to taste bitter. This is not simply a matter of what the thing is but how it ought rightly to be perceived. We ought not appreciate the devil for looking radiant. I do not value the company of the beautiful more than that of the honest. I do not love Mormon temples more because they are prettier than strip-mall churches.

So it is, to come full circle, that the course to finding beauty must be reversed. The substance must always precede the appearance. The Form must always precede the manifestation. The Word must preexist His flesh.

Perhaps it will be helpful to note the particular way you said in your last letter that society ought to “aim” at beauty. Let it be said that I do appreciate that expression. Beauty is worth aiming at. But, as I have attempted to elucidate here, it is important that we identify what beauty really is. Gothic Cathedrals are beautiful, but beauty is also more capacious than aesthetic.

Surprisingly, this is related to something you said about AI, namely your musing on how it handles definitions. Please permit me to disabuse any readers of the heady illusion that AI runs on anything approximating definitions, concepts, notions, or meaning. You are right again when you say that conversation at some point depends upon faith. If either of us lacked faith in the reality of meaning behind language, we wouldn’t waste our time writing these letters back and forth. The whole game, then, simply lies in using language as a tool to attempt the excavation of meaning from one another’s minds. On the other hand, I have said before that AI is to art what porn is to love. AI does not begin with meaning and then try to express that meaning through language or image or any other means. It is a calculator making mathematical estimates about which tokens will be approved as corresponding statistically to the tokens in the prompt. Like beauty with no goodness underneath, AI can only regurgitate language with no meaning behind it. That is to say, AI can say things, but it can’t mean things. It cannot intend a definition by a word any more than a refrigerator can wish you health by dispensing water. The medium is the message.

You do saliently note that AI is intimately related to post-literacy. We can’t divorce Protestantism from the context of its formation, and so I think you do well to wonder at its future based on how the context of the present is shifting. In view of this, I hope not to come across as too harsh on your desire to emphasize beauty. My concerns are serious of course, but perhaps in the age of post-literacy, visual aesthetic will become the new erudition, and the expression of truth will depend more on pictures than thousands of words. Still, we know that snakes are often well-spoken. Sometimes the truth is spoken plainly while lies are more eloquent.

So I will keep arguing about the meaning of beauty — and the world will, too, because we have no choice. Say what we might about the “ugly” evangelical megachurch, but it should not be overlooked that fog machines and lasers around a worship leader in skinny jeans is still a visual, aesthetic appeal. Some might call it “beautiful,” even. It will not suffice to merely assert that they are wrong. On the contrary, their numinous experience of that aesthetic is probably intensely real. They will look at the same “ugly” church as you and I and see something different. The difference lies not in what we look at, but what we look for. What are they looking for that we aren’t? That question may be more determinative of who is right and who is wrong, one way or the other.

I have the privilege, indeed the blessing, of attending a church that I personally find quite aesthetically beautiful, an early-twentieth-century building that avoids the garish ostentation of overwrought medievalism on the one hand and the gnostic asceticism of four bare walls on the other. I could find plenty of aesthetic quibbles if I looked for them. Indeed, the Jungian shadow of the artist is the critic. But a hard, lifelong lesson-in-the-learning for a cynic like me is that critics don’t actually make the world lovelier. That doesn’t make them useless, but it should put them in their place. I don’t want to look for aesthetic quibbles in my church. I want to look for God. “Seek, and you shall find.”

Maybe that will help you understand — it certainly helps me understand even as I write it — where my reflexive reaction to your attitude on beauty comes from. I spent so much of my life as the critic that I have often defeated the artist within myself. I tell you: artists don’t make beauty before they’ve seen it. The last year-and-a-half has been a long and overwhelming experience of the scales falling from my eyes, feeling as though I am learning to see the world more as it truly is, and the more I see, the more aggressively beauty accosts me, even sprouting impossibly from between slabs of dismal concrete. Therefore I know from experience that even reason can never uncover beauty on its own, only Love can. So, if my arguments never persuade you, we will have friendship still, which is better. “Love covers a multitude of sins.” I hope you’ll forgive me if I ever mistake the content of our conversation as being more valuable than the fact of the conversation itself.

In the end, I suppose I am not trying to say that aesthetic is of no consequence. Rather, aesthetic is to beauty what language is to meaning. When something we disagree with is said, it will of course not suffice to simply insist that the other use language we consider “right.” Human sympathy demands that we dig, and I think that will get us farther, anyway. The world is more beautiful for its diversity of language and aesthetic, but that diversity cannot be an end unto itself. It must serve to variously reveal the multifarious facets of meaning. And, sometimes, the most beautiful meaning is the most surprising in appearance.

I’d like to leave you with one final thought, or rather a meditation. I’ve come to regret that I was never taught in my Baptist upbringing to appreciate the beauty of the crucifix. I encourage you to contemplate the crucifixion visually. If your church has one, trying gazing at the crucifix intently for longer than you normally would. Nothing could be uglier. Nothing could be lovelier. What an overwhelming, awful, joyful mystery — the manifestation of Beauty.

Die Wahrheit ist untödlich.

Yours in Christ,
Garrett W.