My account is grounded in the conviction that beauty really is of God, and thus that it is a valid thing to say that God is Beauty. “Beauty is a name of God,” Aidan Nichols affirms (Nichols 2007, p.136); while Maritain argues that “God is beautiful […] by Himself and in Himself, absolutely beautiful […] He is beauty itself, because he imparts beauty to all created beings, according to the peculiar nature of each” (Maritain 1943, p.31).
As we shall see, I will come to differ in important respects from the Thomistic account of Maritain; but this may be invoked, initially, to give credence to my assertion that the beauty of an artwork does not have its source in that artwork, nor in the hands of its artist, but belongs to it by the gracious gift of the fount of all beauty, who is God. I agree with Maritain that “the production of beauty belongs to God alone” (p.35); man’s task, meanwhile, as artist and maker, is the formal perfection of the particular work at hand – to which beauty may, God permitting, be added.
99 Thus the Christian artist works in the hope and vision of beauty; but beauty is not of his provenance. It comes by another dispensation. Nor, importantly, is there anything necessary about beauty’s manifestation; it is not a particular shape the artwork can fit, nor does it appear, time and time again, at the same conditioned signal. No, its appearance and realisation will remain mysterious, unique, and gratuitous. In this, Maritain,
following Aquinas, is less emphatic and consistent than I would wish; for the Scholastic account suggests something very fixed and law-like about the conditions that govern beauty’s bestowal. On this count, my model and my language must differ crucially from theirs.
Here, then, is the Scholastic centre of Maritain’s idea of beauty, about which I have some reservations: “If beauty delights the mind, it is because beauty is essentially a certain excellence or perfection in the proportion of things to the mind. Hence the three conditions assigned to it by St. Thomas: integrity, because the mind likes being;
proportion, because the mind likes order and likes unity; lastly and above all brightness or clarity, because the mind likes light and intelligibility” (Maritain 1943, p.24). My own understanding differs firstly, and markedly, in seeing as common but not necessary conditions of beauty’s manifestation what Maritain affirms as essential aspects of beauty’s nature. Integrity, proportion and clarity are three important and pervasive excellences in artworks, but they are not necessary for beauty’s appearance and they are
not beauty. The reality of beauty is not reducible to, or divisible into, these terms. Beauty,
for all its fondness for these properties, is something quite other.
Most importantly, this otherness of beauty is to be found in its gratuity, which – unlike these other qualities – may appropriately be identified as an aspect of beauty’s nature. In the final analysis, such formal excellences as clarity and proportion are incidental – neither integral, nor even instrumental – to beauty and beauty’s appearance. Not all things that achieve these properties, or that satisfy these criteria, are beautiful – nor do all beautiful things fulfil these criteria, or possess these properties.
This non-formal understanding of beauty provides a peculiarly Christian approach to the beautiful, in contrast to classical attitudes and ambitions. For Berdyaev, formal beauty is a pagan concept and ambition; Christian beauty, on the other hand, always opens to the transcendent, so breaking through a merely worldly order. “In the art of the
100 Christian world, there is not, nor can there be, a classic finality of form, immanent
perfection”, he writes; “In this world only a striving towards the beauty of another world is possible, only the longing for that beauty. The Christian world permits of no closing-in, no finality in this world [and so] The thirst for the redemption of the sins of this world, and the thirst for communion with another world, are imprinted on the ideals of Christian art” (Berdyaev 2009b, p.229). Thus Christian art is importantly ‘open-ended’; something Williams (2011) has stressed with reference to Dostoevsky’s fictions, and something we also find in the poetry of R.S. Thomas. I will discuss this open-endedness further in chapter 5.
Crucially, beauty is not predictable or law-governed, because it is personal and reveals the person of God. Yannaras uses the example of an artwork, where the
“dissimilar and unrepeatable character of artistic expression is not the exactness of a programmed uniqueness […] but the universal ec-static energy which is always revelatory of the creative person” to claim that “the beauty of the entire reality of the universe does not refer to the arranged exactness of a mechanical orderliness, but is […] the beauty of the revelation of a person” (Yannaras 2007, p.82).
If harmony and proportion are not necessary for beauty, it is essential to beauty that it is a gift. The gratuity of beauty is vital – and we like gifts; we like the startling, the spontaneous and the free, for all these are signs of life; and we like that beauty is not predictable, not reducible to the three conditions of Aquinas. We like that it testifies to another order, manifests a reality higher still than the proportions, integrities and clarities of the philosophers’ universe; we like that it manifests personality.
All beauty, for the Christian, is revelatory of God; as Yannaras writes, “the beauty of the world […] shows beings to be the products and principles of the divine creative presence” (p.82). Being personal, God’s self-revelation, it is therefore God’s gracious gift of himself. Thus “We call grace (charis) the fact that God gives himself (charizetai) in his erotic ecstatic self-offering” (p.67).
It is a danger of the Scholastic definition, I believe, that by neglecting beauty’s gratuity it also misrepresents its divinity. We like beauty because we recognise, not only that it is other than us, but also that we are privileged to receive and partake of it, and so we recognise that it speaks to and reveals the best in us; we like how it confirms that we
101 too are of more than a natural or necessary order, that we share in beauty’s otherness, and so that we are, ultimately, in a vital sense like beauty. It is this experience which is expressed in delight and gratitude, for these are proper responses to the surprising and generous. It is also this kind of experience which makes us recognise in beauty and its bestowal the image in which we are made, the likeness to which we are called.