What Makes Something Beautiful? | A Christian Guide to Beauty and Design | Part 3

In this 3rd video in the series "A Christian Guide to Beauty and Design" I look at what makes something beautiful.

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Genesis 1-15, Volume 1 - Wenham (https://amzn.to/2TQnYRO)
Genesis 16-50, Volume 2 - Wenham (https://amzn.to/3aDY21J)

| Transcription |
Welcome back to the Bible is Art where we’re in a series on a A Christian Guide to Beauty and Design. In the last video we were looking at how beauty is objective, a feature of things and not subjective, like our preference for a certain kind of ice cream. In this video we’re going to look at what makes something beautiful or more precisely, the ground of beauty.

While this might seem to be a difficult question, it is actually quite simple, because it’s the same structure of every other question about a good property like justice or goodness. Something is just, loving, and beautiful if it reflects God and his justice, love, and beauty. God is eternal, the creator, and the source of all life, of everything. And when God created the world, none of the diffuse variety of things surprised him. Every emotion and action, every property and relation was always already within him. There was no novelty. So when he created the world it reflects, is an image of his character and nature. Everything is grounded in him. So something is just if it reflects his justice, something is love if it images his lovingness.

So all things find their ontological explanation in him, the originator and source of all goods.

Now you may be thinking, “Okay, but this certainly does not fully answer our question about what makes something beautiful.” That’s true. When we say that something is just because God is just and it mirrors God’s justice, we are saying that there are a set of properties, attributes that together constitute justice and those properties are properties firstly of God. And the same is true of beauty. What we mean by “Justice” is that there are a collection of attributes or properties of God that together constitute justice, so also there are a collection of properties in God that constitute, that name his beauty.

This might sound a bit weird but this is the normal, common sense understanding. When I say that Sally is kind I mean that 1) she has a good, positive disposition toward people 2) that her speech is graceful and gentle 3) that she generous and patient with her attention and so on. Those properties constitute her kindness.

So saying that something is beautiful because it reflects God’s beauty does not provide us with the properties of beauty, but it provides a path to answering it. That is, if we want to know what makes something beautiful, we must look at God’s beauty.

But here we run into a problem because God has not revealed or explained every aspect of his character and world. For instance, while economics and physics have their explanation in God we cannot go to the Scriptures for a detailed explanation of how this is the case. We can’t look at God and discover the structure or purpose of plutonium or supply and demand curves. And there is two reasons why, two reasons why God has not explained everything about himself and reality: