The God of the Signs - The Sign of Beauty
[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]
How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe
Consider first the Sign of Beauty. Beauty requires no description beyond experience, for it is all around us, in as many shapes, sizes, colors, and incarnations as the imagination can fathom, from the moment we awake in the morning until the moment our consciousness submits to the tide of sleep at night. It speaks to us in the voices of children discovering a field of wildflowers. It resonates in the incomparable music of Bach, Pachelbel, Handel and Mozart. It shimmers in the smile of a beautiful woman. It whispers to us in the sound of a mountain stream. It sails with us upon the trackless deep toward a sapphire horizon. It sleeps beside us in the peace and intimate comfort of marriage. It moves in the joints of our fingers and toes and crowns the intricacy of our minds. It swirls with falling maple leaves in a crisp autumn wind. It watches over our shoulder at the birth of a child. It strikes our ears with the roar of a hometown crowd (if you are a sports fan) or with the reading of Tennyson, Wordsworth and Longfellow. Such are only highlights; the exhaustive list is endless. Beauty is the constant companion of every man, woman and child alive, no matter their circumstances. Even in the darkest hours it stalks us with its Light (for even at Auschwitz, as the crematoriums operated to exterminate a race, the sun still rose amid pastel-infused glory). Beauty is an irrepressible force in Creation. Though its individual manifestations may be fleeting, limited, and subject to disfigurement by the bludgeons of violence, cruelty, and despair, Beauty in its grand totality simply will not release us to the autocratic oppression of ugliness unless we choose to cast our eyes upon the Prince of Darkness and submit to his chains.
I am not, of course, the first to recognize the ubiquity of Beauty. Aesthetically inclined men and women throughout the ages have rhapsodized about its beatific graces. Yet the divine truth of Beauty’s sign inheres not in the poetic flourishes which man employs to describe the wonder his senses behold but rather in the lessons that such sensory experience teaches the open heart and inquisitive mind. What are Beauty’s lessons? Simply put, Beauty instructs man that goodness is real, elemental to the world, and absolutely objective. I daresay it is impossible, even for the most jaded and vicious of all sociopaths to resist the gravitational attraction of a brilliant sunset, where sky is splashed with luminescent color and clouds are arrayed in crimson and gold. Such a person may clench his fist at God and cast aspersions upon that goodness, but he cannot ignore it, cannot deny it. Beauty teaches the soul the irrevocable lesson that goodness is intrinsic to the world. Moreover, Beauty establishes the primacy of such goodness, the preeminence of light over darkness. Beauty eloquently instructs man in the nature of rightness, in the shape and form of divine intention and blessing. Beauty stands above the bloodied fray that has besieged the world and cries out that something beneficent preceded the reign of evil and continues even now to conspire against it. Lastly, Beauty teaches man, in almost unconscious fashion, that there exists an objective standard by which goodness should be judged. Beauty does not itself articulate the standard but marks out the trail of righteousness with the faint impressions of a glittering brush. Beauty declares that there is something intrinsically proper about behavior that comports with the intention of Nature, not that part of Nature “red in tooth and claw,” for such is clearly a disfigurement of Beauty, but that part which compels a man to weep at the sight of his newborn child and elicits wonderstruck awe from an observer of the Northern Lights.
Next time: The Sign of Order
Trackback address for this post:
http://www.everysquareinch.com/htesi/trackback.php/221