30. God Is a Fountain of Total Beauty, the Most Beautiful and the Superbeautiful.
30. God is a Fountain of Total Beauty, the most beautiful and the superbeautiful.30
The idea that God is Beauty was totally lost in modern philosophy and, I’m sorry to say, in modern theology as well. Descartes, one of the founding fathers of modern philosophy, including its approach to education, offers an entire philosophy with little attention to aesthetics. Sadly, many theologians followed suit. One wonders how much of the ecological crisis staring us in the face today is traceable to our eliminating the premodern understanding of God as Beauty.
Aquinas was thoroughly marinated in the theological concept of God as Beauty. He brings this premodern wisdom to our spiritually-starving postmodern times. Following are some of his teachings on this important subject. “God is ‘always’ and uniformly beautiful. … God is a fountain of total beauty. The beautiful is said to be from God as a cause. From this beautiful One beauty comes to be in all beings, for brightness comes from a consideration of beauty. But all beauty, through which a thing is able to be, is a kind of participation of the divine brightness.”
Much of the prayer of the Navajo people in America is built around beauty. One such prayer goes like this: “I walk with beauty before me; I walk with beauty behind me; I walk with beauty above me; I walk with beauty below me; I walk with beauty all around me; your world is so beautiful, O God.” Aquinas would be very comfortable with this kind of prayer; it fits a premodern mindset perfectly.
Aquinas elaborates on his linking of divinity and beauty when he declares: “God, who is supersubstantial beauty, is called beauty because God bestows beauty on all created beings.” Key to beauty for Aquinas is harmony, brightness, and proportion.
When he speaks of “brightness,” he is speaking of doxa, glory, or, as I have pointed out, the Cosmic Christ that is present in all beings. “God puts into creatures, along with a kind of ‘sheen,’ a reflection of God’s own luminous ‘ray,’ which is the fountain of all light.” The Cosmic Christ is that “luminous ray.”
Significantly, contemporary science tells us that photons or light waves exist in every atom in the universe.
Aquinas insists that “the beautiful is God” and that all things operate for the sake of the beautiful just as all things operate for the sake of the good. “The beautiful, which is God, is the end of all like the final cause of all things. For all things have been made in order that they imitate the divine beauty in whatever way possible.” We exist to imitate the divine beauty. One is reminded of the observation by Gustav Mahler who said that “all creation adorns itself continually for God. Everyone therefore has only one duty, to be as beautiful as possible in every way in the eyes of God and man. Ugliness is an insult to God.”38
Do goodness and beauty differ? Aquinas believes that “the good and the beautiful are the same” though “beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty.” The distinction lies in this: That “the ‘good’ simply pleases the appetite, while the ‘beautiful’ is something pleasant to apprehend. The senses most drawn to the beautiful are the most cognitive ones, such as sight and hearing, for we speak of beautiful sights and beautiful sounds.” Sight and hearing most feed the intellect and imagination.
Years ago I was awakened to the moral dimension that beauty arouses when a Greek Orthodox theologian said to me: “In our tradition, the bottom line for determining the right and wrong of an action is this: ‘Is what I am doing, is what we are doing, beautiful or not?’” Maybe this is one reason that the Greek Orthodox Church is far ahead of the Western church in responding to the ecological crisis.
Aquinas steers us back to honoring the Via Positiva. We are to treat beauty with reverence, he writes (and reverence is part of what is aroused by awe, wonder, and beauty in the Via Positiva). We are to do two things with beauty he says: (1) hold beauty in reverence, and (2) share beauty, rendering it conspicuous. “In addition to holding both beautiful things and good things in reverence, it is necessary for good things to be conspicuous, because to be conspicuous pertains to the nature of beauty.” Yes! Beauty wants to put itself out there. The sun shines everywhere.
All beauty yearns to be conspicuous.
Christ is
a dew for cooling;
rain for making fruitful;
a seed for bringing forth
the fruit of justice.