Beauty and Aesthetics

Scripture focus

O worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness: fear before him, all the earth.

Psalm 96:9 KJV

At a glance

Summary of the chapter

From the opening line of his very first Miscellany — 'Holiness is a most beautiful and lovely thing' — beauty stood at the center of Edwards's theology, functioning, as interpreter Roland Delattre put it, as 'the first principle of being.' McClymond and McDermott show this made Edwards a genuine outlier among Reformed theologians: no earlier Calvinist writer had given beauty such a foundational role, and even theological liberals like Schleiermacher did not match Edwards's emphasis. Not until Karl Barth in the twentieth century, and then with visible hesitation, did Continental Protestant theology catch up.

Edwards's key move was distinguishing 'primary beauty' — the beauty of spirit, seen in the loving 'consent' of one will to another and ultimately to God — from 'secondary beauty,' the harmony and proportion visible in the physical world. Physical beauty was real but derivative, a 'shadow' pointing to the deeper spiritual beauty it resembled. Only beings capable of will and love, not mere objects, can exhibit primary beauty, because true beauty is at bottom relational: 'the sweet harmony between the various parts of the universe is only an image of mutual love.'

This aesthetic framework let Edwards say something startling: beauty is not simply one attribute among others but 'the divinity of divinity' — so central that, in his own words, without it God 'would be an infinite evil.' Beauty, for Edwards, is where holiness, love, and the Trinity converge.

Key points

• Edwards's theology of beauty appears already in the opening line of his earliest notebook entry: 'Holiness is a most beautiful and lovely thing.'
• He distinguished 'primary beauty' (spiritual, the mutual 'consent' of loving wills) from 'secondary beauty' (the derivative harmony visible in the physical world).
• Edwards's emphasis on beauty as central to theology had no real precedent among earlier Calvinist writers and outpaced even later Continental theologians like Barth.
• True beauty, for Edwards, is fundamentally relational — a matter of loving 'consent' between wills — rather than a static physical property.
• Edwards went so far as to call beauty 'the divinity of divinity,' the very thing that most distinguishes God from every other being.

A line worth remembering

Holiness is a most beautiful and lovely thing.

McClymond & McDermott The Theology of Jonathan Edwards, ch. 6

Related Scripture

• 1 Chronicles 16:29
• Psalm 27:4
• Psalm 29:2
• 2 Corinthians 3:18

For reflection and discussion

1. How does thinking of beauty as relational — 'consent' between wills — change how you understand what makes something beautiful?
2. Why might Edwards have thought physical beauty was only a 'shadow' of something greater rather than valuable in its own right?
3. Where have you experienced holiness itself as something beautiful and attractive, rather than merely obligatory?