{An essay for my christian poetry class that concisely articulated some concerned pondering I'd been doing; thought I would share.}
Is it possible to idolize beauty? Artists are seekers of beauty, in its
many forms. In the current culture it is so easy to witness massive amounts of
beauty. You can simply google ‘flowers’, or ‘Sistine Chapel’, or ‘babies’, and
witness varying angles of the beauty that streams through the world. Artists
are creating beautiful digital art and mass distributing it with the help of
websites like Pinterest or Tumblr, which are partially designed to be gathering
places for beautiful images. We strive to be surrounded by the beautiful, the
decorative, and the transcendent. Amidst this abundance of splendor, we still
yearn for more. The thirst for beauty is never quenched; a beautiful object is
just as thrilling as all the rest you have seen. Yet if we are striving to be the
most beautiful, even in deed more than in physical appearance, might we neglect
our sanctification yearning? Though we guard ourselves against idolization of
beauty, the sanctification journey is one of beauty as well; Christ transforming
us from ugly corpses in sin to beautiful children of God. Thus the two are
wrapped into one, and our desire for beauty is a natural part of our struggling
towards sanctification. Jacques Maritain says that “He [God] is beauty itself”
and later quotes Baudelaire as explaining that this intense emotion felt while
witnessing beauty is not a joy, but rather an extreme melancholy caused by the realization
that paradise exists, yet the soul is in an imperfect land. This definition of beauty’s
impact in Maritain and Baudelaire is the clearest I have found. It provides
hope that beauty is essentially God or God-breathed and thus will not distract,
but direct the spirit to Him.
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