Epistle to Ansgar Letter 12: God and Beauty
05 March 2025 AD
Ash Wednesday
Dear Godson,
Ash Wednesday opens Lent, a season of repentance and fasting. The rite of placing ashes on the brow has it roots in the ancient Jewish practice of mourning and humility, and, earlier, the reminder from the days of Adam that man is risen from dust and returns to dust.
The beasts of the field, as best we know, have no forethought of their mortal span nor any craving for eternal life. Devising memorials is no part of their lives, nor any admiration of beauty for its own sake.
Man gets a glimpse of eternity when his eye falls on beauty in nature, seeing star or diamond, moonrise or mountain, geyser, pine forest, rushing rill, rearing stallion, bright flower, sleek cat, beetle or butterfly or gurgling babe in joy, a damsel seen by candlelight turning her head just so, dark eyes softly gleaming.
Beauty reflects eternity, hence springs from God and leads back to Him.
Upon such visions, the creative urge in him prompts Man, as best he can, to decorate his tools and lodgings, or gladden his garb with adornments, his food with garnish, his words with poetry, his life with music.
Man is alone. Birds chirp, but they do not compose operas. Beavers build dams, but not monuments to the lordly dead. Man has erected works of art and architecture that are breathtaking, and some few even have that strange effect that nature’s grandeur has, that to look upon them allows a glimpse of eternity, a window to a world beyond.
Experience shows that godless men can make beauty only by mimicking their pagan ancestors, copying forms without substance.
Experience shows that godless culture upholds as art only that which shocks and disgusts, or appeals to the ironic sneers of nihilism: a urinal, a lightbulb going off and on, a decapitated cow’s head covered in muck and maggots, a glass of water on a shelf, a crucifix dunked in urine, a can of excrement, or an unmade bed. No exaggeration is this; I kid you not. These are real examples, each one.
Marcel Duchamp Fountain (1917) is a urinal; Martin Creed Work No. 227, The Lights Going On and Off (2000, Turner Prize Winner) is a light going off and on; Damien Hirst A Thousand Years (1990) is a maggoty cow head; Michael Craig-Martin An Oak Tree (1973) is a glass of water on a shelf; Andres Serrano Piss Christ (1987) is a crucifix dunked in urine; Piero Manzoni Artist’s Shit (1961) is a can of excrement; Tracey Emin My Bed (1998) is an unmade bed.
Beauty is indeed the best and clearest proof of the existence of God. It is not a proof that can be put into words, so it cannot be refuted in words. For this reason the devils hate this proof, and, unable to refute it, the devils seek to remove beauty from life.
There are famous examples of beauty bringing belief to unbelievers. The thing that brought Whittaker Chambers to the end of his unbelief was contemplating the delicate intricacy of his baby daughter’s ear. He simply saw it; it was obvious: this beauty could not be accidental.
Peter Hitchens, brother of famed atheist dunderhead and scoffer Christopher Hitchens, was brought back to the church by contemplating a painting. Peter Hitchens argues that truth is beauty and beauty is truth, and both lead men to God, because both spring from God. The rivermouth implies a wellspring.
More to the point, beauty cannot be explained in a godless world. In a godless world, beauty means nothing, it leads to nothing, and can be explained by nothing. Beauty is at best an accident arising from the odd collision of neurons, a side effect of the molecular clockwork of the brain where your illusion of self awareness is housed.
Beauty cannot honestly be said to be some part of the unplanned plan of Darwinian natural selection. Pain, yes, can prompt an organism to avoid damage. Pleasant sensations that accompany feasting or mating can promote nutrition, health, and procreation. Sexual attraction between animals in mating season is not meaningless in Darwinian terms.
But men find beauty in things other than bowls of fruit or fertile maidens, no matter how frequently painters take these as models. A sunset should not seen beautiful to a diurnal creature like man, as the fall of night and approach of darkness is a sign of danger, which should produce fear. Starlight should not produce a sensation of sublime awe, since it is too dim for hunting. Fire should panic us, as it does any beast liable to be burned, but instead we adorn birthday cakes and votive candles in gay celebration and solemn prayer.
Icicles gathered on naked tree branches over a silent landscape of snow should seem a scene of horror from some hellscape of Niflheim, not an elfin fairyland. Diamonds catch the light, but are inedible. Gold is both inedible and useless for weapon making.
The grace and strength of the tiger should cause trepidation, not admiration. Mountaintops, icy and lifeless peaks of rock, are dangerous to us; by right, our myth should people such desolation with devils, not the palaces of the gods.
One might argue that deer seem lithe and beautiful to us because their venison is succulent; but we do not admire the face and form of hogs in swill, howsoever much they crave savory bacon and ham.
And, as for music, it does not exist in nature. Musical sounds certainly exist, flute-calls of birds or the glissades of brooks, the drumbeat of the heart in passion, the percussion of sea-waves crashing, the aeolian harp of winds in the willows. Musicians mimic and orchestrate such songs, to which singers and poets add words.
There is nothing like rhyme in nature, nor a single Homeric metaphor without Homer, nor any pair of psalmist parallels without a Psalmist.
What is not found in nature cannot be the subject of natural selection. Absurd to speculate of apemen roaming Africa who prospered by overhearing arias and sonnets, but failed and died off for lack of jigs and limericks.
The agile Darwinian, always ready with explanations that do not explain, might claim a love of singing springs from the natural selection for pleasant sounds, the pounding of romantic hearts, the hum of healthy lungs, the clatter of clean water babbling, the nature lilt and tone of virgin voices ready for nubile nuptials. Music, by this explanation, appeals to sounds instinctively associated with feeding and mating. Primitive music mimics the erotic grunting and noises of loveplay, the elevated heartbeat of excitement, and more sophisticated music arises from variations on these basic sound patterns.
It is sufficient to answer this by saying this is not so: the chants and epics even of primitive nomads or hunting bands show a love of mathematical metrics that mimic any number of rhythms from dirges to jigs, for music reflects all aspects of life. Much poetry is love poetry, but Polyhymnia and Cleo are muses also, and bards sing for other reasons.
As with music so with painting. The idea that these things spring from Darwinian evolution that made man from apeman, or evolved by social convention from practices useful to hunter gatherer bands is a speculation offered without evidence. What little evidence we have of primate man shows the opposite: fully formed and well mastered technics in poetry and painting emerge in prehistory when man emerges, without any transitional forms that are half-man, half-ape.
The examination of cave painting shows artistic techniques limited perhaps by materials and means, but not by the artistic imagination of man. Looming images of shaman produce awe, pictures of antelope in flight show an observant eye and skill of composition. Indeed, the cave painting preserved from the Neolithic show a greater artistic skill and creative mimicry than many cubist or abstract painter, whose work is literally indistinguishable from the scrawled drawing of the schizophrenic.
Likewise, the Book of Job, which may well be the earliest poetic composition of any form of which we have record, shows a complexity of form and theme, a richness of metaphor and a depth of understanding few modern poets can match, or none.
But let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Darwinian carried the day, and we were convinced that beauty is an arbitrary by-product of irrational nonhuman forces operating blindly to produce man from apeman, or, worse, an arbitrary by-product of social or economic incentives meant to favor tribal life, which gave rise to social convention.
In the first case, beauty is an illusion caused by a malfunction of brain atoms, except in the limited case of men being attracted to healthy fruit or savory meat that aids nutrition, and in the limited case of men being attracted to nubile mates able to produce multiple offspring.
In the second case, beauty is a manmade thing, like grammar, merely a convention or routine sanctified by repetition or Pavlovian conditioning. In such a case, any ugly thing can be made beautiful by clever counter-conditioning, or, since there is no practical benefit to art or decoration, eliminated altogether. Utopia consists of unisex clones in jumpsuits occupying sterile sleeping pods and workstations: everything is painted olive drab, and all gardens are paved over with solar panels.
Whatever is manmade, man have a right to destroy. If beauty is manmade, beauty can be destroyed if an when man so wills.
And the will to destruction is always among us. At the time of this writing, we live in a generation when women have taken care to eliminate the appeal of their sex insofar as possible from the public sphere: neither dress, nor hair, nor jewelry are particularly feminine nor appealing. Instead the tattoos of sailors ink their flesh, the swearwords of sailors fall from their lips, and nose-rings of savages, or, actually, of cattle, pierce their faces. Hair is dyed in absurd and freakish hues, or skulls are shaved in part or whole.
Likewise, it is commonplace for vandals to seek out and ruin monuments, works of art, famous painting in museums, tossing soup cans or paint on irreplicable masterpieces. Ruining beauty is very important to people possessed by devilish ideas, or, indeed, by devils.
The proof of God is in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the rose window of the Cathedral at Notre Dame, the soaring strains of the Saint Matthew’s Passion by JS Bach. Even among pagans, their finest work is spiritual in nature: the Taj Mahal, the Parthenon of Athens, the Pantheon of Rome, Shinto shrines, Buddhist pagodas, the Sphinx of Egypt.
The seven wonders of the world are the Colossus of Rhodes, Great Pyramid of Giza, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Statue of Zeus at Olympia, Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, and Lighthouse of Alexandria. Of these, one is an engineering project: the rest are images of gods, or monuments to the dead. The Hanging Gardens adorned a stepped pyramid, which was both a king’s palace, an astronomical observatory, and a temple meant to represent in miniature the celestial mountain of the gods.
The artwork of a culture is the expression of its national spirit, its sense of life writ large. When the culture is godless, the sense and spirit perish, and ugliness, gross and degenerate, is uplifted to quell the souls of men. When the culture is pagan, however, forms of beauty can emerge, classical images of heroes and goddesses, temples erected in the proportions of the golden mean. But the Christian world produces cathedrals and symphonies, polyphonic music and perspectival drawing, so that even drain spouts have their gargoyles to adorn them, and choirs their hymns.
That beauty leads men to God is proof of the existence of God, and of divine benevolence, for providing so easy and clear a way to apprehend an otherwise unseen truth. One need but look.
One can argue that beauty is meaningless, but in so doing, one argues with one’s own experience of beauty, sublime beauty, beauty that raptures the soul and makes on forget oneself. Beauty itself is its own self evidence argument that beauty is not meaningless.
It is pointless to put the obvious into a syllogism, but for the sake of rigor, allow me: 1. Absent God, beauty is subjective hence meaningless. 2. Beauty is not meaningless. 3. Therefore God is not absent.
I close with a quote:
“We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for and died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born”
― Roger Scruton, How to be a Conservative
Yours,
John Charles Justin-martyr Wright
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
