Beauty

Art has always been my dear friend, and beauty nearly a way of life for me - something I’ve regarded as inherently good and precious, and as such whenever anyone else sees and loves beauty as much as I do, or recognizes the beauty that I have purposefully created they are at once endeared to me.  The other day I was doodling in my sketch book with a soft charcoal pencil, making smooth, blended, dark lines and curves - because I liked how they felt - when my friend commented how much he liked them and inquired after what they were to be. It usually annoys me when people ask those kinds of questions when I’m drawing - I wonder, when God was forming the earth did all the angels ask ‘What’s that? How does that support life? Why the random plant? Are you done yet? What’s it going to look like when it’s finished?’ Or did they watch in wonder as He created and say ‘Ah, that’s a beautiful line.’ Or ‘Oh, is that the shape of the place we’re to live? It’s magnificent; and the way it ties in with the shape of the orbit, the balance simplicity of it’s harmonies are lovely.’ - they were drawn because I like them, and they give me joy. so I said rather condescendingly, “A line. And a shape, I guess. I didn’t really intend for them to be anything.” To which he replied “Well I like them; they’re nice.” I realized then that he saw exactly and all that was intended to be conveyed in those simple drawings; Beauty. For the sake of itself, and nothing else.  Beauty, because it makes me happy; he felt that and it made him happy, too. Beauty, because it reflected in its simplicity and in its own small way the glory of God.

I have been struggling for some while now to come to a satisfactory conclusion as to the definition of Beauty - not beauty that is in the eye of the beholder, but a true or absolute beauty, as it were; for a long while I’ve believed there is such a thing as Absolute Beauty, just as there is Absolute Truth, but the defining of it has escaped me.

C.S.Lewis describes Joy as that sensation one feels when looking at the magnificence of a sunset and wanting to claim it, to grasp, or internalize it - only to find the feeling gone before it came: or the profuond rapture of listening to Flight of the Valkeries for the first time and feeling a longing for something utterly intangible - like the memory of a memory. I have thought before that Lewis’s Joy is connected with the definition of Absolute Beauty that I’d been searching for, because I always felt Joy while experiencing beauty.  He said that this feeling is, as it were, a memory of Heaven and the Absolute Beauty there.

It wasn’t until I started reading Anne of Green Gables that I found words to put that definition into, though: Anne was so enraptured by beauty wherever she saw it, and that beauty made her want to be good - and while the sentiments she shared may have been expressed melodramatically they were sincere and they came from her heart. When she’s first coming to Green Gables she drives past "the Avenue" and says:

‘Pretty? Oh, pretty doesn’t seem the right word to use. Nor beautiful, either. They don’t go far enough...It just satisfied me here’ -- she put a hand on her breast -- ‘It made a queer funny ache, and yet it was a pleasant ache. Did you ever have an ache like that, Mr Cuthbert?’

‘Well now, I just can’t recollect that I ever had.’

‘I have it lots of times whenever I see something royally beautiful.’

Later, when Marilla is teaching her to say her prayers Anne tells her that it is so difficult to be good because God gave her red hair, and she resents Him for that.

‘It would be so much easier to be good if one’s hair was a handsome auburn, don’t you think?’

She didn’t feel beautiful, or believe she was, so she wasn’t able to feel kinship with the God that created her to be that way.

a girl who cared nothing of God’s love, since she had never had it translated to her through the medium of human love

After she’s attempted her first prayer she explains to Marilla her philosophies of praying, how she’d rather feel a prayer than say one, and how she would do it after gazing on the beauty of nature -- and she tells us later that beautiful things make her want to pray.  Beauty made Anne want to be good, and the beauty of the language and ideas in the book made me want to be good -- because it was beautiful

From my experiences reading Anne of Green Gables I came to a definition that, for the time being, satiates the seeming unanswerableness of the question of Absolute Beauty:

Absolute Beauty is that which manifests or reflects the Glory of God and His creations or Divine laws. Something is beautiful when it is a conduit for the Light of Christ.

The Beauty of Nature testifies of Christ, the Beauty of friendships and love is a reflection of God’s love and the Covenants we make with Him to serve our fellow man, the beauty of language is a manifestation or reflection of His words that created the Heavens and Earth, the beauty of the human figure testifies of Christ because we were literally created in His image, the beauty in music is a manifestation of Divine order in the Universe and it’s laws - all of which is achieved through the light of Christ.

Beauty is just as vital to our soul as food is to our bodies -- without it the soul withers and dies.  And in Like manner when the spirit dies, cut off from the presence of God, we lose the ability to find beauty.  Charles Darwin, towards the end of his life wrote:

Up to the age of 30 or beyond it, poetry of many kinds . . . gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare.... formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great, delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music.... I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did . . My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.... The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.9

President Brigham Young spoke to the Saints of his day.

“There is a great work for the Saints to do.  Progress, and improve upon and make beautiful everything around you. Cultivate the earth, and cultivate your minds. Build cities, adorn your habitations, make gardens, orchards, and vineyards, and render the earth so pleasant that when you look upon your labors you may do so with pleasure, and that angels may delight to come and visit your beautiful locations. In the mean time continually seek to adorn your minds with all the graces of the Spirit of Christ.”

President Uchtdorf taught

“Creation brings deep satisfaction and fulfillment. We develop ourselves and others when we take unorganized matter into our hands and mold it into something of beauty” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhLlnq5yY7k)

This last Summer I worked at a clothing store for Carol Tuttle, who focuses on helping women feel beautiful.  One day I heard her say “getting up everyday and taking the time to dress in your energy type [or the ways that make you feel most beautiful] is a way of nurturing yourself.  Women have an inherent beauty “sixth sense” as she called it -- it is one of our most fundamental inborn gifts; to love and desire to create beauty.  As we create that beauty on ourselves we create on ourselves, or make our physical appearance, a conduit for, or reflection of the Light and Glory of God.  Our bodies are created in His image.

Now, let me make a very clear distinction here: Beauty and Sex appeal are not the same thing - the fact that something pleases the carnal senses does not automatically qualify it to be called Beauty; however we are given “feminine graces” for a reason, and when used in the way God ordained, they can be Beautiful.  Women were meant to be beautiful, we are beautiful, and when we stop worrying about our red hair and take the time to cultivate our relationship with God, to remember we were created in the image of God and given the special gift to create Beauty and manifest the Glory of God, then we can feel just how Beautiful we really are; and that beauty can lead others to Christ.

When presented that way, doesn’t it make it a little less cliche, and much more profound when people say “True Beauty comes from within” or “the most Beautiful adornment you can possess is the Light of Christ.”?