Beauty and Desecration

The following is about beauty, and the questions that worry us today: just what is the role of beauty in the life that is growing around us?¹ How do we distinguish it from its fake versions? And how do we defend it against the surrounding culture?

I wish to say a few philosophical things before we begin about why beauty matters. We live in a world in which utilitarian values are not just triumphant, but for many people the only values that there are. For such people there seems to be no sense that things can have a value that is not a form of use. This means that all of us are engaged all the time in what some philosophers call “instrumental reasoning.” Whenever we are asked to justify something we try to find a purpose for it. For example, when someone says “Justify the shape of a particular room at a particular University,” we do so in terms of its purpose, which is to gather people together to listen to a lecture. If it is not very efficient at that, then the room has not actually achieved what it set out to achieve. In all our activities we are familiar with this kind of reasoning. But the question is, why is that the only kind of reasoning? We know perfectly well that it cannot be the only kind because if something is a means to an end, there has to be an end that it is a means to, and that too needs a justification. So we do reason with each other about the ends of our activity; what our goals are and whether we should be pursuing them. And this is especially true in activities such as building or setting out on a career, in which there is a long term project involved and an end point that you cannot very clearly envisage. You know when you set out to build something, you cannot clearly envisage the endpoint just from a ground plan. You need some conception of not just what it will look like, but what will it be like to live with it. And only if you know what it will be like to live with it, will you be justified in building it.

One reason why modern architecture is such a failure is because people do not try to envisage what it will be like to live with the product that they are building. Rather, they think only about its present function and whether it fulfills it according to the requirements. Reasoning about what it is like to live with something means bringing the end of your activity forward to the present, so that you sense its being, as it were, with you in the moment where you are. It is the role of beauty and aesthetic judgment to do that. By seeking beauty we are also seeking long-term companionship, rather than short-term function.

We also argue about our ends from a religious point of view. We know that people have a conception of the meaning of life as lying in some way beyond life, either in the transcendental or in the afterlife. This meaning is sometimes revealed in the present moment: the moment which people are apt to describe as sacred, such as the moment of liturgy and worship, the moment of revelation or reading a sacred text. And perhaps being blessed with that experience is what St. Paul describes (in the words of the prayer book) as “the peace that passeth understanding”: such a thing involves very powerful emotion and a powerful experience—if you can attain it. But we live in a world where not everyone does obtain it or even seek for it. Increasingly the surrounding culture either ignores the sacred or denigrates it. So it is very difficult to explain to people who are immersed in the secular culture how you would justify the ends of existence and not just the means. I think this is our situation today.

Take as an example a landscape by Renoir. Whatever is happening in that landscape, it is imbued with a...