In the Beauty of Holiness: Art and the Bible in Western Culture by David Lyle Jeffrey (review)

During my final year as a doctoral student at Baylor University, I had the opportunity to audit David Lyle Jeffrey's "Philosophy of Art'' course. Like this book, the class was at once rigorously intellectual and deeply worshipful. Jeffrey has been teaching such a course for 20 years, and he's been publishing on theology and the visual arts for more than 45 years, so even though his formal training is in literary scholarship, this book has been percolating in his thoughts and affections for decades. And it stands as a remarkable witness to the way that scholarship can be a form of worship. If Jeffrey shows that beauty and holiness have historically had an uneasy relationship, and yet that beauty can indeed serve holiness, his work here also demonstrates that for all the ways modern scholarship can be at odds with piety, it too can serve holiness. Christian readers will find their minds enlightened and their hearts enkindled with love for the God whose holiness is beautiful beyond all human seeing.

In the Beauty of Holiness is, as its title implies, an extended meditation on how the Christian artistic tradition has imagined the proper relationship between beauty and holiness. In so doing, it offers literary scholars the opportunity to put discussions of literary aesthetics in a broader cultural and theological context. Over the course of the book, Jeffrey stages conversations between many writers—including Dante, Herbert, Wordsworth, the Rossetti siblings, Hopkins, and Potok—and their artistic contemporaries. The range of voices that Jeffrey weaves together is truly breathtaking. His discussions move seamlessly between philosophy and history, biblical exegesis and careful interpretations of particular paintings, theology and music. All of this is contained in a beautifully made book: the glossy, eight-by-ten-inch pages have wide margins and include 146 high-quality color reproductions. Eerdmans did an excellent job with this volume, and it is a rich gift to scholars and teachers.

Jeffrey begins with a reading of Hopkins's poem "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo'' that focuses on our human tendency to make beauty a replacement for God rather than an act of grateful worship. Our contemporary culture often makes the aesthetic an ultimate good and worships poetry, music, painting, and high culture. Professors of literature, because we feel the power of beauty, are particularly prone to this species of idolatry. Yet this is a danger because beauty is intrinsically linked to the holy presence of God. Art can lead us to God, yet it's always an instrumental good. In advancing this argument, Jeffrey provides not so much a history of Christian art as a more focused narrative about the relationship between beauty and holiness in the Christian tradition: how they were brought together in the early church and medieval period, separated during the Renaissance, and now, by some artists, are again being brought together.

Jeffrey's first chapter surveys biblical descriptions of beauty, arguing that "there seems to be no fully accurate access to what the Scriptures mean by beauty except through appreciation of the holy'' (20). We see this connection in the instructions God gave Moses for the tabernacle and the particular vocation given to Bezalel and his assistants whom God names as having "wise-heartedness,'' a term that connotes "artistic creativity'' and is later applied to Solomon, the builder of the temple (20–21). The tabernacle and the temple are set apart, made holy, by their remarkable beauty. Yet beauty can also be corrupted to lesser ends and so serve idolatry. Jeffrey identifies 14 Hebrew words used to express different kinds of beauty, and traces their nuanced uses. Jeffrey hypothesizes that the New Testament's comparative inattention to beauty may be influenced by the Septuagint, which muted the Hebrew range of terms, but the larger cause is that "the primary Classical Greek word for beauty, kalos,'' is used in the New...