What is Beauty?: Interdisciplinary

INTERDISCIPLINARY ESSAYS

What is Beauty?: Interdisciplinary Engagement Between Interior Design and Philosophical Theology

Lisa Simpson Campbell, Assistant Professor of Interior Design Robert P. Mills, Instructor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, College of Arts & Sciences

There are three things that will never die: truth, goodness and beauty. These are the three things we all need, and need absolutely, and know we need, and know we need absolutely. … For these are the only three things that we never get bored with, and never will, for all eternity, because they are three attributes of God.1

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” is a postmodern article of faith. But, is it true? For four years, faculty members serve as mentors, provide constructive criticism, and walk alongside interior design students as they prepare to enter their professional adolescence. Now, armed with a hard-earned diploma, raw talent, and a burning desire, new graduates of such creative disciplines are often faced with doubts about the meaning and value culture puts on their creative endeavors. The question might be asked, “Is beauty merely in the eye of the subjective beholder, or can artists and designers objectively critique their own work?” Or, perhaps, “Are there really principles that exist outside the culture and classroom, standards God has given to show us beauty as well as goodness and truth?” Today’s Christians are not the first to ask such questions.

Beauty in Athens

Hundreds of years before Jesus walked the earth, Plato and Aristotle considered the nature of beauty. While both philosophers insisted beauty is objective, they came to their conclusions from different angles. For Plato, the objectivity of beauty was rooted in the eternal realm of “the Forms,” a realm outside of space and time that would exist even if humanity did not. Here we find the Ideal Forms, which include such material objects as tables and chairs, and the transcendental qualities of truth, goodness, and beauty. Although Aristotle rejected the realm of the Forms, he still thought of beauty as objective. He wrote, “The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree.”2 Because beautiful objects possess these properties, Aristotle suggested, not only was beauty objective, but math could help evaluate the beauty of an object.

In the Bible, God reveals Himself to be the ultimate standard of goodness and truth (Ps 100:5; John 14:6). In creation God shows us His glory, which we recognize as beauty. Using the standards displayed by God, students are taught to employ principles of design –

including balance, harmony, and rhythm – to achieve the goals of their project.

We see God’s designs are all around us. We observe the Fibonacci Spiral in the placement of seeds on the head of a sunflower, we see rhythm in the waves lapping on the shore, and we are taught about harmonious color schemes every evening at sunset. The standards we universally recognize as beautiful are grounded in the nature of God and displayed in His creation. They are standards of perfection that provide a litmus test for beauty when harnessed by the designer.

Why, then, do some people say they find an object “beautiful” while others look on with disbelief? First, we have to recognize that our appreciation of an object is not the same as the object being beautiful. You may not like Jackson Pollock’s crystallographic art, or you may find Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa a disappointment, but their symmetry and use of colors are technically beautiful. Until the Enlightenment, the objective view of beauty prevailed among both secular philosophers and Christian theologians. Affirming the objective quality of beauty, Augustine wrote, “Things are not beautiful because they give pleasure; but they give pleasure because they are beautiful.”3 Centuries later, Aquinas described beauty as “that which pleases when seen.” He also identified three conditions of beauty: perfection or unimpairedness, proportion or harmony, and brightness or clarity.4

Beauty in the Enlightenment

The Enlightenment spurred a steady shift from objective to subjective views of beauty. Immanuel Kant said beauty is that which gives us “disinterested pleasure,” sheer delight free from the intellectual activity of understanding. Kant distinguished between the subjective nature of aesthetic judgments and the objective nature of sensory experience. He insisted all appraisals of beauty are “judgments of taste.” And a judgment of taste, he writes, is one “whose determining ground can be no other than subjective.”5 In today’s terms, although Kant would not have put it quite this way, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

Kant’s separation of beauty from goodness and truth reverses the views of philosophers, theologians, and artists from the previous two millennia. His aesthetic theories also contradict the Bible’s teachings about beauty.

Beauty in God’s World

Nowhere does the Bible even hint, let alone declare, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Nowhere does the Old or New Testament proclaim that beauty is subjective. One place the implicit assumption of beauty’s objectivity becomes explicit is at the outset of Isaiah 28. There, Ephraim’s capital city, Samaria, is described in terms of “the fading flower of its glorious beauty.” Isaiah doesn’t say, “the fading flower that I personally happen to think is really, really beautiful.” He doesn’t say “the fading flower that some of the people who live there describe as beautiful.” Instead, he makes an objective statement: Samaria possesses the quality of “glorious beauty,” albeit beauty fading like that of a flower plucked from a garden and put in a vase. God’s glory is one of God’s characteristics, which is to say that beauty is part of God’s nature. Since truth and goodness also belong to God’s nature, Christians cannot meekly accept cultural misbeliefs about beauty without thereby undermining their efforts to defend the biblical understandings of goodness and truth.

When Liberty University graduates go out into the world as painters or writers, musicians or interior designers, they should be able to proclaim with confidence that beauty – like goodness and truth – is not in the eye of the beholder, but is grounded in the nature of God. From reading Aristotle and Aquinas, we learn to see God’s principles of design in ratios like the Golden Mean and Fibonacci series. From reading Plato and Augustine we understand how standards of beauty are anchored in something (or Someone) that lies beyond individual taste and preference. By intentionally incorporating the standards of beauty God has shown us in creation, interior designers and other artists cannot be assured that everyone will like their work. But by coupling an intimate understanding of God’s elements of design with the discipline of rigorous self-review, they can critique their own work and be assured of its grounded, true, and real beauty.

1 “Peter Kreeft, “Lewis’s Philosophy of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty,” in, C.S. Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness and Beauty, ed. David Baggett, Gary R. Habermas, and Jerry L. Walls (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2008), p. 23.

2 Cited in Frederick Copleston, A History of Western Philosophy: Vol. 1: Greece and Rome (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1946), p. 254.

3 Cited in Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, II/1, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1970), p. 656.

4 Thomas Aquinas, Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, vol. I, ed. Anton C. Pegis (New York: Random House, 1945), p. 46 and elsewhere.

5 Cited in Jeremy Begbie, Voicing Creation’s Praise: Towards a Theology of the Arts (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), p. 190.