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Christian beauty

Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2006 1:45 pm
by Turgonian
A Christian Vision of Beauty, Part One
Albert Mohler wrote:We speak of beauty, when what we really mean is prettiness, or attractiveness, or even likeability. None of these things, however, is actually equal to beauty. Yet the popular culture increasingly confuses the artificial for the real, the pretty for the beautiful, and the untrue for the true--all of which are essentially one root confusion, as we shall see.
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A Christian understanding of beauty runs directly into the wisdom of the age by suggesting that the beautiful is simultaneously the good and the true and the real. This goes all the way back to the conversation of the ancients--especially to Plato, who understood the good, the beautiful, the true, and the real as being essentially reducible to the same thing. If there is one good, then that good must also be the true, which must also be the real, which must also be the beautiful. So the good, the beautiful, the true, and the real--the four great historical transcendentals--are unified in the One. For Plato, however, the One had no name.

Augustine, the great theologian of the patristic era, identified the One as the one true and living God. Taking Plato's metaphysical speculations into the very heart of the Gospel, Augustine suggested that Christians uniquely understand that the good, the beautiful, the true, and the real, are indeed one, because they are established in the reality of the self-revealing God--the triune God of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He alone is beautiful, He alone is good, He alone is true, and He alone is real. That is not to suggest that nothing else reflects beauty or truth or goodness. It is simply to say that He alone, by virtue of the fact that He is infinite in all His perfections, is the source and the judge and the end of all that is good, beautiful, true, and real. For as Paul said, from Him and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory forever, Amen.
Pick one of three options:

1) Observing a tree is better than reading a fictional novel, because the tree is true and real (= good) and the story is not true and not real (= not good).
2) Reading a fictional novel (even in the genre of fantasy) is good, because a story contains truths on a fundamental level.
3) Albert Mohler is somehow wrong here.

I pick 3, because I don't believe 1 can be true, and 2 would be the equivalent of saying 'there's some good amid a lot of evil' (= untrue things), to which the easy (and heavily fundamentalist) rebuttal would be, 'Why choose to get the good with such a lot of evil? Read the Bible / a theological book we agree with 95-100% / a history book!'