beauty and the real

adapted from my sent folder to a friend and fellow traveler:

I wonder whether you might be seeking the beauty complement to the truth and goodness you’ve been articulating for yourself in the last few years? I don’t know anyone who’s exercised the discipline and honest analysis in pursuit of what’s true and good more than you have. You said at lunch that you’re not very imaginative; I doubt very much that that’s true, especially considering the imagination it takes just to think one’s way out of the miasma of modernity and its buffered-self defenses. Still, though: I think the beauty part of the triad gets short shrift in most discussions of it. We say that something that’s true usually comes with a kind of “elegance” about it, as in equations, or perhaps the monumentality of a landscape or the sublimity of the ocean, the pleasing symmetry of classical architecture. But for beauty to be on the same footing as truth and goodness, it has to be constitutive of the real, not just downstream effects from the “really real” of truth and goodness. I think it is the beauty of the gospel that has its hold on me more than anything else these days.

I thought about all this while listening to Malcolm Guite in this lecture that a friend linked to over the weekend. It may or may not be your thing, but I love how Guite describes the dialogical Trinity, the inherent relationality of the force behind the universe, the idea that the gospel perhaps works best as poetry, not a series of if-then propositions. Iris Murdoch says that beauty does its work by “unselfing” us — dethroning our egos in its presence in a pleasurable experience that we seek out, not an eat-your-spinach obligation. Guite’s description of the gospel is close to where my head is these days. And, bonus: he has the vest-and-pipe of the old school don. The poet and preacher, still preserved in time.