When we look out into the world and reflect on its beauty are we making a claim that beauty exists outside of our mind. That beauty is more than just our inner awe of what we experience. Are we saying that an object is beautiful just because we think it is?
Our postmodern world would tell us that there is no inherent meaning or signification in the things of the world. So where does the desire, that longing feeling to worship an object find its connection. Is our desire of beauty just an empty concept we use to label a chaotic world. Is our longing a longing of nothing beautiful in itself?
David Hart in his book “The Beauty of the Infinite” says that beauty evokes desire. So if beauty does not exist in the world independent of our minds then what is it that has evoke our desires. To answer this we must look at what beauty is and why it attracts.
Have you every read a good book, which told such a beautiful story that it drawed you into its wonder and evoked desires from you of its beauty and goodness? If you have you know that the beauty is not in the book or in the ink on the pages, but transcends into the mind of the Author. Weather it’s a book or a song in which we thought the beauty was located, it will betray us if we trust in them, it was not in them, it only came through them and what came through them was longing.
As a book can make us want to connect to the beauty of the Author, this world is like a book written by the finger of God. Reflecting, representing and describing its maker. Creation is like another text, it has layers of meaning and points or signifies beyond itself. Beauty is a manifestation of a mind that evokes absolute awe and desire to be consumed and satisfied. If you reject this, then we are left we humans just thinking on their abstract thoughts which are desires relating to nothing that is beautiful. To talk of impersonal beauty would mean it has no form. Our ability to judge some thing as beautiful is a sign of our bearing God’s image, because these judgments point to an absolute Beauty. The visible world is made after an invisible mind who has made every thing good. Creation is a self-revelation of the personal Creator God.
The physical things take their image and design and structure from the artistic creations of God’s mind. Every structure and form is a sign pointing to its ontological source (God). As we look past a physical book of matter and go beyond it, so we should be moved beyond nature and see the master designer who has shined himself through all to evoke a longing that will draw us to his absolute beauty, goodness and love.
The one difference between a book and ourselves is that we don’t just look past people and just see God, we value each person for who they are as image bearers and then worship the creator who has made us. If you have a beautiful spouse you have a gift, but your gift also is reflecting back to its giver (the creator) who is the original author and mind of all beauty as he is the absolute desire that we all need to be complete in. God evokes desires so we will be drawn into his glory and love. The rest of creation is beautiful too but draws us beyond its physical nature.
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4 comments:
Oh dear, oh dear - this is what happens, I guess, when one presupposes all the questionable premises of one's view: one loses one's intellectual acuity. "Beauty evokes desire" is not the same as "without beauty, there would be no desire," just like "flooding makes streets wet" doesn't mean "without flooding, streets would never be wet." So beauty can very much be subjective at the same time as humans desiring things. Or, of course, your author could just be wrong: I think space is beautiful, but it hardly evokes desire in me.
Thanks for your comment. I would never say that one cannot have a subjective thought of beauty. But just maybe beauty does exist outside our minds and is not just a random subjective concept that has been produced by the irrational blind forces of evolution which you believe produced your rational mind.Was this concept produced by irrational determinism or absolute freedom without any causes? Both i would say are irrationaland de-values any rational purpose for beauty.
I would like to think that my thoughts correspond to a rational, meaningful world. That my thoughts are thinking God's thoughts (God;s interpretation of reality)on a finite level.
You may wish to think that reasoning upon your reasons establishes absolute Truth, but thats to subjective for me to base all truth on that...
I would also like to add, if you deny that reality as a whole has a rational interpretation to it, then the world is impersonal and irrational.
Could you tell me what logic can say about a impersonal irrational world? What can your sujective experiences tell you about the impersonal, maybe just another subjective experience of your mental states of which you say are here by chance produced by random chemicals in the brain of which you are not in control of.
If Logic and experiences do not relate to the objecive world in any rational sense, then we are lost in the subjective.
Also your logic game fails because I didnt say that a thought had to correspond to objective beauty every time to establish the existence of beauty. Of course we could have a subjective concept of beauty in a dream.
Yes Richard, you have put so much more elequently what I also have tried to express in my post http://struth-his-or-yours.blogspot.com/2008/05/yes-this-is-true.html
I hope and pray you continue this good work. Lord help us express these things in ways that are accessible to people. Amen!
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