Beauty
The mild triumph of crucified love
How do I define Beauty? Although I’ve written a book about the role Beauty plays in our lives, for a long time I hesitated to define the concept directly, and for two reasons. First, I was more interested in that amazing, recurring overall pattern in which Beauty played the starting, or catalyzing role. In shapes like the following we see clear parallels in our approaches to knowing, learning, spiritual communion, and discipleship:
Beauty; Goodness; Truth
Grammar; Dialectic; Rhetoric
Purification; Illumination; Deification
Show ‘em; Train ‘em; Tell ‘em Secrets.
The recurrence of this beautiful pattern, and the power of its dark archetype in trauma (where ugliness expressing malice seems to give the final word on reality), seemed to me to be the main story. It can’t be insignificant that this unfolding shape occurs so centrally.
And since writing the book, I’ve discovered that Iain McGilchrist has actually discovered the neuroscience which underlies all this. For he describes the right hemisphere of the brain—in almost all creatures which have brains—as dealing with wholes, while the left hemisphere specializes in parts. And McGilchrist insists on an approach to thinking about the world that follows a Right Brain; Left Brain; back to Right Brain unfolding. This, he says, is the only way to get at reality accurately.
Thus, the Beauty, Goodness, Truth unfolding almost certainly is related to this basic physiology within our minds. It’s not just really cool, it’s also neuroscience.
As for defining “Beauty” itself, I figured when I wrote The Ethics of Beauty that people would sort of know it when they see it, and that would be enough for my purposes. In other words, my second reason for not trying to define Beauty more directly, was just to keep readers firmly within their own experience.
