by C. Walker

The study of aesthetics bothers itself with one primary question, among others: what is beauty? For people all over the world, beauty means something seemingly different. Yet, there are things that we all consider beautiful. As well as this, it is not uncommon to hear the phrase as follows: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I believe that this phrase is a façade covering the truth of the situation. There is some semi-objective (more nuanced than simply “subjective”) aspect from which we derive a sense of beauty. To discover it, we begin with discussing a duality.

I will put forth a claim and leave it to those reading to dissever its validity, although I believe that the arguments and axioms are valid. There are two sources of beauty, and the first is love. Any instance of true love is beautiful, this is something everyone can agree upon. The widow in mourning? A kiss at midnight? The passing of a loved one? A hug from an old friend? Certainly, these are beautiful. We feel it deep within ourselves. At the same time, anything of hate is ugly. The Holocaust? The school bully? Subtle racial discrimination? An evil glare? These things are unpleasant at best and hellishly wretched at worst. The duality of beauty and ugliness helps us understand what exactly beauty is, by comprehension of the duality of love and hate. So this is the initial claim, that beauty is found in anything touched by love. It may very well be true that love is the fundamental aspect of beauty, but there is another aspect I would like to discuss.

Consider any piece of art. It was constructed dutifully and articulately, the shapes and colors chosen wisely to portray this figment of imagination, of reality. There is a sense of order imbued in the art by the artist. And consider the preferred state of living: clean. When there is no disaster, mess, dirt, scum, when there has been organization, there is order, there is, dare I say, beauty. Is a pristine sculpture not more beautiful than a dirtied and forgotten one? What about the living room swept, the kitchen sanitized, the shine of clean counters and floors, with no excess of objects strewn about, haphazard? The order of art, of cleanliness, of organization, is beautiful. Thus, witness this parallel: beauty and order, and ugliness and chaos.

Some would argue that a clean room is beautiful because it is loved. It is love that pushes for the room to be ordered as seen fit by the one doing the ordering and the loving. I am inclined to agree for the sake of the theistic argument yet to come. I will state here that while I am more interested in defining what exactly beauty is, I am more so interested in simply proposing the theistic argument which is yet to come; I enjoy the idea of the argument more than its actual legitimacy. I could even say I love the idea of it — because it is beautiful!

Beauty is recognized in the sense of order one witnesses in the world, as well as through acts of love. There is an argument to be made about the parallel of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness, and of order and chaos. I will allow this paper to remain rudimentary with regards to being detailed and exact towards these parallels and their significance. Simply that beauty is found where there is order or where there is love is the argument being made. Even consider the messy room of a messy mind; to them, they know where almost everything is. The room is a normalcy which they come home to every day. Thus, though there is an objective dirtiness and disorder, for the person who inhabits the room, there is a sense of order, and thus, some beauty. Even the breaking of order can be orderly, and thus, beautiful. Cycles, in their cyclicality, are beautiful for this reason, especially when they relate to that which we all inherently love so much, this being life itself. Consider the wildfire that ravages a forest. It allows for a new forest to flourish, and the activity itself is part of a larger ecological cycle. Consider the romanticization of the setting and rising sun. This romanticization is an inherent activity. It is imperative that I also point out, while I explained that dirt, scum, and disaster are objectively ugly, it is when dirt or decay is recognized within a structured system (for example, the decay of a tree in the woods is beautiful in its role in the cycle of nature) that dirt and decay can be beautiful.

A quick aside: while I have made the claim that something is beautiful because it is loved or touched by love, this does not nullify the fact that something is loved because it is beautiful. Perhaps it is the initial order of the loved thing or person which draws another in to love them, and as such, there is a larger ordered ecosystem set in place where the environment is inhabited by these lovers or love-touched objects or beings. So love could be another façade over the truth of the reality of beauty, which is that core idea of the duality of beauty and order. I started this paper by proposing that love and order are two separate ideas which are fundamentally sources of beauty, but perhaps order is more fundamental than love and love is incited by order, perhaps as a way to order one’s life, perhaps by the physical order of the loved person or thing, the shapes and colors. Or, love is more fundamental, and it is this idea which will catapult us into the theistic argument.

This is my proposition on beauty. It is more complex than “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” If the ideas I have proposed are to be taken with seriousness, now consider the inherent beauty of nature itself. The world, and the universe, is undoubtedly beautiful. The vast cosmos, the solar system, the deep ocean, the soaring clouds, the animals, the molecules, and humanity itself: beautiful. Based on what I have proposed, the universe is either beautiful because of its order or because it is loved. Or, both. I have not completely convinced you through this essay, or myself while writing it, of the relationship of the beauty of order and the beauty of love, and thus, there is a possibility of any instance of order causing or being caused by love, in some definition. Still, I will end this essay with a final proposition derived from the idea that love is the fundamental aspect of beauty: perhaps the inherent beauty of the world is as such because some almighty God the Father loved it in creating it and loves it still now. Ultimately, I would dare argue that in order to be beautiful, nature has to be inherently loved, and there is no great entity that can possibly love nature and the universe in its entirety besides the entity of the Abrahamic God. It must be the Abrahamic God because of His all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful properties. Only an entity that is above the universe (or created it) possibly has the power to love it in its entirety. As well as this, if He does not know every small natural detail and every large natural object, He cannot possibly love it. You cannot love that which you are not aware of. Then there is His loving nature; this is why He loves the universe as opposed to hates it. This is me purporting the possibility that in order to make sense of the natural beauty of the universe, we must conclude that God is real, for He loved the universe in its creation and still now, granting it that aspect of “natural” beauty.

I recognize the parallels of my argument with Aristotle (and possibly Swinburne) but these are the ideas as they came to my mind and how I desire to present them. I agree that my argument is not revolutionary or new, but it is the conclusion that I came to by my own means.