Beauty is not decoration. It is one of the ways God is known. The created order is built to be beautiful, and the response that beauty produces in a healthy soul — wonder, gratitude, longing — is the response God wants from his creatures more often than he gets it. Screens and tools that render or transmit beauty inherit a powerful good and a particular bend. The good can travel further than it ever has. The bend, also, can travel further than it ever has.
The Created Good
The Psalms are perhaps the clearest place to begin. The created world is testimony. Its testimony is beauty.
…
The heavens declare. The sky has speech. Beauty here is not a private aesthetic preference; it is revelation. The creature beholds the creation and is moved toward its Source.
Isaiah's vision in the temple makes the same move from the other direction. The seraphim, themselves bright, cry to one another about a glory that fills the whole earth.
…
There is no neutral patch of creation. All of it is participating in something that has weight, that produces awe, that pulls the eye upward.
Even Israel's priestly garments are made for glory and for beauty — the very phrase is preserved twice in Exodus:
…
Made things — woven, dyed, embroidered things — can carry glory. There is no canonical squeamishness about objects being beautiful. The opposite. The deeper temptation is under-valuing the beauty of made things, not over-valuing it.
In Scripture
Paul gives the most striking single sentence about where beauty is finally going. The light of the new covenant, he says, shines in a face.
…
The glory of God is, in the end, in the face of Christ. All other beauty is rehearsal for that face. The sunset is real. The painting is real. The well-set table is real. They are also signs — beautiful in themselves, and beautiful because they trace a deeper Beautiful who is a Person.
Christ at the Center
Christ is the form of beauty itself. He is the one in whom every right loveliness participates and toward whom every right loveliness points. A landscape, a face, a chord, a building, a poem — all are beautiful because they are made through him (Col 1:16) and they all point back through themselves to him for those who have eyes to see.
This is why a Christian aesthetic can never be merely consumerist. Beauty is not a product. It is a window.
In the New Creation
The picture of the new creation is, throughout, beautiful — and the beauty is never severed from its Source. The city has "the glory of God for its light." The bride is described as adorned for her husband. The fruit is described as good for food and pleasant to the eye, like Eden's. Nothing of created loveliness is left outside the gates. It is, every bit of it, transfigured.
The Distortion
A screen can carry creation, art, and the face of Christ — windows on glory more available, more often, to more people, than any prior generation knew. That is no small thing. A bedbound believer can see a sunset she could not have seen. A village without a stained-glass window can see one. The gospel can be set in beautifully-typed words and travel.
The distortion is not the absence of beauty. It is the severing of beauty from its source. Four characteristic bends:
The first is curated glamour — beauty arranged for the consumption of the eye that has already decided not to be lifted past the surface. The point of glamour is not that you see through it; the point is that you stop at it. The beauty becomes the destination.
The second is objectification — the body as image-for-others. Pornography is the limit case, but the same logic runs through nearly every aestheticized social platform: the person becomes a beautiful thing for the gaze of strangers, and the gaze of strangers becomes the standard the person uses to evaluate themselves.
The third is aesthetic-as-engagement-bait — beauty algorithmically tuned not to lift the eye toward God but to hold the eye on the platform. The aesthetic is doing real work, but the work it is doing is keeping you. There is no destination.
The fourth, the deepest, is beauty severed from its Source and consumed for its own sake. A whole aesthetic life can be built that never thanks anyone. The art is real. The taste is real. The taste is also a substitute for worship.
On the Screen
The diagnostic move is to ask, of any beauty-heavy use: does this lift my eyes past itself to God — or stop at itself? The test is in the response. Beauty that participates in glory produces a particular response: gratitude. It tilts you toward thanks. Beauty that has been severed from glory produces a different response: desire to consume more of it. It tilts you toward acquisition.
If a use ends in thanks, even small thanks, it is a window. If a use ends in more, please, it is closing the trace.
Go Deeper
- Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord — the seminal Catholic treatment of beauty as one of the transcendentals.
- Tony Reinke, Competing Spectacles — how screens substitute manufactured glamour for the glory they were partly built to display.
- Scripture — Ps 19:1; Isa 6:3; Ex 28:2; 2 Cor 4:6.
- Related node — Light, the participation good closest to beauty (because all beauty enters by the eye, and what enters the eye fills the whole person).