BEAUTY IS OBJECTIVE:

This article is adapted from Chapter 4 of Margarita Mooney Suarez's new book, The Wounds of Beauty: Seven Dialogues on Art and Education (Cluny Media, 2022).

In this discussion, Mooney Suarez and Wilson reflect on the nature of beauty, particularly the idea that beauty offers a path to self-transcendence by helping us to see our participation in reality and thereby leading us to participate in a truth that's greater than ourselves. [...]

Mooney Suarez: One stereotype about beauty is that it is only for the elite. But as Hans Urs von Balthasar said, a world without beauty is a world without love. And without love, we don't have hope.

Wilson: One of the glories of Plato's dialogue, the Phaedrus, is its suggestion that an encounter with beauty is supposed to remind us of our vision of the splendor of truth, the form and splendor, the vision of the forms in the eternal place of being. One way to think about what it means to encounter or perceive beauty is that what seems initially unfamiliar can, in fact, become deeply familiar.

Plato says that our souls have fallen into the body and are straining to grow wings, to go back up to the place of being, where the soul's vision saw Beauty itself which is all the splendor of truth. But I think that we recognize that an encounter with form, with the way in which being discloses itself as having a form to give itself away, to be known, to be desired, and to be perceived, is an experience of the world as an intelligible mystery. Every culture has known and cherished this encounter with mystery; ours is aberrant because it tries to reduce mystery to something less than itself.

Beauty tells us this cannot finally be done. The mystery of being in its fullness, so strange and difficult, is also something that is somehow familiar to us. We think, "I've seen you around someplace before," and feel a magnetic attraction to what is at once so ancient and so new.

As we encounter a truth, we place that truth into a broader sense of the cosmos as an orderly reality. Then, we also sense that when we encounter some particular thing, we can enter through its contemplation into a contemplation of that broader order. To perceive the whole order of things, from top to bottom, from the particular to the universal, is what the ancients called wisdom. Beauty, you might say, is the objective correlative proper to reality itself that corresponds to the subjective virtue of wisdom.

The role of the arts in particular, whether visual or literary or otherwise, is to communicate the fact that things are good in themselves. By drawing attention to the formedness of the thing, the artist leads the eye of the mind through this particular formed thing into a deeper encounter with mystery--which is a deeper encounter with the fact that there's something rather than nothing, that things simply are, that things are formed and that they are intelligible and desirable, and yet they're always a part of something bigger and greater than themselves. They don't exist merely in themselves but always in relation to other things, and to the cosmos. Beauty is what we see; wisdom is what we obtain when we see it fully.

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