Beauty: A Very Short Introduction
by Roger Scruton reviewed by Erin Doom
Feast of St Jason & Sosipater the Apostles of the 70 & Their Companions
Anno Domini 2020, April 29
Beauty: A Very Short Introduction
by Roger Scruton
Roughly divided into two parts, Scruton begins by exploring four categories of beauty – human, natural, everyday, and artistic – and then ends with an apologetic for the pursuit of beauty. Underlying the entire work is the key question of judgment: Is the judgment of beauty subjective and relative, or is there a rational grounding based on a real and universal value. Or, posed in Scruton’s terms in the Preface, “since it is in the nature of tastes to differ, how can a standard erected by one person’s taste be used to cast judgment on another’s? How, for example, can we pretend that one type of music is superior or inferior to another when comparative judgments merely reflect the taste of the one who makes them?” Scruton unabashedly asserts that beauty is a “real and universal value, one anchored in our rational nature.” And he defends his claim by approaching the question philosophically, turning to philosophers as his primary sources of defense. The climax of this short apologetic is the penultimate chapter titled “The Flight from Beauty” in which Scruton examines the modern repudiation of beauty. According to Scruton, “It is not merely that artists, directors, musicians, and others connected with the arts are in flight from beauty. There is a desire to spoil beauty, in acts of aesthetic iconoclasm.” Why such vehement desire to desecrate beauty? According to Scruton, because “beauty makes a claim on us: it is a call to renounce our narcissism and look with reverence on the world.” Wide is the gate and broad is the road of flight and desecration that leads to destruction; small is the gate and narrow the road of renunciation and reverence that leads to life, and only a few find it (cf. Matt. 7:13-14). May we choose our way wisely so that we may be, with Sir Roger Scruton, among the few who submit to the hard claims of beauty.
Still not persuaded? I'll let Sir Roger Scruton seal the deal. Here is his full Preface:
Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.
Yet judgments of beauty concern matters of taste, and maybe taste has no rational foundation. If so, how do we explain the exalted place of beauty in our lives, and why should we lament the fact – if fact it is – that beauty is vanishing from our world? And is it the case, as so many writers and artists since Baudelaire and Nietzsche have suggested, that beauty and goodness may diverge, so that a thing can be beautiful precisely in respect of its immorality?
Moreover, since it is in the nature of tastes to differ, how can a standard erected by one person’s taste be used to cast judgment on another’s? How, for example, can we pretend that one type of music is superior or inferior to another when comparative judgments merely reflect the taste of the one who makes them?
That familiar relativism has led some to dismiss judgments of beauty as purely “subjective.” No tastes can be criticized, they argue, since to criticize one taste is simply to give voice to another; hence there is nothing to learn or to teach that could conceivably deserve the name of “criticism.” This attitude has put in question many of the traditional disciplines in the humanities. The studies of art, music, literature, and architecture, freed from the discipline of aesthetic judgment, seem to lack the firm anchor in tradition and technique that enabled our predecessors to regard them as central to the curriculum. Hence the current “crisis in the humanities”: is there any point in studying our artistic and cultural inheritance, when the judgment of its beauty has no rational grounds? Or if we do study it, should this not be in a skeptical spirit, by way of questioning its claims to objective authority, and deconstructing its posture of transcendence?
When each year the Turner prize, founded in memory of England’s greatest painter, is awarded to yet another bundle of facetious ephemera, is this not proof that there are no standards, that fashion alone dictates who will and who will not be rewarded, and that it is pointless to look for objective principles of taste or a public conception of the beautiful? Many people answer yes to these questions, and as a result renounce the attempt to criticize either the taste or the motives of the Turner-prize judges.
In this book I suggest that such skeptical thoughts about beauty are unjustified. Beauty, I argue, is a real and universal value, one anchored in our rational nature, and the sense of beauty has an indispensable part to play in shaping the human world. My approach to the topic is not historical, neither am I concerned to give a psychological, still less an evolutionary, explanation of the sense of beauty. My approach is philosophical, and the principal sources for my argument are the works of philosophers. The point of this book is the argument that it develops, which is designed to introduce a philosophical question and to encourage you, the reader, to answer it.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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