The beauty of God

The beauty of God is a deeply unfashionable topic in theological circles. Most Protestant systematic theologies do not mention God's beauty when covering the divine attributes.

Why should a Christian believe that God is beautiful? The Scriptures testify to God's beauty, cf., e.g. Psalm 27.4: 'One thing I ask of the LORD, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to seek him in his temple.' Or cf. Psalm 90.17: 'May the beauty of the Lord our God rest upon us.'

Many of the modern hymns and songs of the Christian tradition talk of the beauty of God. If one accepts that God is an absolutely perfect being, then one should ascribe to God every perfection. It certainly seems to me that beauty is a perfection. Hence I think one should ascribe beauty to God.

Is beauty objective?

What is beauty? The first question one has to face is whether beauty is a real, objective, property of things, or whether it is, as people say, in the eye of the beholder.

I do not think it is plausible to suggest that beauty is a property of the beholder rather than that which is beheld, that when nobody is looking at The Mona Lisa, when, for example, the Louvre is closed, it ceases to be beautiful. And I certainly do not think that it is possible that something be beautiful with respect to one person and not beautiful with respect to another, as 'the eye of the beholder' view would have it. This is particularly implausible where God is concerned: it would be outrageous for one to say of the psalmist's affirmations of God's beauty, quoted earlier, that God was beautiful for him but not for one.

On the other hand, there are well-known arguments against the view that beauty is an objective property. One is that there is much difference of opinion concerning beauty. Although much is made of these differences, there are also remarkable agreements, e.g. very few people are willing to claim that Michelangelo's David or Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is ugly, and most agree that it is beautiful. In any case, the argument seems to me to be of little weight: there are differences of opinion in most fields of life-philosophy, history, geography, even physics. Yet most people think that these disciplines are objective and in pursuit of an absolute mind-independent truth.

Similarly, arguments purporting to show that our aesthetic agreements are culturally conditioned prove nothing of interest. These go to show merely that our views are caused by certain mundane factors; but this fact suggests nothing about whether our views are true or false. Finally, I think that all our value concepts should be treated alike: if one thinks that moral statements are a matter of real, objective truth or falsity, one should think the same about statements about beauty too.

An anatomy of beauty

But can we define beauty in more detail? Thomas Aquinas, apparently following Aristotle, held that beauty consisted in three things: (a) integrity or completeness (b) right proportion or harmony and (c) clarity or radiance. I think that the possession of one these factors is sufficient for the possession of beauty. A complete collection of books is beautiful because of its completeness. A geometric figure, say of a regular dodecahedron, is beautiful because of its proportion, a D major chord in music is beautiful because of the harmony of the notes of which it is composed. Finally, a shaft of summer light is beautiful because of its radiance, and the pureness of a note of music, (played on the trumpet, for example), is beautiful because of its clarity.

I think that these examples show that the presence of one of these three elements, (a)-(c), is sufficient for beauty. For present purposes, I shall be satisfied if I can show that God has at least one of (a)-(c).

Invisible God

The most obvious difficulty in showing that God has at least one of (a)-(c) is that God is not physical. Most of our everyday talk of beauty concerns the physical. A Christian might well reply at this point that the doctrine of the Incarnation states that one of the persons of the Trinity has actually possessed a body for part of the world's history. Gerard Manley Hopkins considered Jesus' body as seen in Palestine two millennia ago to be a locus of divine beauty, but this flies in the face of the witness of the prophets, as Isaiah said: 'He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.' (Isaiah 53.2b)

So does it make sense to speak of something non-physical as beautiful? Yes. It makes sense to call a piece of music or a ray of light 'beautiful'. Somebody might reply that, in a sense, these things are physical. But one may call a mathematical proof 'beautiful' because various different axioms combine to achieve the desired result (and here we are definitely not thinking of the physical writing down of the proof which might be ugly in the extreme, owing to poor handwriting for example) or a personality 'beautiful' because it is rounded and each of its facets works harmoniously with each other. This latter is clearly getting closer to the case of God.

Where to look

There are two obvious places for the Christian to search for God's beauty. One is in the structure of the Trinity. The Trinity could be said to manifest integrity or wholeness, and it seems plausible to me to say that the Trinity manifests also proportion or harmony: each member of the Trinity finds his place in the whole, and supports and works alongside each of the others. It is difficult to imagine how there could be greater harmony than the mutual perfect love of the Trinity and so here there could be no greater beauty.

However, condition (c) is more difficult. What would it mean to say that the Trinity exhibited clarity or radiance? There is a sense in which simplicity exhibits clarity, mental clarity, and it is in this sense that Aristotle and Aquinas apparently intended the notion of clarity to be taken. The doctrine of the Trinity can be fully captured in two simple formulae:

* There exists exactly 1 divine substance.

* There exist exactly 3 divine persons.

The reconciliation of these two truths is by no means a simple matter, and many expositions of these truths are by no means clear. Nevertheless, the statement of the doctrine is excessively simple: it may be done in no more than 12 words. So I conclude that the Trinity demonstrates a very high level of simplicity, perhaps the maximum level possible if it is to be complete and if there is to be inter-personal harmony between the members. Overall, then, it seems as if the Trinity demonstrates a very high level of beauty, perhaps a level so high that nothing could be more beautiful.

Members of the Trinity

However, it would seem inadequate to ascribe beauty to just the Trinity as a whole, and not to its members. Why is each member of the Trinity beautiful?

Well, firstly, there is a certain sense in which each member has wholeness or completeness. This is that each divine individual will have every perfection to the maximum level. So each will have 'the complete collection' of perfections, and will in no way lack any perfection.

Secondly, each member of the Trinity demonstrates proportion or harmony because each of the attributes of the divine person enables and supports the possession of each of the others. For example, the possession of omniscience enables the possession of omnipotence to be effective: power without knowledge is of little use - how could one bring about what one intends without the knowledge that if one did a certain action, certain consequences would follow? But each divine person's attributes combine to create a harmonious collection of perfections. It is hard to think of anything demonstrating greater harmony than this, so it is, therefore, hard to think of anything exhibiting - in this respect - greater beauty.

The third condition (c) is, again, harder to ascribe to a divine person. But I think that there is a certain simplicity about the divine nature. It is simple in virtue of the fact that it consists in no more and no less than absolute perfection. Again, a very profound nature is represented by a very simple formula, here no longer than a couple of words. Indeed, it is hard to see how the divine nature could be simpler.

So it seems that each divine individual satisfies each of the three conditions and should therefore be thought of as beautiful, indeed as beautiful as can be, just as the Trinity as a whole may be thought of as as beautiful as can be. So a Christian should not be embarrassed about joining with the psalmist in proclaiming the beauty of the Lord.

Daniel Hill
Department of Theology & Religious Studies, King's College, London

Can we properly call God beautiful?