Via Amanda Witt and Wittingshire, a great post on the power and value of art on The Diary of a Former Atheist, including:
- All beauty and goodness has a living Source. In modern parlance, we call this source “God.”
- The closer we get to God, the closer we get to perfect joy.
- We have a strong tendency to drift away from God. Yet further away we get, the more unsettled and miserable we are.
- When other people drift away from God it makes our lives more difficult.
- The pleasures and comforts of the material world seem like they will make us happy, but don’t.
- We love other people, but not as much as we should.
- Acts of evil are shocking offenses to the way things should be.
- There is evidence of God in the material world, and our hearts soar when we see it.
And so on. All of these conditions are true objectively (they’re not “your truths” or “my truths”), all have been known in some way or another to every person who ever lived, and none can be discerned from the material world alone. It delights us to share our experiences of these truths with our fellow human beings, because it creates a bond that surpasses our animal instincts and connects us at the level of the soul.
The line I quoted in the title of this blog post comes from the next paragraph–but you’ll want to read the whole thing.
Art, Beauty, Truth
For those of us who have debated whether morality is objective, this blog post takes it to another level: beauty is objective, too. One reader, responding to Gene Veith’s post on Aesthetics & American Idol, writes,
“Learning to subjectively like what is objectively good at first bounced off of my 3am quick-read blog-scan. But then I realized that this exact thing happened to me and I shall anecdote-ize it thus:
“When first I approached Milton’s Paradise Lost I knew that I ’should’ treasure it as a sublime and beautiful epic of written art. But i could only (at first) force myself to appreciate it from the outside, like looking at an utterly alien thing that all others considered beautiful. You look at it sideways, squint a bit, trying to see what they see… but it is unutterably alien. Perhaps you see an angle here or there that has a symmetrical form that is pleasing, a curve here, a line there… but the whole is so beyond your current vantage point that the beauty is lost by your own unelevated perspective.
“Then, after forcing yourself to merely ‘mentally ascribe’ the designation of beauty to the form, you slowly achieve the ability to connect the slivers of recognizable traits of beauty that you CAN see from your current state.
“This is achieved in literature by reading more…. “
More at Apprehending Beauty — Cranach: The Blog of Veith
Beauty
