I’ve been dazed by beauty lately. And when I get dazed by something, I stare at it. I read about it. I talk to God about it. It becomes a window for viewing everything. That’s what beauty has been for me for weeks now. The question I can’t get past is the simplest one: what is beauty?
Let me throw you one definition and then work at unpacking it. Beauty is the presence of God. That’s it. But look closer. Even closer. Beauty isn’t a “thing.” It’s not a concept we extract after mashing together a group of experiences that we “like” or that “move us.” Beauty is someone being somewhere. That’s really hard to grasp, isn’t it? Maybe that’s why I’m still thinking about it.
Everything goes back to the Trinity. If you know anything about me, it’s no surprise to hear me say that. But we don’t have to go there just yet. Start with Psalm 27:4 and the plea of King David.
One thing have I asked of the Lord,
that will I seek after:
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 inquire in his temple.
“The one thing” that David wants isn’t riches or personal relationships or pleasure. It’s simply being with God, to live where God lives, to dwell where God dwells. Why? “To gaze upon the beauty of the Lord.” God is beautiful. And if we know nothing else about beauty, we know this: beauty is the glorious thing worth gazing at when we’re with God. It is something God houses in himself. If we’re in God’s presence, we’re compelled to stare at him, at his beauty.
Beauty is the glorious thing worth gazing at when we’re with God.
But what is this thing called beauty more specifically? Can we put any more content into that word? We can with the Trinity. If God is beautiful, then who is God? God is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—constantly giving themselves to each other in love and glory. Giving, receiving, enjoying, and giving again. That’s why David Bentley Hart says, “The Christian use of the word ‘beauty’ refers most properly to a relationship of donation and transfiguration, a handing over and return of the riches of being” (The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 18). Beauty is born out of the nature of the Trinity: ever-giving and ever-receiving and ever-honoring. That’s what draws our gaze. That’s what David wants to stare at forever.
In our world, this trinitarian beauty manifests itself in the unity and diversity—the relationships—flooding our senses. It’s these relationships that drew out the pen of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; dazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change.
Praise him.
See the unity? All things are fathered-forth by one God, who is changeless. And yet we find such puzzling and magnetic diversity in God’s world: the fickle and the freckled, the swift and slow, the sweet and sour. Beauty in our world is really about relationships—the connection between the uniqueness and inter-relatedness of creation—from large-mouth bass to dandelion puffs, from my grandmother’s hands to my father’s rough beard. The textures for touch and the colors for eyes and sounds of seagulls . . . beauty dances always in the embrace of uniqueness and relatedness.
Beauty dances always in the embrace of uniqueness and relatedness.
When we say, then, that “beauty is the presence of God,” that’s true. It’s the presence of the Trinity, the three-in-one, the tripersonal Spirit who houses both unity and diversity in himself. And when we look out into this world and see beautiful things and beautiful people, we have the ability to either look at them or through them to the God who gives.
Try it today. Look through something beautiful and gaze at the Trinity. That’s what David wanted. And that’s what I want, and I’m sure it’s what you long for, too.