Last Sunday after one of the services, a member of this congregation came up to me and asked me when I was going to address the Brooklyn Museum situation from the pulpit. It was not a surprising question. If religion is the means by which all the varied aspects of our lives get tied back together into a coherent and meaningful whole-that's what the word religion means: to tie back together-then everything is fair game when we come to church. Everything is fair game, even muddle-headed politics and mediocre art-or whatever it is you wish to call whatever it is that's going on in City Hall and in Brooklyn these days. When you look at the three principal actors in this drama, however, you'll quickly understand why I didn't rush to write a sermon: the Virgin Mary, the backside of an elephant, Rudy Giuliani. This is not a trinity that works for me.
Most of the debate surrounding this controversy reminds me why the etiquette books tell us not to discuss religion and politics in polite company. It's a point reinforced by a story related in Civilization magazine by the journalist Steven Henderson, who spent a weekend in the country with friends not long ago. On Sunday morning, as Steven tells the story, while his hosts and their other guests were still asleep, he slipped out to a service at the local Episcopal church. When he returned, everybody was up sipping coffee and deeply worshipping the morning papers. He immediately sensed that his absence had been discussed, a suspicion that was confirmed soon enough. "What did you learn in church?" someone asked him in the sing-song voice adults most often use when addressing toddlers. "Forty days have passed since Easter," Steven replied. "The priest spoke about Christ's Ascension." At which point another person wondered aloud, "When Jesus ascended, did he float up gradually, like a hot air balloon, or did he blast off like the space shuttle?"
This is a question not unlike some I have heard discussed in recent weeks concerning the artistic merit of various body parts and bodily products. Fortunately for Steven, he had the good sense to respond to the question about Jesus' ascension by asking "What's for breakfast?" Unfortunately for the public discussion of the "Sensation" exhibit, sensible voices have not dominated. Part of the problem is that public funding of the arts has always been both necessary and complicated. Art is not useful to the body politic in the same sense that, say, a bridge or a train station is useful. And if long-dead masters such as Matisse and Mozart are the only points of reference, it can be difficult to remember how vital freedom is to the process of creativity.
At our best, we give artists the freedom to carry out their duty, which is to lure us into new ways of seeing, hearing, and sensing our familiar world. Sometimes that new perspective comes to us as a result of being shocked or appalled or even disgusted. A work of art can help us remember the interpersonal and international horrors of which we as human beings are capable. Other works of art lend a luminescence to our experience by reminding us of the sublime beauty that infuses our world, if only we stop and pay attention. And it's this latter function of art-its ability to express the enduring human quest for beauty-that has captured the human imagination over the generations. That is why many people in recent weeks have been understandably opposed, not only to the works of art in question, but some even to the freedom of the museum to display it. I understand that these are complicated issues, and that good people disagree about them. But I'm concerned that some of the opposition may be short-sighted. Over the long haul, the ability of our public institutions to enable and sustain some measure of creative freedom is not a threat to our civic character, but a prerequisite to it.
Even so, while my mind believes in freedom, my soul longs for beauty. Which is why I will gladly pay my taxes, but probably spend my time in other parts of the Brooklyn Museum, or even elsewhere. Unlike other human desires, our desire for beauty is both enduring and extensive. We seek beauty in many ways and in many places. Whenever possible, we surround ourselves with beautiful objects and ornaments, beautiful sights and sounds, even-there is a gender difference here, to which I will return in a moment-beautiful faces and figures. But our desire for beauty is not like other human desires, many of which can be satisfied by the object desired. The desire for a good meal, for example, seems magically to end about the same time the meal itself ends. And the desire for a good night's sleep ends about the time morning comes, at least under most circumstances. But no matter how long beautiful things last, they cannot out-endure our longing for them. The pleasure we take in beauty is inexhaustible.
But this situation offers up an interesting question, which Elaine Scarry, a professor of aesthetics at Harvard, ponders in her short but challenging book titled On Beauty and Being Just. What is it, she asks, that a person who seeks beauty is looking for? What precisely do I hope to bring about in myself when I open myself to beauty, or even actively pursue it? When we ask the same question about other enduring objects of human aspiration-goodness, truth, justice-the answer seems rather straightforward. If we pursue goodness, we hope in so doing to make ourselves good, or at least to make ourselves better then we were. If we seek justice, we surely hope to be able one day to count ourselves among the just. If we pursue truth, we do so in order to make ourselves more knowledgeable.
The situation with beauty is less obvious, the calculus more complex. It's rather unlikely, for example, that listening to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony will improve the timbre of my voice, or that looking at a Renoir will improve my appearance, even if I look at it for a very long time. But something happens to us in our encounter with beauty, and it's worth tracing the contours of our emotional response.
Part of what we feel when confronted by beauty-let's take the example of a sublime sunset for a moment-is simple astonishment. Our hearts are filled with a new and newborn sense of awe and wonder. The sunset seems-it actually is-incomparable, unprecedented. At its most powerful, an experience of this sort gives us a "never before in the history of the world" feeling.
It's almost as though, Scarry notes, beauty has been placed here and there throughout the world to serve as small wake-up calls to our perception, spurring us to pay attention when alertness fades. Through its beauty, the world continually challenges us to a rigorous standard of careful attentiveness. Even if we do not search out beauty on our own, the flowers and faces, the silhouettes and the skies, the clouds and the countenances will come and find us. They will astonish us and fill us with wonder that we have been graced with such a rare and precious gift.
But that leads to another question, which asks about beauty itself. What precisely is it that can elicit such a profound and deeply felt response in us? Think for a moment about several recent experiences of beauty in your own life. What do those experiences have in common-not in terms of your emotional reaction, but in terms of whatever it was out there that caused you to respond in that way. In other words, what is the essence of beauty itself? Scarry, casting her academic eye over centuries past, contends that the attribute most steadily singled out to define beauty has been symmetry-a sense of balance and proportion. She rightly points out that we hear those qualities in great music-Bach is a ready example-and we see them in beautiful paintings and beautiful buildings, as well as in beautiful faces.
While Scarry may well be descriptively right, I think her way of putting it fails to do justice to the power of our experience. Words like symmetry, balance, and proportion may quicken your pulse, but they leave me feeling a little like I'm in architecture class. Nonetheless, they do point toward the sense that, in the midst of the chaos and clamor of our lives, an ideal of some sort does exist. When an experience of beauty enables us to see even a hint of that ideal, a hint of what can be possible in this world and in our lives, we have one of those genuine "Oh, my god!" moments.
Which is why, Scarry argues, the experience of beauty has built-in consequences. And those consequences are best captured in our language by a single word, "fairness," which is used both to refer to the loveliness of a face and to refer to the ethical requirements for being fair, playing fair, fair distribution. Beauty issues a call to those who encounter it; beauty creates a compact with those who experience it. It is a call to symmetry and equality: not just in our art, but also in our relations with each other and with our world. Or, as Scarry says in her title, it is a call to being just.
If that is true, however, it's crucial to ask why beauty has been so profoundly oppressive to women in our culture. Maybe it's our double standard. While men have relatively low standards when it comes to their own beauty or lack thereof (I know very few men who even want to be beautiful), most men tend to expect women at least to strive for the ideal of a perfect face and a perfect figure. But at the level of what they mean, a beautiful face has almost nothing in common with a beautiful painting. A painting is essentially what the paint looks like, but a woman is not essentially what her face looks like. But men often act as if that is the case, reacting to women based not on who they are essentially, but on what they look like superficially. That's how women come to be treated like objects: when men react merely to a face or a figure-to what a woman looks like superficially, rather than to who she is are essentially.
That said, I still think it is true that our experience of beauty is the best intimation we have of life at its best. And the experience does have consequences. What a glimpse of the ideal should elicit in us is a profound dissatisfaction with our world as it is. At its best, beauty confronts and confounds us, pressing, insistent, directing our attention toward what is absent in our world: symmetry, proportion, balance, equality, justice.
Henri Matisse said repeatedly throughout his life that he wanted his paintings to be so beautiful that when one came upon them, all problems would subside. That's it, precisely: the experience of beauty makes problems go away, in both senses. At its most powerful, beauty both transfixes and transforms us. To be swept away by the passion of a Verdi opera is to become tirelessly impatient with a world where so many children have so little hope. To be stopped short by the simple calm of a Constable landscape is to recognize that anger and hostility have no place in human relations. To be captivated by the elegant symmetry of a Bach fugue is to know the obscene dissonance that hunger and poverty represent. To be riveted by an exuberantly colored butterfly is to know that we must stand strong against those who would crush the fragile and oppress the weak.
But knowledge is not action, nor will awareness alone make a difference. What is called for is courage. As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Screwtape Letters, "Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." Courage is the form of every virtue at the testing point. And that point comes when beauty calls out to us, and we know that the world within and around us is out of balance, that equality is missing and justice hard to find. That's when we need courage-courage to sign up, speak out, lend a hand, make a difference.
After all, as Annie Dillard wrote in Holy The Firm, "there is no one but us. There is no one to send, not a clean hand or a pure heart on the face of the earth or in the earth-only us unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and uninvolved. But there is no one but us. There has never been."
This world is filled with splendor, some of it created by human beings, much of it given to us as a gift. Our duty is to allow it to transfix us and transform us. And then, as Matisse said, all of our problems will begin to go away. Copyright AllSouls 1999.