Plato wrote, “Beauty alone has this privilege, to be the most clearly visible and the most loved.” In the Symposium, Plato writes about a ladder of love. First, an individual becomes attracted to a particular beautiful person. Next, the individual sees that beauty is possessed by other persons, by nature, and by society. Finally, an individual can arrive at “beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting . . . without diminution and without increase, or any change”
But what exactly is beauty? St. Thomas Aquinas taught that the beautiful is something pleasant to apprehend. He also taught that the greatest pleasure is enjoyed in heaven where the saints see God face to face. God is therefore the ultimate beauty because God gives the greatest pleasure when seen. Indeed, Thomas Aquinas argued that God is the true, the good, and the beautiful, the unity of the Forms sought by Plato.
Eleonore Stump, in her essay “Beauty as a Road to God,” notes, “Very few people, maybe hardly any people, come to God because they are convinced by a proof. As far as I can see, people come to God because of something else entirely, not because of some convincing argument for God’s existence but rather because of some desire or yearning in them.” This seems right. For every Edward Feser or C.S. Lewis who comes to belief in God through philosophical argument, there are thousands of people whose faith in God is kindled by the beauty of holding a sleeping child.
Since the road to God is always a personal one, Stump points out, “Something will be a road to God for a person only in case it goes from the spiritual or psychological or moral place where that person is to the one objective destination which is God. And so although a road to God will have one fixed ending point, it will have as many different beginning points as there are people engaged in the process of coming to God.” Paul McCartney’s “Let It Be” might be helpful for one person to move toward God (given her location) but not another person. As Stump puts it, “A road to God has to start where the person traveling that road is. So only what you find beautiful can be the beauty which is a road to God for you.”
Beauty perceptible to the senses moves us to the goodness of God, who is himself beautiful, if we only have heart to see it.
The road to God leads not to a physical place like Seattle but to a personal relationship like a marriage. Our relationships come in degrees of intimacy; we can be more or less close to God, as we can be more or less close to anyone else. Stump writes, “You cannot get a personal relationship with another person just by being in the same place as that person. You need also to have some meeting of minds and hearts, and there cannot be any such harmony of wills between a perfectly good God and a person whose will is not fixed in righteousness. It is in this way that there is distance between a human person and God.” Since God is unchangingly loving and good, the change must take place on the part of the human being. So, exactly how does Stump think that beauty can help us in our journey to a closer relationship with God?
First, beauty stokes desire. She writes:
Sometimes beauty wakes in us a desire, a great yearning, an inchoate longing for something. . . . There is a strong connection between beauty and the desire which makes a heart restless until it surrenders to God. ‘Beauty’ is a good name for what draws us when we feel such desire, when we feel restless in Augustine’s sense. When we are in the grip of that Augustinian sort of desire, we often do not know what we are yearning for. But Augustine (as well as many others in the Christian tradition) thought that if both the beauty and the desire for it are real and great, then in effect the desire is a desire which will lead to God.
Painful longing can help us move toward God to allow him more deeply into our lives.
Secondly, suffering which can take us away from God is eased by beauty, in particular that of sad music. Stump writes that this kind of “music gives us a sense of peace even in pain. It is, as it were, a redeemed pain. The whole effect is a stillness which is willing to trust God even in pain. This music thus mediates to us an acceptance of the pain in our innermost psyches. Those griefs, those failures, which might have bent us away from God in shame or anger lose some of their power to do so, in the quiet of the beauty of that music.” Beauty can melt us, ease our resistance to union with God, console us in times of suffering.
And then there is the beauty which enhances our joy and gratitude to God. Stump writes, “It is important not to forget the way in which beauty in art can be just joyful. The choral part at the end of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, for example, is a great overflowing of exuberance, of gratitude, hope, and joy. Here pain is simply absent, and there is a rush of gladness that lets us forget sorrow and trouble for a time. Gladness and joy in beauty also strengthen us for the road to God and draw us further on it.” So, beauty can be a road to God because “it arouses feelings in us which make us long for God’s presence or produce in us peace even in a fallen world or render us joyful in the good we find around us.”
Stump concludes her essay by noting, “Goodness presented to the senses is a kind of stealth bomber. It flies in under the radar of the reason to have its effect on desire, without a preemptive strike on the part of reason to stop it. By prompting pain in us, even pain of a redeemed or transcended sort, or by giving us the kind of love of goodness which is joy, beauty perceptible to the senses moves us to the goodness of God, who is himself beautiful, if we only have heart to see it.”
Stump notes, “I do not say that beauty is the road to God. There are many roads to God, and different roads are appropriate for different people.” In this insight, she echoes Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI. He was once asked, “Are there many roads to God or just one?” The future pope answered, “There are as many ways as there are people.”