The Transcendentals: Beauty

Over the next few posts, I wanted to write about something called the Transcendentals. These are fundamental principles or attributes of reality due to the divine eternal attributes of God and how He as creator instills Himself into His creation. Those transcendentals consist of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. Today I want to begin thinking about beauty.

Lately, I have been rereading a book by Clyde Kilby called “C.S. Lewis and the Image of His World” and I once again came across this quote that has always spoken to me in such a powerful way:

“Arthur Grieves has suggested that the beauty of the world is to some degree an evidence of God. From the London hospital where he’s recuperating, Lewis took vigorous hold of this idea and pressed it further than Arther had imagined. ‘Precisely where,’ Lewis asked, ‘does the beauty of a tree reside? Like every other physical object, a tree is made up of atoms, and atoms are identical and without color, so, when you call a tree beautiful you are actually speaking of something other than the atoms of which it is made. A light from the vibrations in the distant sun produces a wave toward your eye. When it reaches the tissues of your eye, another vibration is set up and moves along a nerve like a telegraph wire, carrying the sensation to your brain. One sight sensation we call greens, another browns, a third, shapeliness… But there is no actual color either in the atoms of which the three is composed, or in all those vibrations. Where then does the beauty of the tree arise?

Shape. size, color, touch and the like are simply the names we call our sensation and no amount of study of them can ever bring us to the notion of beauty in the tree. Beauty, must therefore arise from some non-material relationship between the tree and myself.’ Lewis concludes that Beauty was to be explained with something in reference to something right outside time and space, and that Beauty is the call of the spirit of that something to the spirit in us.”

This view and understanding of beauty that C.S. Lewis had through his viewing of a tree is something I long for. I want to find beauty in all of creation, but I also want to strive to see the beauty of the creator as the value that ever object, moment, or place has instilled within and throughout them.