The Way of Beauty: Part 3
Part 3: Perception & Knowing
[To make the initial lengthy contemplation more digestible, this is Part 3]
Perception & Knowing
With Part 2: Cruciform Beauty in mind, the perception of beauty, of Christ, is key here and sorely lacking in our modern industrial complex of manufactured distractions and surface-level engagements. The Greek word aesthesis means perception and is also the root word for aesthetics, with speaks to a set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty. As Eugene Terekhin writes1, the opposite of aesthetics is anesthetic (yes, that stuff you receive in the hospital) and means imperception or without sensation, and we anesthetize ourselves through modern anesthetics, through the over-use of phones, social media, Netflix, shopping, politics (you name it!) thus evading and numbing ourselves and losing the ability to perceive deep beauty.
As Christians, we should learn to perceive the cruciform love animating creation and embody this cruciformity in the light of Christ’s Resurrection, opening us up to perceive Beauty. We need to battle the idolatrous fragmentation of our desires through repentance and allow them to be re-ordered and re-calibrated. As Maximus the Confessor alludes to in the early 7th century, sinful humans are naturally meant to move toward God but are now wandering and easily led astray and so the soul’s ability to perceive creation rightly has withered2. In our modern era, we are easily led astray and deformed into consumerist busy bodies, endlessly evading ourselves. We are liturgically deformed but as James KA Smith says, even our disordered loves attest to creational desires. Prayer and creative, concrete practices such as that contained within the liturgies of the church, trains us out of idolatrous mindsets and patterns and allows us to attend to that which is the Highest, to Christ, making us open to the love and grace of God, the Ground of Being, and training us to treat our neighbour as imagio dei and then subsequently grow into His likeness with the help of His grace.
The psychiatrist and Oxford scholar Iain McGilchrist has written and spoken extensively about the “left” and “right” brain and how we are currently arguably in a left-brain dominated culture. Broadly speaking, the left hemisphere is focused on/attends to detail & attention to fragments that are decontextualised and disembodied (analytic thinking) i.e. to grasp and get, whereas the right hemisphere has a broader attention on interconnections and nuances. They are thus two modes of attending to the world. In his estimation, society has become overly dependent on the left hemisphere (in an age of reductionism) and neglecting the wiser right hemisphere. We should obviously use both in union, but as humans and civilisations and sinful ones at that, we tend to the extremes. We need the capacity to perceive beauty, to perceive the whole.
In his book Beauty for Truth’s Sake, Stratford Caldecott, a fellow countryman of mine, also speaks of the need for our perception to be sanctified and restor(i)ed, an education in the perception of form. Even for Socrates, the Greek philosopher from Athens and generally regarded as the founder of Western Philosophy,
“The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful”.
A brilliant interview with Iain McGilchrist that speaks about the importance of attention and love and how it relates to the two hemispheres of the brain and their differing perceptions of the world can be found here.
An interesting symbolic parallel is perhaps that of Peter and John in the Bible as is explored in the article here. Peter symbolises the ‘active’ and John symbolises the ‘contemplative’. The active should go through the contemplative, the heart, so to speak. And in a society that tends to the left-brain, we also tend to attempt to hijack heaven (attempt to bring heaven to earth ourselves) and act/react/grab, rather than unionise heaven and earth through participation in Christ. The heart is amiss.
In a kind of feedback loop, my experience in traditional church liturgies, which I initially viewed with suspicion, has honed my perception of beauty and receiving the world as sacrament i.e. as grace-filled and participative, not merely propositional. There is a sense in which these ancient Christian liturgies make you attentive to the “depth of things”, to the communal and relation nature of reality and how we obviously miss the mark ourselves and don’t perceive “The love that dances at the heart of things” as the fantastic poet Malcolm Guite beautifully describes below:
Contra Descartes’ dictum “I think, therefore I am”, it’s probably more accurate to state “I am loved, therefore I am” and by loving, we get closer to the nature of things and to perceiving them, to perceiving Beauty. We must love God and love our neighbour. Through Christ, we learn the epistemology of love as Fr Stephen Freeman so succinctly summarises in Only Love Knows Anything. In modern life we imagine that,
“Knowledge is gained by the amassing of facts, but such knowledge is very limited. Information does not constitute knowledge, true knowledge is an act of communion, of love”
And might I add, of beauty. To truly know something, we need to commune.
Conclusion
As Augustine stated in the early 5th century,
“We have heard the fact; let us seek the mystery”
And I would add, let us participate in the mystery. Following Christ is not an intellectual ascent to a set of propositions, but an embodied way of life patterned by the Source of life.
The communitarian, sacramental and “joyful sorrow” of the historical church grew out of a faith attuned to cruciform beauty, which runs in accordance with the sacrificial grain of the cosmos, effecting a transfiguration through Christ and with the assurance of the Resurrection and union with God.
The search for Beauty is the search for the Logos - the Ordering Principle that holds unity in multiplicity, universality and particularity, and perfectly expresses the essence of a form. We seek Christ, the Logos, and through Him we become more that the sum of our parts, we become depth-fully beautiful.
As Aidan Hart says,
“We are called to be transfigured, not merely follow Christ at a distance”.
Early followers of Christ were called people of “The Way” (Acts 9:2). Might I also unashamedly add “of Beauty”. Let us become people of The Way of Beauty.
Aesthetics vs Anesthetics: The Battle for Our Senses, Eugene Terekhin
"And I would add, let us participate in the mystery. Following Christ is not an intellectual ascent to a set of propositions, but an embodied way of life patterned by the Source of life." [Jesus Christ]
Amen to that.