Introduction
In Part 1 of Modesty, I retold the lie that modesty is a prudish condom to protect men from the bewitching beauty of women. Part 2 was a vignette describing an interaction with the personification of Beauty and Truth to begin exploring the idea of Beauty’s objectivity. This post will be the essay companion of the previous fiction installment.
My task here is to challenge the assumption that Beauty is merely subjective, the product of opinion and appetite. Beauty’s objectivity must first be established else the conversation of Modesty will die the death of a thousand cultural qualifications. Then I want to end this post with what Modesty is for. It’s about time.
Trickiness of the Problem
Margaret Wolfe Meade captured this subjectivity of Beauty in her ubiquitously repeated phrase “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” found in her novel Molly Bawn. Before her, David Hume penned, “Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.” Right about the same time, Ben Franklin quipped, “Beauty, like supreme dominion/ Is but supported by opinion” in Poor Richard’s Almanac. Even the Bard in Love’s Labor Lost opined “Beauty is bought by judgment of the eye”. The idea can even be traced back to Plato, like everything else. So Beauty being a subjective experience is not a new idea, and today dominates. But is it true?
Excepting the current mental malaise of the West, there have never been any rigorous attempts to philosophically render Truth to be subjective. Disagreements about what Truth is have been robust, but the fact that there is even a debate about Truth implies that only one side, or neither, can be correct, thus enshrining objectivity. Our lives are built around the veracity of physical and chemical Truth stamped into our universe and we subjectify it to our peril. A man may refuse to acknowledge the hostile sun over his head, but it will burn his face all the same. Thus, the objectivity of Truth is out of the reach of our fumbling hands.
But when it comes to Beauty, there is considerably less agreement. She cannot be verified or falsified in the same way as Truth; she cannot be harried into beakers and set to boil, nor dissected like a cat to have her liver weighed in grams, nor subject to mass spectrometry, nor squeezed into a syllogism. She doesn’t work like that. And because She refuses such probing we got it into our heads that Beauty is a personalized rubber stamp of approval we can thwomp on anything that tickles our senses and gives us the feelies. But if we probe, we will find that Beauty, like Truth, is not in our jurisdiction to summon or dismiss on a whim.
Of Emotions and Appetites
Anytime we call something beautiful we are making a claim about some quality of an object. Consider the claim “It’s a beautiful day.” What are we saying when we make this claim? What does it mean for a day to be beautiful? We may mean the weather is temperate, or the air smells fresh, or the sky is a cloudless cerulean blue, or the sun is yellow and sneezy, or it reminds us of a similar day when we were young and life was simple. Quite likely we mean all of these things together. Likely, there is no one thing that we can point to specifically to identify the locus of Beauty, rather it radiates from overlapping experiences, memories, and slippy things we can’t quite place.
But as for the source of Beauty, there really are only two options on the table: either Beauty is an objective reality, like Truth, that exists outside of us, or it is generated from within us. When we assume Beauty is subjective we are saying the source of Beauty is not in the object, but in us, the beholder. Just as the stomach growls in response to a hamburger, the heart aches with Beauty in response to a sunset. There is no “hunger” in the food; nothing about a cheeseburger demands us to salivate for it. The hunger is in me and is awakened by the burger, or lasagna, or whatever. If we hold Beauty to be subjective then, like hunger, it is nothing more than a peculiar sensation we are bringing to the table; it is provided by us, arising from the lizard parts of the brain.
CS Lewis makes this point in his essay The Abolition of Man, citing an example from a schoolbook of several contemporaries, nicknamed Gaius and Titius, who are discussing how to teach children to think about their experiences of Beauty in the natural world.
In their second chapter Gaius and Titius quote the well-known story of Coleridge at the waterfall. You remember that there were two tourists present: that one called it ‘sublime’ and the other ‘pretty’; and that Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgement and rejected the second with disgust. Gaius and Titius comment as follows: ‘When the man said “This is sublime,” he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall… Actually … he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word “Sublime”, or shortly, ‘I have sublime feelings.’ Here are a good many deep questions settled in a pretty summary fashion. But the authors are not yet finished. They add: ‘This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.
CS Lewis, The Abolition of Man
From the subjectivist point of view, when we look at a beautiful waterfall what we are really saying is that we have feelings associated in our mind with “beauty”, or “I have beautiful feelings towards the object.” We are saying something about us, not the waterfall, something like “This is the kind of thing that gives me the feelies.” The object serves us; we are the intended end, and that end is an increased self-awareness. The feeling feels good and we feel good about having the good feeling. Beautiful moments condense the best parts of being alive; they make us conscious of life, in the beat and the breath of our bodies. And so these feelings provide proof of life and help remind us that we exist. In a Cartesian twist, these moments conclude with the axiom: I feel, therefore I am.
I am not saying here that this is a good or bad thing – I am saying it is the only thing. There are no other options. If Beauty is subjective, then we may rightly call it a mere tickling of emotions – it can be nothing else. The pleasing sensation is the burbling eddy of our emotions verifying their own experience. We go nowhere. We are transported in a reflexive arc back into an awareness of ourselves. It exists only so long as dopamine soaks the synapses.
Lucky for us it is not true. We will take this to task below, but first, we have to identify a similar dead end we often take to understand Beauty: the appetite.
Beauty is also mistaken as being the consequence of personal appetite. One kid likes chocolate ice cream and the other vanilla. A man prefers blondes to brunettes. She likes Monet, he is more of a Manet bloke. Each of us has appetite preferences that emanate from some shadowy and nameless place inside us, and what I consider delicious blossoms into an abstract proclamation of Beauty. And who is to judge between appetites? Each decides what is beautiful according to his own grumblings welling up from some brackish swill of hypothalamic secretions, informed by forgotten nostalgia and suppressed sexual desires.
That people have different and even opposing appetites is clearly true; people have all sorts of strange tastes and go about filling their bellies accordingly. There is a craving that comes from some irritating tickle in the lower cortex and we seek out various avenues to scratch it. I’ll buy that – there has to be some explanation for why people like The Grateful Dead. But it would be a mistake to conclude that the disparity of appetites is an adequate solution to the objectivity of Beauty question. And this is for two reasons.
First, if we drop down a level, all appetites share a common goal. Again, CS Lewis writes
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing, for they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
The Weight of Glory
So the man who sips ice-cold chocolate milk and the man who quaffs an oatmeal stout are both sniffing for a whiff of that “scent of a flower” in the slaking of their desire, and that desire is the fulfillment of some pocket joy. In this, the men are identical. Both appetites, distinct as they are, share a common, objective root; both humans are seeking out that temporal experience of a tiny transcendence to get a peek at the green slopes of that far-off countryside. Or to put it another way, transportation is happening. The men are being taken away from themselves through fulfilled desire; self-awareness fades to self-forgetfulness in pursuit of the longing. It is this transcendence towards a shared source where we see the true objectivity of Beauty.
Secondly, appetites undermine subjective Beauty by way of reductio. If a man has an appetite for cat excrement, would not we all say there is something wrong with him? Some twisting of the brain or soul resulting in an appetite for unworthy things? Here we would all take the liberty to reach into someone else’s world and cast judgment on this broken appetite as if it were as objective as the shining sun. Munching cat turds is not some peculiar expression of that same desire for goodness all men share. When the possessed man, out of his mind, lurked among the tombs cutting himself, Jesus came to reorder his affections, not parley with a super unique, random guy living life off the grid.
Ask yourself: Could a man consider beautiful something that is so heinous that we could say he is morally onerous? Or could a woman despise an object so beautiful that one could say her affections for Beauty are broken? If the answer is yes, and we admit the objectivity of ugliness, then are also letting the objectivity of Beauty through the door as well.
Subjectivity of Beauty consigns it to the beholder’s emotions and runs the risk of reducing it to nothing more than a swill of neurochemical juices. These juices ooze in response to some external stimuli like gastric juices dribble in response to a bit of meat. Beauty, in this dim light, is nothing but a consumptive reflex to ingest the object and make it part of us.
Further Up and Further In
As I say, the objectivity of Beauty is found in her transportive capabilities. She is the only thing that can rip the eyes off the self and transcend the soul. It is this transcendence that is the true impetus behind all appetites and unifies all humanity in an objective pursuit. Though Beauty can prick each man’s heart differently, these varied experiences all beckon beyond to the same place, up and out of the world to the heavens. Beauty’s objectivity is in her transcendence.
Transcendence is quite the opposite of the fulfillment of feelings, for that is an increasing self-consciousness. Rather, it is a pulling away from the self. Appetites are not the Beauty itself, but they are gateways to the transcendence of Beauty; the feelings Beauty creates is that weightless sensation of the soul leaving the ground. Or to put it another way, we satisfy appetites to be taken up and away from the appetites.
Beauty was not sent to stay. She moves, pulls, and beckons from beyond the boundaries of the universe. She is in the creation, but not of it, far older; she is a harbinger, an emissary, a missionary speaking a universal language of the soul. Beauty directs away from the self towards the unvisited country. For the length of a sunset or a sonnet, our eyes break the gravitational pull of our own little world and transcend to the heavens. She transports further up and further in the grassy slopes of heaven. The most unhappy men have a menagerie of collected Beauties.
The grateful grief we experience when a beautiful moment passes is proof that fulfillment is not in this world and blesses us with future hope for the country from where she comes. The pursuit of our little beauties is the path to worship which grows brighter and the singing stronger the further up we follow, until it ends in the worship of the Beautiful God, from whence she is dispatched to evangelize our dark little world.
Diadem In The Crown
Woman is the pinnacle of creation. Man was made from the dust of the earth, but she was made from man. She is the last and most beautiful act in creation. Paul describes a man’s wife as his glory.
For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man.
1 Corinthians 11:7
This does not mean, as some suppose, that man is the image of God and a woman is not, as if she were some over-xeroxed blotchy reproduction. Genesis tells us both man and woman are made in the image of God. The implication here is that man was the climactic achievement of the creation, the image and glory of God – and woman is the glory of the glory – a resplendent ruby diadem in the golden crown that takes all the attention.
God made Man in two parts with some assembly required. He made them male and female, each with a portion of His nature unique to the sex. We call this Feminine and Masculine. Our biological forms were made as vehicles to carry the Masculine and Feminine in the male and female, respectively. The predominating splendor of the Feminine is Beauty. Beauty has been gifted to her to display the image of God on the earth, and He is a beautiful God.
Importantly, we must acknowledge that not all women are as physically attractive as others and for various reasons. Some are tens, others are not. There really are some cultural peccadilloes. Physical appearance can be affected by a host of things such as the woman’s choices or the psychological consequences of things done to her, for good or ill. But no woman gets a pass on imaging the Beauty of God regardless of genetic cards she may have been dealt. Regardless of where a woman’s physical attractiveness lands in whatever culture, she can still act and dress like a hussy.
This immaculate gift of Beauty, as I say, is meant to draw the eye up and away from the self to the Lord, the giver of Beauty. But because women are sinners, and because Beauty is the harkening of the heart to worship, there is the temptation for her to grab Beauty by the wrists and to hold her captive in her own body. Sequestered Beauty is the endemic temptation of women, to divert the flow of fresh worship as it transcends from the eyes and heart of mankind into her own cisterns. This is very dangerous, not least of which for her.
Marylin Monroe had a recurring dream where she was naked in front of a church and all the congregants bowed down to worship her. This temptation lies at the heart of every woman. Beauty was not safe with her. Abused beauty will ruin the woman and all who fall into her cavernous trap. And so Beauty has been given a Handmaiden to protect her from the rapacious hands of men and women – Modesty. Modesty’s charge is to protect Beauty, not boys. In protecting Beauty, Modesty is also protecting all others. We will explore this idea further in Part 4.
And so, God’s gift of Modesty protects the woman from the worship of others, others from drinking from a broken cistern of her well, and Beauty from being free to flow back to God and take others with Her.
Conclusion
We have achieved our objective of proving Beauty’s objectivity. Beauty is not some extension of our feelings that we stamp onto an object of our choosing, nor can Beauty be reduced to whatever strange things we happen to like. Still, our appetites and affections are not meaningless but are given to use so that we follow these pocket joys toward the same objective end, which is the worship of a Beautiful God.
Beauty has a purpose, a direction: She is the beckoning of God calling us to behold Him. She has been scattered throughout the human experience to be found and followed back to Her source. She is here to take us There. The surest sign that you have stumbled upon Her is you forget yourself.
The Lord bestowed Beauty on women in a way that is special. Because of mankind’s sinful nature, there is always the temptation for a woman to keep the Beauty for herself, to cage it up in herself and draw the gaze of men as though she is the beginning and end, the Alpha and Omega of Beauty, a feat easily enough achieved by hiking up skirts and perking up the breasts and making up herself to look perpetually aroused. God gave us Modesty as a handmaiden for Beauty to mitigate this theft and to protect us from taking Beauty for ourselves, which ends in the destruction of us and others.
In the next post in this series, we will look more into Beauty’s theft and the disastrous results when Modesty is not allowed to do her job.
Thought Butter 