"One Thing" on Beauty

This is sort of a response to David's post on beauty a few days ago. He says, "Beauty is not a good guide to truth. For often false things may appear beautiful." Conversely, I posit that Beauty is a good guide to Truth.

God is beautiful. He is lovely. He is praiseworthy. That is the truth. God, in fact, is Beauty. Maybe what David means to say, and what I will say, is that our false conceptions of beauty are not a good guide to truth. Our failure to see real beauty for what it is, is a reflection upon ourselves and our sin, and not on beauty itself, whose content is God. To call a marriage, which is "full of rot and bile," beautiful is to lie about beauty, and to lie about God. God's beauty is not expressed in rotten marriages, but in ones that reflect his supremacy and communicate the truth about his Son to the world.

It's often the philosopher's game to say that "Beauty" or "Goodness" is some abstract thing, but in reality, God is those things, first, and the things that are beautiful or good are the things which reflect God. God revealed both truth and beauty to man in the incarnation, the death and the resurrection of Christ. Therefore, again, to call a philosophical argument, which is untrue, beautiful is to lie about beauty and God.

Now, things (like ceremonies or argument)may appeal to us, or affect our emotions or stimulate our brains, but may not be true or good. In these cases, we prefer them over something else- but wrongly. But to say these things is not to change what the things are, or if they reflect God's beauty. So the problem of truth lies in our sin. For what is sin or idolatry but to find loveliness in something other than God? (to lie about God's beauty and worthiness and sufficiency and to replace God with something of lesser worth?) Beauty is a good guide to truth, for wherever we find true Beauty, there is the handiwork of God, who is all beauty. So in order to evaluate the beauty of anything, we must first see,know and love true Beauty.

Sam Storms just put out a new book called One Thing, which talks a lot about God's beauty. It's good as far as I have gotten in the book, and I will post a review when I've finished it. But I do recommend it.