See Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death.
36. See Tillich, Courage To Be, 64–85.
37. Tillich, Courage To Be, 32.
38. Tillich, Courage To Be, 36–39.
39. See Tillich, Courage To Be, 32–36.
40. See Tillich, Courage To Be, 181.
4: Beauty41
We have seen that the encounter with depth, futurity, and freedom requires an attitude of allowing ourselves to be grasped by them. Our typical response, though, is one of initially shrinking back from entering into the embrace of these horizons (which are really three ways of thinking about a single horizon) while, at the same time, being irresistibly drawn toward them. Rather than allowing ourselves to be immediately comprehended by depth, futurity, and freedom, we try to place them under our control. Such a response is inevitably unsuccessful, however, and we finally realize that our sense of well-being, our happiness, requires that we surrender ourselves to them.
Nowhere is this need to surrender more obvious than in our encounter with beauty. In order for us to experience the beauty of nature, other persons, a great event, or an artistic masterpiece, we have to allow ourselves to be “carried away” by the aesthetic phenomenon. This experience of being grasped by the beautiful is one of the clearest models we have for expressing what is involved in the intuition of the divine. In fact, it is more than a model. We may even say that our ordinary experience of the beautiful is already an encounter with ultimacy.
The experience of beauty is as two-sided as is the religious experience of the sacred. On the one hand, great beauty is overwhelming in its seductiveness and attractiveness. It is a mysterium fascinans that compels us and invites us to surrender ourselves to it. At times we have all experienced the seductiveness of the beautiful, especially as it is embodied in other persons, but also in the glories of nature, music, and literature. At the same time, we have felt the pangs of unfulfilled longing that accompany every aesthetic experience. We are implicitly aware of the chasm that lies between the beauty embodied in any particular object of aesthetic delight and the unlimited beauty for which we long in the depths of our desire. This abysmal distance is a mysterium tremendum from which we shrink back. Our recoil from ultimate beauty takes the form of a fixation on particular, limited, aesthetic objects; this fixation is accompanied by an anaesthetizing of our deep need for a wider and fuller beauty.
In short, our quest for beauty is a quest for the divine. That ultimately satisfying beauty which we long for—but continues to elude us—is what the word “God” means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it and speak of the ultimately beautiful for which you are continually searching in the depths of your desire. Perhaps, in order to do this, you must forget much that you have learned about God, perhaps even that name itself. For if you know that God means ultimate “beauty,” you already know much about the divine. You cannot then call yourself an atheist, for you cannot think or say, “I am completely indifferent to beauty.” If you could say this in complete seriousness, then you would be an atheist; otherwise, you are not. For as long as you have some longing for a wider and deeper beauty than you have experienced thus far in your life, you show that you have already in some way encountered the divine, or rather, that the divine has taken hold of you. Another way to think about God, therefore, is as the horizon of ultimate beauty toward which you are irresistibly drawn.
Scholars of religion rightly make a distinction between religious and aesthetic experience (as we shall call the experience of beauty). Religion, they often say, involves the symbolic sense of a “totally other” dimension that becomes transparent to the believer in the images and objects that stand for and mediate the “sacred.” The aesthetic experience, on the other hand, is not explicitly concerned with the symbolic transparency of the aesthetic object. It does not have to understand a beautiful object as standing for any sacred reality “beyond” itself. The beautiful seems sufficient in itself and does not inevitably lead us into another dimension, whereas the religious sense does.42 To many individuals for whom the “sacred” means nothing at all, the “beautiful” means a great deal. Therefore, some distinction must be made between “the sacred” and “the beautiful.”
But can we so neatly set one experience apart from the other? I am uncomfortable with too sharp of a distinction between the aesthetic and the religious experience. To segregate them too crisply seems artificial and out of touch with what actually happens in our encounter with the beauty of reality. For if we carefully ponder what is involved in the experience of concrete beauty, we may think of it as continuous with our encountering the divine. By our tasting the beauty in our ordinary experience, we are already being invited into the realm of ultimacy, although we may not wish to interpret it as such. Nonetheless, the point of the following is to argue that this is indeed the case. An examination of our ordinary encounter with beauty may disclose to us that the beautiful is a mysterium tremendum et fascinans too, and that we respond to it with the same ambivalent wavering between repulsion and attraction that the experience of the sacred evokes in homo religiosus.
Can we state conceptually what it is that makes things appear to us as beautiful and some things as more beautiful than others? Alfred North Whitehead, whose philosophy is permeated by aesthetic considerations, tells us that beauty is the “harmony of contrasts.”43 What makes us appreciate the beauty of things is that they bring together nuance, richness, complexity, and novelty on the one side, and harmony, pattern, or order on the other. The more “intense” the synthesis of harmony and contrast, the more we appreciate their union. Nuance without harmony is chaos and harmony without nuance is monotony. Beauty involves the transformation of potentially clashing elements into pleasing contrasts, harmonized by the overarching aesthetic pattern of the beautiful object or experience.
An example of such harmony of contrasts may be seen in any great novel. What makes such a novel beautiful is its weaving together into a unified whole the many subplots and characterizations that might have easily led to confusion. A poor novel would be one that was so concerned with overall order that it failed to establish sufficient tension and conflict to bring about the nuanced complexity required by beauty. At the opposite extreme, an inferior novel would degenerate into chaos, failing to bring its details into the unity of a single story. Either lack of harmony or absence of complexity would impoverish the artistic masterpiece. Our appreciation of the work of art, or of anything beautiful, is the result of our implicit sense that the beautiful precariously balances the order and novelty brought together in the aesthetic object.
If we reflect on the elements of the beautiful, however, we are led to the conclusion, also emphasized by Whitehead, that every actuality is, to some degree at least, an aesthetic phenomenon. Every “actual entity” is a patterned synthesis of contrasting elements. In the simplest objects the contrasts are not intense, but they are there at least to some small degree. Nothing would be actual at all unless its ingredients were patterned in some way or other. Whether we are talking about an electron, an artistic creation, a person, a civilization, or the universe as such, these entities would not have any identity whatsoever unless their constituent elements were patterned in a definite way. Their “actuality” corresponds by degrees to the mode and intensity of their synthesizing harmony and contrast. This means that all things are actual to the extent that they are beautiful and all things are beautiful to the extent that they order novelty and complexity into aesthetic contrasts.44
Beauty, therefore, has what philosophers call