The Hidden Symbolism of Caravaggio
Caravaggio's Narcissus subtly structures the entire composition into the shape of an eye, visually embodying the very organ of the youth's fatal vice.
Physical and Non-Physical Beauty
Physical beauty is not a disconnected accident, but an earthly mirror and teacher of the complex interior beauty of the soul and of God.
In this essay, we are exploring how physical beauty relates to non-physical, interior beauty. One of the tricky things about thinking through a theology of beauty is that we often think of beauty purely as a physical property, like the beauty of a mountain or the beauty of a woman. But there is non-physical beauty as well.
For instance, the Apostle Peter tells us that there is such a thing as interior beauty, and we all intuitively recognize this. He writes:
Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear—but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious.
So there is an analogous relationship between physical beauty and non-physical beauty. Both of these instances of beauty belong to the same genus; they share a similar nature. But to grasp this, we have to understand a much more fundamental feature of the structure of the world: the physical world is the mirroring of the non-physical world.
The World as a Mirror of Heaven
This is a theme explored by writers as diverse as Meredith Kline and Matthieu Pageau. In his book Kingdom Prologue (and explored in God, Heaven and Har Magedon), Kline points out that earth, the visible cosmos, was made to mirror the invisible world of heaven. The lower terrestrial register—earth—was designed to contain replicas of realities in the upper register glory realm, including the likeness of the God of heaven. He notes that the same Hebrew word for heaven or sky is used of both the throne room of God and the blue expanse above us. In that framework, there is a King in heaven, and there are copies or little images of that King on earth—namely, human beings. These and many more duplicate realities indicate a mirroring, analogical relationship between these two realms.
It is not simply that creation mirrors God’s realm—a realm invisible to us—but that there is also a normative relationship between them. In the words of the Lord’s Prayer:
Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
We want those invisible realities to be impressed upon earth; that is what we pray for. Pageau describes this pattern by observing that the whole universe can be described in terms of the intercourse between heaven and earth. This joining of spiritual and corporeal realities, called knowledge, is the most fundamental notion in biblical cosmology. In fact, every single phenomenon can be interpreted according to this pattern. On the one hand, spiritual reality informs corporeal reality with meaning and purpose; on the other hand, matter expresses spirit by making it visible and tangible in the universe. We see this exact model with Moses: he was shown a heavenly pattern on the mountain that was to be duplicated down below in the Tabernacle.
While this might seem a bit esoteric at first, it is actually the basic pattern of Christianity. We are to model God. We are made in His image. Our core prayer is that God’s kingdom in heaven will be duplicated on earth.
This composite reality—the invisible reality of God in His realm and the visible reality of earth—is duplicated in microcosm inside of man. Man is a composite of invisible and visible parts: soul and body. By custom, we call that invisible part the interior. Humans in themselves embody this union of the invisible and the visible. The nature of reality—heaven and earth, invisible and visible—is duplicated in humanity as the union of interior and exterior life.
It should not surprise us, then, when we see characteristics like beauty that carry both an interior and an exterior sense. Beauty is not the only quality that works this way. Strength, for example, is used for both an external physical capability and an internal quality of character. This duality allows us to reason in both directions: when we understand something about physical beauty, it will be analogically mirrored in interior beauty, and vice versa.
Beauty as an Orchestration of Properties
So what can we learn about beauty from this dual nature?
First, beauty is a higher-order property because it is a combination, an orchestration of many properties. When you study the history of beauty and art, philosophers and artists will constantly list a handful of aesthetic properties—balance, harmony, proportion, and so on. While there is ongoing debate regarding exactly which properties are included, the one undeniable thing all these thinkers agree upon is that beauty consists in a combination of multiple qualities.
Notice that fascinating consensus: all major thinkers agree that beauty is never just one solitary thing, but many things working together. What do we learn from this?
Not understanding this principle is one of the main errors of many contemporary artists. Take Jeff Koons, famous for making giant metallic balloon animals. What did he do? He essentially isolated a single aesthetic property—size—and cranked the value up extremely high. It is just huge. That is the aesthetic equivalent of taking one instrument from an orchestra and playing a single note at maximum volume, or making an entire canvas just one flat color. Now, of course, contemporary artists might counter that the goal of modern art is not beauty. But such is the way of modern and postmodern thinkers: endless redefinition, reduction, and ultimately a complete jettisoning of common sense, or what we simply call reality.
The real nature of beauty is the harmony of many diverse things. This is why we can speak intelligibly of the beauty of a family, the beauty of a country, or interior beauty. It is also what makes aesthetic experience so difficult to articulate. You take a trip to the Grand Canyon, and your friends ask you how it was. You say, “It was amazing, it was beautiful.” When they ask, “What do you mean? What was beautiful about it?” you find yourself stumbling for words: “It just… everything together.” That difficulty arises because the beauty of the Grand Canyon is the harmonious ordering of countless distinct elements.
As a quick footnote: what do I mean when I say interior beauty? I do not mean merely moral beauty. Moral rectitude is a major part of it, but interior beauty encompasses the whole of interiority: the character of a person, their intellect, their emotional depth, the whole inner life.
Three Lessons from Physical Beauty
What other insights can we gain by looking at physical beauty and transferring that knowledge to the non-physical realm?
1. Attractiveness
The most fundamental thing we experience about beauty is its attractiveness. We are instinctively drawn to it. This was central to St. Thomas Aquinas’s famous formulation: beautiful things are those which please when seen (pulchra sunt quae visa placent).
Because interior beauty is analogous, it too is attractive—or ought to be attractive. It is not merely cold, abstract goodness and rightness; it is alluring. Our experience of physical beauty drawing us outward serves as a teacher for how interior beauty should draw us. That felt pull of physical beauty is a sign. When we notice that something is beautiful, we are making an objective claim about the object itself, not merely describing our subjective taste. When we are drawn to the ominous beauty of the ocean or the exotic beauty of a woman, that experience is an icon of how we should be drawn to interior, moral, personal beauty. The interior beauty of a human person made in God’s image is ever more deeply and ominously beautiful and exotic than any physical landscape. Those physical encounters are signposts disclosing the truest nature of personal and moral beauty. Just as physical beauty is the orchestration of many elements, interior beauty is not mere mechanical obedience to a legal code, but the rich, complex fullness of a good person.
2. Harmony
Beauty is the harmony of many elements, and interior beauty is the harmony of many aspects of human character. We already know this and possess traditional categories for it: we formulate lists of virtues alongside emotional maturity. In literature, we call this a well-rounded, fully realized character—a beautiful character. The interior beauty we are summoned to love is a complex person bearing the image of God, possessing genuine depth, nuance, and variety. We ought to cultivate both the taste and the tenacity to search out and unfold that depth in others.
3. Intensity
Finally, a defining mark of beauty is not merely that it draws us, but the sheer intensity of that draw. Throughout human history, wars have been fought over the beauty of women—think of the Trojan War—and bitter family feuds have dissolved in its presence, as in Romeo and Juliet.
What do we learn from the intensity of that pull? God chose our strongest physical desires to communicate the gravity of the moral and personal life. Beauty reveals not only how attractive goodness is, but how relentlessly, captivatingly attractive it ought to be. It should not merely invite our polite approval; it should pull us forward, demanding sacrifice even unto death.
Ultimately, all of these attributes we trace in physical and interior beauty have their original, archetypal form in God Himself. We can apply these lessons back to God because He is their truest source. And that is why interior and exterior beauty is art.