Irreducible Beauty

This week, a beloved friend with a lethal cancer learned her experimental treatment has provided miraculous improvement. This week, a son with three young children lost his job. Life is such a beautiful painful pilgrimage.

The fourth-century holy woman Macrina the Younger was convinced that God allots to each person a fixed sum of happiness and of sadness, and that we choose whether the proportions are allotted here or later. 

God divided the life of man into two parts, namely, this present life, and that “out of the body” hereafter; and He placed on the first a limit of the briefest possible time, while He prolonged the other into eternity; and in His love for man He gave him his choice, to have the one or the other of those things, good or evil, I mean, in which of the two parts he liked: either in this short and transitory life, or in those endless ages, whose limit is infinity. . . . [Some] soon use up on gluttony in this fleshly life the dividend of good which their constitution can claim, and they reserve none of it for the after life; but those who by a discreet and sober-minded calculation economize the powers of living are afflicted by things painful to sense here, but they reserve their good for the succeeding life, . . . and thus purchased by present annoyance future blessedness.”

I don’t believe the premise—that we have a fixed sum of happiness we can either enjoy here or enjoy later. But it's an interesting idea and may have been a comfort to the general mass of humanity who, in those times of massive infant mortality, rampant warfare, and a general precariousness of well-being, needed to believe their suffering was securing some benefit. The principle underlying Macrina’s conception is the early Christian devotion to “askesis,” (see Acts 24:16) which means spiritual discipline and training (analogous to that of athletes). Macrina’s point was that depriving ourselves of certain benefits and pleasures of mortality would be compensated by their redoubled enjoyment later. 

Spiritual discipline takes fierce hold in the Christian mind, and it is easy to track its flowering into a rich and diverse tradition of asceticism from those early Christian centuries to the present. Like most human attributes and qualities, self-discipline can be a virtue or a mania. Discipline of sexual and acquisitive and gluttonous appetite is requisite to holiness. It is doubtful, however, that spending decades on a tiny platform a hundred feet in the air was helpful to the renowned ascetic Simeon Stilites or to anyone emulating him. 

One possible explanation for the increasing emphasis on ascetic practices—extreme fasting, self-flagellation, lives of stark isolation and deprivation—was that, in the fourth century, Christianity was becoming mainstream. In previous times and places in the Roman empire, just being Christian—members of a despised and occasionally outlawed sect—came at a cost. Now baptism came with cultural capital rather than martyrdom, so some Christians might feel the need to demonstrate faithful sacrifice, “spiritual athleticism,” in self-inflicted ways.

Macrina’s legitimate point was the simple truth that disciples must be willing to deny ourselves those satisfactions that impede our spiritual growth—in the interest of that spiritual growth and its long-term benefits. Some took that principle of self-denial to extremes, cautioning against enjoying or loving anything that did not lead us to love God—and saw renunciation of bodily pleasure as the cost of spiritual union with God. Again, valid principles underlie the root motive: As incarnate souls, we are perpetually enticed to satisfy those purely biological drives that are part of the mortal condition. Sadly, it was easy to hear in those warnings against love of this world the suggestion that its attractions are always in tension with love for God. In its most extreme formulation, some taught that “God then alone is to be loved; and all this world . . . are to be despised.”

Few Christians today frame life in terms of such stark polarities. And yet, we often place inconsistent valuations on that which pertains to our physical world and life in it. In trying to make sense of beauty, for instance, one theologian has held (like many before him) that we love Mozart’s music or Michelangelo’s sculpture because “they call into being in our minds a whole spiritual world that is laden with a host of spiritual elements.” That’s a lovely sentiment—but notice that it is reducing exquisite music and superbly executed sculpture to vehicles through which we come in contact with higher, nobler realities. In similar language, others have believed our rapture in the natural world is based in our faint recollection of a premortal world of ampler, more refined and extensive beauties.

I fear these perspectives come at a cost. William Wordsworth embarked on numerous trekking adventures in his life. On an Italian expedition, he was excited to be making his first trek across the Alps. Having bustled anxiously along the path for days, tired and disoriented, he stopped to ask for directions through the last pass. A local peasant gave him the disappointing news.

For still we had hopes that pointed to the clouds,
We questioned him again, and yet again;
But every word that from the peasant’s lips
Came in reply, translated by our feelings,
Ended in this,—that we had crossed the Alps.

So intent had he been on the distant goal that he had been oblivious to the sublime experience while it unfolded all around him.  

In a similar way we may be missing the point of embodiment, distracted as we are by metaphors of testing, proving, confinement in this mortal shell. Without a doubt, our brain functions more to limit than to enhance our interface with reality. Visions and imaginings of the afterlife—like the aspirations of medieval mystics—sought escape from the “prison of flesh,” spiritual sight unconstrained by these eyes of jelly, the spirit’s aery soul-flight unburdened by gravity and weighty matter.

And perhaps in a distant day, we may register an expanded electromagnetic spectrum and the new colors they herald; we may interface with new realms through senses never before imagined, like the electroperception of mormyrid fish or the echolocation of bats and dolphins. For the present, however, this tabernacle of clay fashions our encounter with this world. Whatever the route our bodies took to arrive here, and however this world took shape from an array of elements from hydrogen to uranium, they are our bodies and this is our adventure in the world. They are particular, and because they are particular, they are non-substitutable. 

Here is what that non-substitutability means. We seldom use the term omniscience in our tradition, and that is a good thing. Even for the incarnate Christ or the Father of whom he is the perfect image, there is no “unique, all-seeing vantage point for perception. . . . Perception necessarily originates from a perspective, or point of view.” As Teppo Fellin continues by way of example, “A tree is a place of shelter for one species, a nesting location for another, an object of beauty, an obstacle, shade, a source of food, or a lookout point. . . . We cannot point to a single, objective characteristic of an object.” We are always situated in a particular time and place and body—and no other perspective can perfectly replicate the particular experience we have of the world. The painful and the beautiful alike, as we experience them, are a form of knowledge for which there is no substitute or equal. That is why embodiment is additive rather than limiting in our quest for greater love and knowledge alike.

And that is why we err to our great loss if we believe that our love of this world, while we are in this world, is a threat to our devotion to God. In John Burnaby’s words, “we shall be using God that we may enjoy the world” or we will be “using the world that we may enjoy God.” But are they really in competition? I may enjoy a patch of flowers in my back garden. Learning a friend planted them for my delight heightens that delight, as it heightens my knowledge of and love of my friend. But my joy in the flowers is not merely instrumental, and no friend would worry that I become to immersed in the delight those particular flowers provide independent of any other consideration. The Lord himself has told us that “it pleaseth God that he hath given . . . the good things that come of the earth . . . unto man” (D&C 59:20).

Love and delight are not zero-sum games, and a God who believes they are is not the God I worship. From the perspective of Lady Wisdom in Proverb 8, “Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him; Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the sons of men.”

This sounds to me like a God who invites us to rejoice in creation as much as they do, marveling alongside them. Nothing beautiful is instrumental. Beauty is ultimately its own end.

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New. To receive each new Terryl Givens column by email, first subscribe and then click here and select "Wrestling with Angels."

Art by Cristall Harper. Cristall Harper lives in American Fork, UT. Her website is www.cristallharper.com and her Instagram is @cristallharper.

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