My first post-modern lesson was in kindergarten. It was Mrs. Dubbin. I was five. It was snack time, and I was unhappy with what was offered. “That’s gross!” I said. Mrs. Dubbin corrected me: “You must not say, dear, that ‘that is gross.’ You must say, ‘I do not prefer it.’” She was a good, kind teacher, and I remember her fondly. She meant to correct my manners; she did not know she was teaching me philosophy.
Mrs. Dubbin’s simple lesson in manners is a good one which I teach to my own children. But the world has exalted it beyond mere manners into an all-encompassing worldview. Her little rule has been transposed from a matter of politeness into a universal and uncontestable dictum: You shall not say “this is good” or “this is not good.” You shall only say “I prefer this” or “I do not prefer this.” It is called relativism. Christianity does not fare well under such a system. Rather, I should say, that system does not fare well under Christianity. Relativists cannot be happy with God’s first word over creation: “It is good.” Neither can they be too pleased with God’s first word over lonely Adam: “It is not good.” That is because the denial of absolute Goodness is the essence of relativism.
Relativism comes in varieties. Moral relativism denies objective moral value. Aesthetic relativism denies objective beauty. Beauty and morality - they are conjoined twins, distinct but inseparable. You cannot destroy one without killing the other. Philosophers and theologians have often said as much, from Plato to Pope John Paul. What may be surprising is how often they give aesthetics, not ethics, the prior place. Time and again they tell us that we are drawn to the good because it is beautiful.
“Beauty reveals goodness,” says Karol Wojtyla. “When a person meets up with beauty, that beauty points to some good and causes that good to become attractive to him.” The attractiveness of beauty “indicates that there is something else beyond it, which is hidden.” Ultimately, that which is beyond it, which it points to, is God. “Everything found in the concept of beauty is found in God.” The knowledge of God is not only intellectual, but experiential and even sensory. “O taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34.8). You may know all the doctrines of God, yet if you remain unaffected by His Beauty, you have but a devil’s knowledge. Sadly, sin can corrupt our aesthetic sense just as surely as it corrupts our moral sense. God’s goodness is manifest as beauty everywhere in the world, but man’s faculty for recognizing and receiving that goodness has been broken by the fall, rendering him numb to it by degrees.
Such insensitivity to beauty has moral implications. Consider the story of the costly anointing. When Mary breaks the alabaster flask to pour the precious nard over Jesus’s feet, Judas objects. Is this not impractical? Is this not a waste? Are not the hungry poor more important than this expensive ritual? Judas’s argument seems reasonable enough, even if his motives were impure. Modern Christians may be forgiven for sympathizing with the logic of his complaint. Yet it was not logic that failed in Judas that day. It was his sense of beauty. And to that perilous shortcoming Jesus addressed himself: “Leave her alone... She has done a beautiful thing to me.” Judas, who could not sense the beauty of Mary’s action here, would never be able to see the beauty of the crucifixion.
“Aesthetics is the mother of ethics,” said Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky. Such a statement perplexes the modern Christian, who, like Judas, has forgotten the fundamental role of beauty in the Christian life. The modern Christian, especially the modern evangelical Christian, tries to be a moral absolutist while an aesthetic relativist. He agrees with objective ethics but considers aesthetic values to be wishy-washy at best. He feels confident in his moral pronouncements but diffident in the face of any claims about artistic merit. There is absolute right and wrong, he says, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. He is probably not aware that such a split attitude would have been foreign to Christians throughout the ages.
Until our current age of relativism, people everywhere generally assumed without controversy that both morality and beauty were real and objective. C. S. Lewis catalogues this general agreement in The Abolition of Man. He compares a wide variety of philosophies and religions and comes to a striking conclusion. “What is common to them all,” Lewis says, “is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.” In context, the “attitudes” of which Lewis speaks are aesthetic responses. Until relativism became the dominant worldview, people everywhere believed that when you said that something was lovely, or grand, or noble, you were really talking about the thing itself, and not merely expressing your own feelings. You could be right or wrong about such statements, depending on whether the thing really was lovely, or grand, or noble. Lewis explains that a man who claimed that a certain landscape was sublime “was not intending simply to describe his own emotions about it: he was also claiming that the object was one which merited those emotions.” This is an essential point. “Until quite modern times,” he says, “all teachers and all men believed . . .that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence, or our contempt.”
Behind this critique is Lewis’s fear that such creeping relativism ruins man’s sense of morality. What starts as aesthetic subjectivism becomes moral subjectivism. Lewis, like so many others, understands what is at stake. It is a moral danger. It is why Dana Gioia could say with sincerity and seriousness, “There is no more important issue in our culture - sacred or secular - than the restoration of beauty.” Moral objectivity cannot long survive aesthetic relativism. Once a society has given up on objective beauty, it will soon abandon objective morality, for they are inseparable. If we refuse to train our children’s aesthetic sense, their moral sense will atrophy. We must be bold enough to show them what is worth their esteem and what is not. If we will not show them, for instance, that this house of worship is majestic while that one is base, that this hymn is profound while that one is trite, that this harmony is vigorous while that one is commonplace, then we will unwittingly raise moral relativists. We will think that we are teaching them manners; we will not realize that we are teaching them philosophy.
John Wykoff, Interim Music Director
