How fondly I hold hands with our narcissistic society. Nearly every corner of my life preaches a gospel of self-satisfaction, that a vibrant life is found strictly in the satisfaction of personal desire. But the road to a vibrant life is found outside and above self—only when we transcend egocentric gratification. A vibrant life is found only in the pursuit of Joy and Joy has as its object something—Someone—outside of self. That object is Beauty and the source of all beauty is God. For this reason, every pilgrim journey must be a thrust away from self-preoccupation and toward Beauty.
This spiritual pilgrimage is about pursuing something higher and outside of myself; it consists in pursuing Beauty, True North, in order to reach God. Our animal existence is no longer enough. Like the prodigal son, we can set aside eating husks and lean toward home.
How then do we lean toward home? Again, I believe that God is calling to us not only through suffering, but primarily through Beauty. It is essentially and effectively, in our longings, that God speaks most. Even in suffering, in darkness and wilderness wandering, Beauty has a magnetic pull on the soul. As we pursue ultimate Beauty, not her footprints alone, then we amplify the natural integrative ability of the imagination and give it a higher calling. Imagination has to work at a higher pitch to discover the enchantment or glimpses of Beauty, hidden or not, wherever she looks. An imaginative vision trained upon Beauty will find Beauty not as a fixed point but an expansive horizon, like her source: God. God’s creation cannot contain Him and the scent of Beauty is not the same as Beauty himself.
We do well to remember that God (Beauty) is so far above us that He must stoop down, as I believe Calvin once said, and lisp in our childish ears. He is primary Beauty. Every other expression of Beauty is less than primary, like smaller, more manageable bites of ultimate Beauty. Were God to rip open the great blue heavens like a curtain and present himself in all His Beauty, I would be vaporized by the sheer glory of His being. Thankfully, God knows our frame. He speaks to us, therefore, in baby-talk, using small words and gentle tones, so that we might follow His voice and cross the ravine that divides the finite from the infinite by means of the imagination which He has supplied. Jonathan Edwards echoes this truth when he wrote, “as men, when they teach children, must teach them after their manner of thinking of things, and come down to their childish capacities, so has God taught us concerning himself” (Jonathan Edwards).
Edwards serves as a wonderful guide in this search. Unfortunately, he is best remembered for his thundering sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” We misunderstand much of that sermon because we do not understand its context within his larger body of work and his life’s pursuit. For Jonathan Edwards, God’s Beauty and the resulting grace that pervades our existence was the only worthy imaginative and soul pursuit. Only with deep sadness over his congregation’s hard heart did he preach that sermon. He hoped beyond hope that his congregation might be moved by repentance to engage the imagination and pursue, with him, the glory of God. For Edwards, Beauty was “the central motif through which he [understood] the world, God, virtue, and divine things” (Edward Farley). For Jonathan Edwards, Beauty was True North—a compass point that lead straight to God.
By placing Beauty at True North, I am not calling for a Philistinism which turns Beauty into a means for self-fulfillment, a tool for our use. Neither am I calling for a renewed Aestheticism which claims Beauty for Beauty’s sake. Our souls long not for Beauty alone, but for God. We are set on pilgrimage by God, not by Beauty. Jonathan Edwards’ view of primary Beauty provides us with a view of Beauty that finds its source in God. Edwards lifts our vision above and beyond the footprints left by the wave upon the sand. We wander from the path as soon as we make this pilgrimage about us or our self-realization. Our self-fulfillment and self-realization will be a by-product of our pilgrimage toward God. Because we are the expressions, the epiphanies, of God’s imagination, we will be fully at home only when we return to Him. We want the vibrant life, but the way to the vibrant life is ironically found only by looking for something besides the vibrant life. If we put our imaginative nose to the ground and begin the hunt for Beauty, then the vibrant life grows up around us.
Like Toad in The Wind in the Willows, our imaginations slumber in a deluge of sensual overload after a life-time of drunken obsession with pleasure. God rouses us from our shallow stupor by giving us pangs of Joy, tastes of Beauty, Sehnsucht: crumbs along the trail that will lead us to Himself. This, then, is sanctification, the experience of faith: an unselving flight toward the One who selves us with himself. “Coming from God, then, and going to God are one and the same thing…a pilgrimage into the infinite, a journey from nothingness into God’s beauty, forever” (David Bentley Hart).
