A Sense of the Divine

How should we begin? With C.S. Lewis’ the Numinous, with John Calvin’s Sensus Divinitatis? Both of these writers point us towards a sense.

A sense.

A sense of the divine, of divinity. And, although the sense itself has several modes, and many ways of catching our attention (more than we have space for here) we might be able to consider one of them. So, what name should we put to this avenue through which we might sense the divine?

Beauty? Let’s go forward with beauty.

To be alive is to recognize the world is a hard place, we will go through varieties of pain before the end, and the end indeed seems worse still. It presents a bleak prospect that no trite phrases or easygoing flippancy will answer.

And so I present none, I only draw attention to a sense.

If we hold to the idea of materialism, we should expect a cold, harshness to the world.

But what about beauty? Of course it depends on what we mean by beauty. If we mean something which is aesthetically appealing, or that which is satisfying — for example those qualities that are beneficial or favorable, materialism would have no qualm. However, there is a second, deeper kind of beauty.

We would probably agree that beauty is found in simplicity, symmetry, elegance, harmony, inherent order, or inner logic. That beauty is satisfying.

But there is another beauty that we experience in our lives — although containing many, or perhaps all of these qualities, it is not an emergent property of them, for it goes against satisfaction, it is in a way — unsatisfying.

And so let’s for our purposes here call this second kind: Transcendental Beauty — that sense which is, in a way, not satisfying — now, it is not dissatisfaction, but is more like an open-ended satisfaction, like a question, it is the beauty that stirs longing. It is a sense not benefitted by experience or training — we don’t need a degree in art theory to know it, so to speak. It rises up in us quite automatically. And the longing of this sense leads us somewhere — as though the deep parts of us resonate with something we cannot even describe, and fail to put words to — and that those depths sketch the partial edges of something more, and that for just a moment we can sense where they lead. The moment finds us, and appears to us as both natural, and surprising: it meets us when we see a certain sunrise over a mountain, waves crashing against a cliffside, the breaking forth of spring flowers on a hard post-winter field, or, during the birth of a child — beauty that transcends the conditions of facility.

I hope I have described this sense appropriately so far. If not, let’s use another example — that of top down beauty, and of bottom up beauty.

Top down beauty is that kind of beauty which we ascend to, meet, or discover either by experience or by craft. We rise to meet it, so to speak. We attempt to understand it, or perhaps learn about it, and in gaining experience we might enjoy it more. Poets can understand the million beautiful moments of poetry better than I can.

Bottom up Beauty, though, is that kind of pre-articulate stirring, a being-met-by something that directs the observers gaze up, to that transcendental longing. It lifts the one being met by it, lifts them in possibility, lifts them in potential. No special experience is needed here, it is more foundational than that.

These two can even overlap, but when the first kind gives way to the second, that is what we might call: ‘awe.’

The first kind satisfies, and is satisfying. It is wonderful to look at your favorite painting, or listen to your favorite song. But when the second kind stirs, and we are met by it, the painting of the landscape we are looking at reveals in us a longing for a reality more real than anything we’ve yet known. It stirs in us a longing for the music to never end, because for that moment we are sensing a Beauty that stands behind and above that very beauty we are experiencing in front of us, in the immediate.

We are, in that moment, caught up and met by Transcendental Beauty. It is that pre-articulate, a priori sense that reveals itself; and, upon the disappation of that moment, leaves us, as we walk away from the gallery, from the concert, from the moment — struck silent by what we just beheld.

To understand beauty as the materialist does is to lose the second sense of Beauty. It is to settle for unguided aesthetics, and to deny our being met by that which is more. The second kind of beauty is the more basic, you do not have to understand high art to be caught in a moment of awe. And yet awe finds us and something innate in it makes sense, and means something. It is only after that that we then have to fight to remove the meaning, to rationalize it away with the old ideas of Freud.

And yet that beauty which transcends, and does not satisfy, but with its innate sense causes us to look for that which is behind the first kind of beauty, to look for meaning with a capital M — that beauty remains, even if we try to close of our senses to it.

If the cold, harsh universe contained only unguided aesthetics, then why would those moments evoke in us metaphysical meaning, meaning with a capital M? We could of course say they don’t, that it is only illusionary, but I wager if we took that statement seriously in itself, we would have to close many college departments that deal in such frivolous things as literature, art, or philosophy.

And so we are faced with a question — what do we do with the second kind of Beauty, the deeper kind, the Beauty a priori? Where does it take us thoughtfully? Do we have an answer for the teleological problem of Beauty, as it were?

•••

I have found solace in this idea of beauty, and I want to make something a bit clearer, it is an idea that I do not connect with the medieval and early-modern arguments for what is called natural-theology, I am not sure it can be an argument or philosophical proof in that way, it defy’s that sort of thing like a foreign continent defy’s being wholly described by a postcard.

The articulation of this sense, though, can be found, and is found in places like Psalm 19:

‘The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.’