The Battle for Beauty
Published on August 9th, 2010.
A sacramentalist metaphysics is uncongenial to, if not simply impossible within, our present intellectual environment, which, at the extremes, tends to cut one of two ways. On the one hand, we find the rejection of metaphysics and meaning in the nihilism of the postmodern void, a view that denies any claim to inherent meaning or signification in the things of the world. On the other hand, we find a lean, minimalist metaphysics designed to support the reductionist practices of science and the market economy that sells the technologies science spawns, a view that objectifies and commodifies the things of this world. Neither tendency can imagine the physical world as a realm of creatures, of symbols, sacraments or “cop[ies] of an invisible world.”
It is not clear how beauty fits into either view, except as the object of capricious and market-driven desire. On the first view, beauty, like everything else, is meaningless, if not perhaps distasteful: the attempt to use a pretty ornament to hide a violent and chaotic world. The second view banishes all value, including aesthetic value, from objective reality, leaving us with a world populated by desiring machines. Neither view can give desire an object worthy of our most profound sense of longing. Instead, we are faced with desires that result from accidents of evolutionary forces, guided, if by anything, by self-interest expressed quite often in violence. Such groundless and purposeless desires are prey to the manipulations of propaganda and advertising, mere tools of the marketplace–our longing aimed now toward the dubious beauty of the surgically altered bodies presented in film and television. Beauty’s ability to survive in this toxic mix is uncertain. Lewis the dinosaur, and those who have followed him in his concern for sacrament and beauty and even God, point us to a better hope.
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Michael Muth, “Beastly Metaphysics: The Beasts of Narnia and Lewis’s Reclamation of Medieval Sacramental Metaphysics,” in David Baggett, Gary Habermas and Jerry Walls, eds., C. S. Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness and Beauty (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 244.
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