Why Beauty Compels Us

*This excerpt seems especially resonant given the violence in Ukraine.

In May and June of 1992, the cellist Vedran Smailovic (pictured above) played Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor in the ruins of Sarajevo for twenty-two days uninterrupted after a mortar shelling killed twenty-two people in a market in the besieged city. He played in the crosshairs of snipers and artillery gunners amid the rubble of his town. When all around him tragedy and affliction were the only daily story—with no end in sight—his response was to create and offer beauty. Not anxiety. Not fury or revenge. And not despair. Beauty. 

And the beauty he offered changed everything.

I don’t mean it stopped the shelling. The siege would continue for nearly four more years, and many more would lose their lives. One could argue that nothing changed at all. But what Smailovic’s commitment to beauty did was change the direction and trajectory of people’s attention and action. And it is what it will do for us.

Our desire for and encounter with beauty could be described in terms of wonder, welcome, and worship. When asked to imagine beauty, our minds turn to Yosemite’s Half Dome, the Chartres Cathedral, Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Henry Tanner’s Annunciation, or the Trek Domane SL6 road bike (even if you’re not a cyclist, you will immediately want to become one when you see this bicycle). We would approach any of these with eager anticipation and an uptick in heart rate. We would view, listen, or ride paying full attention to the beauty we are encountering. All else would fade away as we were swept up in the moment, compelled and captivated by what we were sensing and perceiving. And we would want the moment to travel into the next and the next.

The beauty embodied in all of these examples implores us, in a word, to gaze. We don’t glance at beauty. We gaze at it. It captures our attention and holds it. We catch our breath—and breathe again—and then ponder. And here, to gaze upon beauty refers not only to our visual senses but to all the ways we sense the world. For indeed we are able to engage the world only as we first sense it in a kaleidoscope of ways. We listen to beauty in the drumming of the pileated woodpecker. We taste it in the black raspberry pie (and believe you me, my wife’s is the best). We touch it in a cashmere sweater. We smell it in the scent of a lilac. Beauty reveals itself to us of its own free will; we do not demand that it do so, for if we did, the very essence of the beauty would be diminished. We are not its owner but rather the recipient of a gift we do not deserve.

To be aware of beauty in this way compels us to gaze. In this posture we do not leer, gawk, ogle, or glare at beauty. To do so reflects disintegrated and disintegrating responses that emerge out of shame, responses that are clutching, hoarding, fearful, condemning, consumptive, and, ultimately, violent. The shame that ignites these responses to beauty is itself the nidus of all sexual lust, abuse, and violence. A man can be aroused by the presence of a woman; that arousal can take less than three seconds to mobilize. The question is what he does then: Does he gaze, or does he commit violence?

To gaze on an object of beauty is to be present and look upon it on its terms, not on our own. We allow beauty to enrapture us and carry us to peaks and troughs of what it means for us to be human. We long to linger with it, to remain with it as long as it will remain with us (hence our yearning to stop the clock on that spectacular sunset), sensing ourselves being mysteriously transformed by it. In fact, if asked to imagine beauty in any fashion, we would likely expect to gaze upon it, non-consciously anticipating doing so. It is not difficult to see, then, how our poet of Psalm 27 expresses his longing to gaze upon God’s beauty, beauty that is an expression of God’s very essence, an essence from which all other imagined notions of beauty emerge. Beauty that would swallow us up, that we might become that upon which we gaze.

Moreover, if we are the dwelling place of God, if we are the body and face of Jesus, then, by extension, we reflect the very beauty of God upon which we gaze. We must work to imagine how, just as our poet longed to gaze upon God’s beauty in the tabernacle, we do the same in the progression from tabernacle to temple to the body of Jesus to pillars in the temple of our God in the new heaven and new earth. And we encounter that very beauty of God no more powerfully than by gazing upon each other. I am not equating us with God in some pantheistic sleight of hand. Rather, I am inviting us to imagine how, being sisters and brothers created by the Holy Trinity in the love of our Father, rescued by our older Brother the King, and nurtured and empowered by the Spirit as we dwell together, we see the resemblance of our Father in each other’s faces, hear our Brother’s delight in each other’s laughter, and revel in the Spirit’s joyful transformation of us as individuals and as a community in each other’s stories of new creation. In this way, as we gaze upon each other, we gaze upon God’s beauty.

But we don’t go looking for beauty in a war zone. We play the cello in a concert hall, not the rubble that remains in the wake of a mortar shelling. It would not ever occur to us to search for beauty in a minefield; no one would enter such terrain expecting to discover, embrace, and be transformed by beauty. How would it be possible? We would be too distracted by the fear of the obvious danger. Moreover, it would be sheer lunacy to consider that same minefield as a construction site for an outpost of beauty. No one knowingly walks into the ruins of one’s dwelling place and the crosshairs of sniper fire with the expressed purpose and expectation of creating beauty and putting it on display. But as it turns out, this is exactly what God has done in the incarnation. And whether he knew it or not, the incarnation is what Smailovic was echoing in Sarajevo. 

From Curt Thompson's The Soul of Desire: Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community

Copyright (c) 2021 by Curt Thompson. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com