Beauty is NOT “in the eye of the beholder.” C.S. Lewis on Beauty.

A Theological Aesthetic and Apologetic for Objective Beauty.

Welcome! This is a seminary term paper turned into a Substack post (my first one btw!). For a shorter reading, jump down to the “A Theological Aesthetic” section (that’s where it gets real good!). Thanks for reading!

What to expect in this reading:

• How subjectivism and nominalism has influenced modern thought in the West, especially pertaining to aesthetics.

• Why “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is utter baloney.

• What is beauty? What is the best view of reality?

• Wisdom from Master Oogway (yes, that Master Oogway)

• The True, the Good, and the Beautiful have an ontological order and a psychological order!

• Beauty and the beholder: what happens when they meet?

• Beauty stirs a certain longing C.S. Lewis spent his whole life writing about.

• The ultimate picture of Beauty.

---

In this article, I will expound a theological aesthetic based on C.S. Lewis’ arguments for objectivity from The Abolition of Man and other works. I will first address the problems of subjectivity, particularly nominalism, as a basis for understanding the nature of beauty.

Aesthetic Nominalism

Since the time of Enlightenment, there has been a dramatic shift in how Western society views reality. What was once believed to be a universe full of Plato’s Forms and objective values has now been diminished to a matter of preferences and opinions. Instead of Truth, we have “your truth” and “my truth.” Nominalism, along with empiricism (the theory that all knowledge is known only through the senses) and naturalism (the theory that everything in existence can be reduced to natural causes and properties), has become one of the most pervasive views influencing modern thought.

Nominalism is the view that universal essences do not exist outside the constructions of our mind and that all that does exist are “non identical particulars.”¹ For example, the “apple” is just a mere name, a mental construct, a language we use “to help us talk about particular apples.”² Nominalism makes a strong dichotomy between “the world outside the mind, and the mind itself”—between mind and reality.³ In viewing creation and art, this same distinction has been made, resulting in a culture that has truly internalized the saying, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” This aesthetic nominalism has led our modern world to assume that beauty is not found in the physical world or the works of art themselves but merely in the mind of the beholder. So, is beauty simply a construct of the beholder? What are the implications of adopting such a view? In the next section, I will address some of the main concerns with an aesthetic nominalistic view of beauty.

Marcel Duchamp’s “readymade” art pieces such as the Fountain are a perfect example of how the culture has adopted a mind-dependent view of art—that art’s ultimate end is a mere thought of its beholder.

Issues of Aesthetic Nominalism

Beauty is reduced to subjectivity.

The biggest concern with aesthetic nominalism is that it reduces beauty to subjective judgements. Lewis dealt with this at length in his confrontation with The Green Book in which authors Gaius and Titius make the following comment about the story of Coleridge at the waterfall:

When the man said This is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall…Actually…he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word ‘Sublime,’ or shortly, I have sublime feelings…This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.⁴

Lewis first points out that one problem with this mindset is that it presumes “that all sentences containing a predicate of value [(sublime)] are statements about the emotional state of the speaker.”⁵ If it is true that all we can describe is our feelings about reality, not reality itself, then the world becomes unknowable and completely up to interpretation, especially since feelings can differ and change from one individual to another. A second problematic proposition follows: “all such statements are unimportant.”⁶ If all we can know and convey is our emotions, then there is no point in making such statements about an object in the first place. There is no universal value in sharing such statements—even if only to share one’s emotions, we cannot speak on the behalf of another individual’s emotions. Now, someone other than a Gaius or Titius might claim to really be saying something about an object, but as long as one holds to the view that values are determined by the mind, then the same problem remains: there is nothing really being said about anything outside the mind; therefore, there is no universal significance to make such a statement.

Naturally, these issues apply to the conversation on beauty. The consequence of the fact-value split in relation to beauty is that beauty becomes divorced from reality, only existing within the mind of the beholder. In fact, according to aesthetic nominalism, a world of beauty does not even exist; all there is is just a world of ideas—as “beauty” is just a mere name, language, construct. Consequently, anything goes—anything can be described as “beautiful” and be completely justified on the basis of subjectivity. A tyrant can see his tyranny as a beautiful expression of his power and no one has the objective grounding to say otherwise if there are no universals.

Aside from obvious moral dangers, art and works of art also lose their meaning. Dr. Scott Smith summarized it perfectly: “Art becomes distanced, separated, severed from reality—without an essence, artistic pieces have nothing to say to that which is not art.”⁷ Therefore, we lose any standard to determine between “good” and “bad” art. Art then can tell us nothing about the real world, only about our thoughts and feelings: “Art, in this view, has more to do with ideas than reality. As such, art has very little to do with the non-art world. Art no longer discloses any truths about the universe, society, or even the human spirit.”⁸

Symptoms of Aesthetic Nominalism.

Once beauty has been stripped of disclosing any universal truths about reality, both beauty itself and artistic works quickly tend to be reduced to purely functional values. Instead of allowing beauty to inform oneself about the universe or human nature, it becomes more about what it can do for one’s internal self-expression. For instance, one symptom of aesthetic nominalism is making the sole purpose of art the exhibition of art. Viewing artistic works merely as something for display in a museum, gallery, or a private home strips them of their dignity “by reducing them to objects for exhibition rather than works related to human ends.”⁹ In this case, art becomes a passive aesthetic simply just hanging on a wall waiting to fall prey to an individual’s constructivism, no longer engaging its beholder in a conversation about the objective world and human condition.¹⁰ Beauty itself becomes completely moldeable to the mind of the beholder, merely an expression of one’s ideas or feelings.

Three other symptoms arise. The over-commodification of art becomes a natural result of aesthetic nominalism as people look to buy to fill their walls with more passive images that will always conform to their self-image. Secondly, innovation for the sake of utilizing human freedom becomes the goal of the artist. The problem that arises here is the “rupture of the bond between the aesthetics of a work of art and artistic innovation.”¹¹ What happens is that when innovation dominates artistic creativity, the focus for the artist becomes novelty rather than discovery and disclosure of universal truths, and the focus for the beholder becomes trying to understand the artist’s innovations rather than the truths infused into the work of art itself. Such art becomes nameless and “almost cries out to its audience to give it a ‘name.’”¹² As innovation becomes the endless demand of the artist, the value of past works, tradition, style, and art itself diminishes.¹³

Thirdly, “‘aesthetic alienation’” is a symptom that manifests on two fronts: (1) within the art community itself and (2) within general society.¹⁴ Within the art community, nominalism’s resulting drive for innovation encourages pointless division among artists about what constitutes “good” or “bad” art. Within the general community, nominalism alienates art from the ordinary life of everyday people. The rejection of universals and the repurposing of art for mere innovation tends toward the development of group elitism and art Gnosticism in the community, in which people have to have some kind of special esoteric knowledge to understand the artist’s work and intentions, thus discouraging community around art and beauty.¹⁵

A Theological Aesthetic

So, what is beauty? There are two primary answers to this question: (1) beauty is found in objects that appear beautiful; (2) beauty is found in the subject who takes pleasure in the object. So the real question follows: “is beauty that which is beautiful or that which gives pleasure?” or as Augustine frames the question, are things “beautiful because they please” or do they “please because they are beautiful”?¹⁶

Beauty is a fact.

As I have already shown, nominalist and subjectivist views bring about all sorts of problems. Beauty cannot be reasonably defined by a feeling or personal preference. Rather, it makes the most sense that beauty itself exists outside the mind as something observable and unmoldable. How would we describe something as beautiful if beauty did not exist and present itself to us in the first place? I have already demonstrated why nominalism cannot answer that.

Realism (the position that the things we perceive really exist, outside the mind) seems to be the most reasonable alternative to nominalism and a much more liveable view congruent with reality. It is much more intuitive that we live in a universe of objective values and of universals that can metaphysically describe the nature of something, its what-ness, and apply commonality to many particular examples of that nature–i.e. “apple” is not merely a name but a singular essence that makes up physical instances containing “apple-ness” that show up in the world. One easy way we can know apples have a certain nature is through observing the fact that an apple seed will only grow into an apple tree that will only produce apples–not oranges, bananas, or any other kind of thing. What each person may or may not think an apple is does not change the nature of an apple or the fact that it has a nature. The same principles apply for all objects in the universe, including human beings. Even Master Oogway from Kung Fu Panda understood this.

Image screenshotted from Kung Fu Panda. Text added.

Lewis describes how the universe operates under what he calls the Tao (i.e. Natural Law in Christendom): “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.”¹⁷ Rather than reality submitting to the constructs of individual minds, it exists and flows independently. This implies that there is a way in which to live according to reality, and to not do so is to live outside of it. Lewis explains how objects do

not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt…and because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective values or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it). No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform.¹⁸

Objects in the universe are charged with certain objective values that demand to earn their appropriate responses. “The man who called the cataract 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.”¹⁹ Like how children must be “trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful,” Lewis states, we, too, must continually learn to align our thoughts and emotions to the Tao, and thus, to an accurate view of beauty itself.²⁰

“Beauty is an objective feature of reality, part of the furniture of the world God has made,” and it demands a proper response in the objects that feature it.²¹

Beauty is a Person.

Notice that an object can have a feature of beauty—we would then call it “beautiful”—but it is not beauty in itself. This is where we give attention to what philosophers have long acknowledged as the transcendentals, the timeless cosmic values and properties of Being itself that transcend all physical reality. The three prominent transcendentals are Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. In the essay, “Lewis’s Philosophy of Truth, Goodness and Beauty,” Peter Kreeft observes that these transcendentals have an ontological order:

Truth is defined by Being, for truth is the effulgence of Being, the revelation of Being, the word of Being. Truth is not defined by consciousness, which conforms to Being in knowing it. Goodness is defined by truth, not by will, which is good only when it conforms to the truth of Being. And beauty is defined by goodness, objectively real goodness, not by subjective desire or pleasure or feeling or imagination, all of which should conform to it.²²

However, the way in which we psychologically respond to them is in reverse:

As we know Being through first sensing appearances, so we are attracted to goodness first by its beauty, we are attracted to truth by its goodness, and we are attracted to Being by its truth. But ontologically, truth depends on Being, goodness on truth, and beauty on goodness. Truth is knowing Being. Goodness is true goodness. And the most beautiful thing in the world is perfect goodness.²³

Beauty is the splendor of true and perfect goodness—of Being. We know beauty shares a significant relationship with truth and goodness since it is possible to tell the truth in an ugly way or do a moral good without love; both these acts would tarnish the desirability of the Good and the True, and thus, Being itself.²⁴

The transcendentals can also be described as the three universal longings of the human soul.²⁵ Arguably the most significant theme in all of Lewis’ writings is about these longings, encompassed in what he calls the Joy longing, a deep-seated and insatiable longing, particularly for something transcendent and seemingly unattainable.²⁶ Lewis emphasizes how our insatiable longing to experience the true, good, and beautiful in this world are telling of our deeper longing to experience Truth, Goodness, and Beauty as Being (the I AM) and unify with Him:

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.²⁷

This transcending beauty Lewis alludes to is, of course, the Christian God himself; God is the source of beauty; God is Beauty itself. Although the things of reality that appear beautiful may be enjoyed to one degree or another, they are mere signposts pointing our Joy longing to the very source of that beauty, which is a personable God.

Beauty and the Beholder.

So, how do finite human creatures experience the infinite, invisible, and transcendent God? It happens through the experience of the transcendentals in the physical world because God is the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. In The Portal of Beauty, Bruno Forte builds toward a theology of aesthetics in light of past prominent theologians and writers (Augustine, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Evdokimov, and Balthasar). He proposes that beauty is an event: “beauty happens when the Whole offers itself in the fragment, and when this self-giving transcends infinite distance,” the Whole being the harmony and fullness of Being.²⁸ Like Lewis warns, the fragments of reality we see as beautiful such as art or nature, are not Beauty itself but objects that point to it. Beauty happens when God reveals Himself in the fragments of creation, and although “the fragment really becomes a dwelling-place of the Whole,…the Whole does not simply become the fragment.”²⁹ Although Forte’s proposal is well-presented, he is slightly off: beauty itself is not the event; rather, it is the experience of beauty that marks the event. While beauty is in the realm of the objectives, the experience of this event requires a subjective role from the beholder as he must be able to recognize that beauty and align himself to the response that object of beauty is worthy of (recall Lewis’ analogy of teaching children proper emotional responses). At this special moment of revelation and realization is when beauty happens, so to speak.

Of course, the ultimate picture of the Whole revealing itself in the fragment is in the event of the Incarnation. The event encompassing “the totality of the divine Mystery revealed and hidden” is in the person of the Incarnate myth made fact, Christ Jesus.³⁰ He is the “icon of what is unseen” and “the absence of the invisible and silent Father,” pointing us to the ‘beyond-ness’ of the transcendent, triune God while simultaneously manifesting God’s faithful presence as “the nearness of the Absent One, the sacrament of the One in whom love has its source, and who is at one and the same time infinitely distant and infinitely near.”³¹ One could say true beauty is a “Trinitarian ‘aesthetic.’”³²

Conclusion

Paul Gould remarks, “while it may be true that we behold beauty with the eye (or ear or pallet), beauty is more than a manner of personal taste.”³³ Beauty is mind-independent. It is an objective fact of reality. It is a personal God making His presence and perfect goodness known through a momentary unveiling. It is a temporal event of the beholder (the subjective) and the Divine (the objective) meeting face to face in the fragments of reality and ultimately, in the Incarnate Son of God.

When we look at beautiful things, “it is less the beholder that interprets the art but the art that interprets the beholder.”³⁴

The experience of beauty reveals to us our deepest desire, our Joy longing, for the one and only One who can truly satisfy. It is as St. Augustine famously said: "Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee."³⁵

Cover art for this post: A Deeper Country by Connie Wilkerson-Arp.

1. R. Scott Smith, Exposing the Roots of Constructivism: Nominalism and the Ontology of Knowledge (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022), 49.

2. Alejandro R. García-Rivera, A Wounded Innocence: Sketches for a Theology of Art (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003), 27.

3. Ibid.

4. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 2-3.

5. Ibid., 4.

6. Ibid.

7. Smith, 119.

8. Garcia-Rivera, 29.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., 28

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., 29.

13. Ibid., 28-29.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., 29-30.

16. Bruno Forte, A Portal of Beauty: Toward a Theology of Aesthetics, trans. David Glenday and Paul McPartlan (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008).

17. Lewis, 2-3. The idea of the Tao originally comes from Chinese thought; Lewis is borrowing this concept and building on it.

18. Ibid., 15, 19.

19. Paul Gould, Cultural Apologetics: Renewing the Christian Voice, Conscience, and Imagination in a Disenchanted World(Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2019).

20. Lewis, 16.

21. Ibid., 98.

22. Peter Kreeft, “Lewis’s Philosophy on Truth, Goodness, and Beauty,” in C.S. Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness and Beauty, ed. David Baggett, Gary R. Habermas, and Jerry L. Walls (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 25.

23. Ibid.

24. Gould, 99.

25. Ibid., 29-30.

26. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1955), 19. Lewis admits this: “In a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else.”

27. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 42 and 30-31.

28. Forte, 61.

29. Ibid.

30. C.S. Lewis, “Myth Became Fact,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970).

31. Forte, 17-18.

32. Ibid., 27.

33. Gould, 98.

34. Garcia-Rivera, 61.

35. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3.