How Does Scripture Talk About Beauty?

Listen in to a conversation about beauty in the Old and New Testaments.

Hello, friends! Here’s the next episode our podcast Another Life, hosted by Joy Marie Clarkson ☀️. This time, Joy speaks with Ben Quash about beauty in scripture.

This episode is a wonderful introduction to our Beauty issue: “The Call of Beauty.” Joy and Ben discuss the difference understanding of beauty in the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament and how beauty gives us a window into many points of doctrine, from creation to the incarnation. A few highlights:

On beauty and attention:

Ben Quash: Beauty is seeking to speak even though we can be quite good at creating the kind of din that makes it impossible for us to hear. The belief that beauty seeks to speak to us should make us more gently attentive, more patiently attentive, and more optimistically attentive, more hopefully attentive. Hope is more than optimism, it’s a disposition which sometimes we need to kind of hold ourselves to rather than just a feeling. That determination to look for it or listen for the attention that Simone Weil is so wonderful at talking about will reward us. And it will take the form of better relationships, not just with things we look at, whether artworks or natural objects, the things we might categorize as aesthetic objects, but it will actually affect the way we relate to each other.

On Thomas Traherne:

Ben Quash: It brings me to tears when I read Thomas Traherne. He’s a seventeenth-century poet and also the most exquisite writer of prose; a sort of Anglican mystic really, writing remotely in the west of England. Not a great deal is known about him; many of his works probably are lost; some have been found actually quite recently. He’s in the spirit of the metaphysical poets such as John Donne and George Herbert. And beauty runs as a constant thread through his writings; he’s intoxicated by it. It colors the way he sees everything around him in the world. It’s almost platonic, but it’s so affirming of the world that there’s that important, deeply Christian, world-affirming dynamic to it, where he talks about the creation as the frontispiece of eternity. It’s that front page of a book which is charged with the promise of what lies within. And when we look at the world, we’re seeing only the frontispiece, but it’s not obscuring, it’s promising. It’s promising what’s to come. And everywhere he looks, he sees eternity announcing itself – in the tiniest thing, even a fly. He can meditate ecstatically on a humble fly and see the respect and glory of its iridescence as already a foretaste of glory. It’s amazing. So Traherne, I think, is absolutely wonderful…

Traherne is writing at the time of the birth of modern science. This is where the very first steps towards organized natural science are taking place as a distinct discipline with its own methods. But he’s at that brief moment, that cusp, where there is no distinction between the natural scientific method and praise. So, it’s doxological science. It’s praise. It’s science that gives glory. And it won’t be long – it will be within the next fifty to one hundred years that it doesn’t seem to be a possibility anymore; it’s a door that gets closed. But for Traherne, an encyclopedia can be punctuated with exclamations of praise at every point. You’re mapping the world, learning about the world, and constantly referring it to God in praise. Along with mystical empiricism, I long for a doxological science. And, in a way, that can be the recognition of beauty.

We hope you enjoy this episode!