Beauty is an experience that touches the heart of human beings and stimulates reactions in their minds that bring pleasure. The word “beauty” can be a complex concept that takes many forms, and has been the source of much debate in philosophy, religion, and art for centuries.
Early philosophical conceptions of beauty, mainly in the classical period (and some modern ones), focus on proportion and symmetry: a line is beautiful when it has a symmetrical relation to the long part, as the long part is to the short. The idea of a golden ratio, or a Fibonacci sequence, provides mathematical models for this principle.
Some of these philosophies of beauty also make use of subjective and objective modes of judgment, depending on the mind’s response to particular things. For example, the French philosopher Santayana argues that a thing is beautiful when it ‘induces a certain kind of pleasure.’ Aristotle, on the other hand, conceives of beauty as a sort of Form of Forms: it is real in the sense that it is objective, and he calls it ‘the greatest of all human qualities’ (Plato, Politics II, 62).
Hume and Kant were at the forefront of a movement to argue against purely subjective notions of taste, such as those of Santayana, and to argue for an approach which allowed for some variance and volition in the judgment of things as beautiful. In his Essays, Moral, Political and Literary (1758), David Hume argued that ‘Beauty is nothing in the thing itself: it is an exercise of the will; and each mind perceives a different kind of beauty.’
Aquinas, in a typical Aristotelian pluralist formulation, explains that there are three qualifications for beauty: integrity or perfection, due proportion or consonance, and clarity: “whence, things that have a brightly coloured appearance are called beautiful” (Summa Theologica I, 39, 8). In his later writings, Aquinas adds a third quality to this list: that the object be ‘fit for God’: in other words, it must have a ‘divine character’.
Theological definitions, on the other hand, often see beauty as a revelation from God: Karl Barth for instance saw it as the divine perfection in irresistible self-manifestation. He believed that this revealed quality was a key to understanding the Christian faith, and he saw that it is not primarily an aesthetic or philosophy concept but rather one which connects God’s nature, character and will to our own.
Theological views of beauty are usually firmly rooted in the Bible, and the language of the Bible does not tend to rely on philosophy or aesthetics but to a more precise identification of the Tri-une nature of God. It is possible to find a variety of biblical definitions of beauty, all of which are important in their own right and in their place within the larger framework of theology.