We want to love that which we find beautiful, and I think that’s a good thing. I didn’t use to. Well, at least I didn’t think loving everyone I found beautiful was a good thing. In fact, as a closeted gay kid growing up in the church, loving the boys I found beautiful was definitely not a good thing, or so I was taught. But no matter how much I tried, I still found those boys beautiful. No matter how many times I tried to bury it, love kept pushing up from that fertile ground. I began to hate myself for finding beauty in places others told me not to. And then I felt an intense amount of shame and embarrassment because even hating myself couldn’t keep me from loving that which I found beautiful.
The thing is, beauty incites love. I often wonder if that is the point of beauty, to incite us to love not just ourselves but to love beyond ourselves.1 Perhaps beauty addresses the God-breathed likeness of our existence, and says with divine imperative, “Observe creation. Take in the other. And now love.” Who can change or thwart such a command? Who can ignore the herald of the Creator? So long as you can recognize beauty you will not be able to divorce yourself from the desire to love that which is beautiful. It is a testament, the fingerprint of God upon us.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and in doing so he created quite literally everything there is to know, and I would suspect everything there is that we may never know. Consistently throughout God’s creative work, he apprizes his creation and calls it “good” (טוֹב tov) (Gen. 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31). Perhaps when we read, “And God saw that it was good…”, we think of “good” in terms of morality (e.g. “good dog”; “he’s a good brother”), or we might think of “good” in terms of utility (e.g. “it’s a good truck”; “she does good work”). Those aspects are certainly wrapped up in God’s judgment of his creation as “good.” But we have a tendency to forget another aspect of that word, namely, beauty. In Hebrew the word טוֹב (tov) used in these passages is often translated as “beautiful” elsewhere in the text. In English, if we use the term “good” when we speak about the quality of creation or art, we usually imply that the art/creation has beauty, and is good. The goodness and the beauty of the creation are linked together.
Considering then Genesis chapter one as the depiction of the creational work, that word “good” cannot be divorced from beauty. God sees all he has created and judges it as good and beautiful, and loves it. Whatever God loves is beautiful, and whatever is beautiful God loves. Because he alone determines beauty and is the source of all love. Beauty doesn’t have any sort of power over God. Rather, it is because he determined that his creation is beautiful (good, pleasing, agreeable), that we are incited to love it. This is where we enter the scene as creatures crafted by the divine. Ultimately we see reflections of his glory in beauty, the faces and bodies of those around us, and so beauty then acts as an invitation to love and worship God.2 The beauty of others can inspire us to love not just the other, but to love God as well.
Moving through scripture, there are about a few dozen characters in the text that are referred to as beautiful in some way.3 In almost all of these occurrences, it is clear that the person’s attributed beauty incited the love or affection from others. Sarah (Sarai) garnered the affections of Pharaoh and his household because of her beauty. Rachel’s beauty was instrumental in inciting the love of Jacob. Joseph’s beauty roused the affections of Potiphar’s wife. David saw Bathsheba’s beauty and became enraptured. After seeing the beauty of her child, the mother of Moses was moved to save his life.
Many of these characters who are described as beautiful were taken advantage of, exploited, abused, and raped. They suffered these atrocities not because they were beautiful, or somehow flaunted their beauty. Rather, it was because the perpetrators sinned by failing to rightly express love toward those they obviously found beautiful. It is entirely possible and all too common to love someone to death. How we love one another matters. How we love that which we find beautiful matters. Even though we don’t always know what to do with the love and affection we are filled with, beauty still incites us to love. Our failure to love rightly is not just an individual failure, but a societal failure as well, a failure of the Church. We have failed to do the hard work of actually rightly loving what we find beautiful, and instead seek to neuter anyone whose love we don’t understand, including our own.
If we feel love spring up in our innermost selves when we take in the beauty of another, that is a good thing. All of us can appreciate all forms of beauty, and yet it does seem that we each have a predilection to particular forms, features, and styles which can uniquely catch our attention. I can appreciate and recognize a beautiful woman, but her beauty doesn’t hold my attention or attract me with the same force that the beauty of a man would. There are several different forms of attraction which are often experienced at the same time in varying degrees (e.g. sexual, sensual, emotional, intellectual, etc.). At the core though of each form of attraction we seem to be drawn to some quality of beauty, however subjective it may be. We are attracted to the way someone thinks because we find beauty in their thought process. We are attracted to the way someone looks because we find beauty in their appearance. We are attracted to someone emotionally because we find beauty in the way we feel around them. Beauty then seems to be the active ingredient behind all forms of attraction. And because we cannot seem to deny God’s assessment that his creation is beautiful, we are roused from death and decay and enkindled to love the beauty that stares us in the face and will not let us go until we declare the love of God.
Growing up closeted in the church, I learned to respond to beauty by killing off any desire that beauty awoke within me, lest it lured me into having sex with a man. Did your heart skip a beat when that cute boy smiled at you? You better mortify your flesh. Did you notice the strength and elegance of your friend? You better “bounce your eyes.” Did you start to feel a depth of love and intimacy for another man? Time to seal up your heart, suffocate it, and put a twenty-four hour guard around that tomb. I call this the chemo approach, and I don’t recommend it. Sure, if you master this method you might make it incredibly far without having sex with someone you shouldn’t. But that is often a fast-track to resentment and bitterness. Turns out that you can pursue celibacy and end up hating God because of it. Better to live a messy life of incongruity at the foot of Jesus than to behave perfectly apart from knowing his love.
I wish I knew how to respond to beauty all the time. Part of my frustration is that I often don’t. You can read more of my thoughts on responding to beauty here.4 But one thing I have learned is that if beauty invites you to love someone, then you shouldn’t kill off that desire. Killing off the desire to love someone because you find them beautiful (and fear you shouldn’t) seems to be a wickedness in its own right. We may want to kill off our desire to love someone because frankly it would be easier than having to learn how to love them rightly. But for one thing, no matter how good you get at killing off love in your life, it will keep coming back; forcing you to become a professional murderer of love (a la Dan in Real Life). Secondly, you will never learn how to actually steward a gift that God has given you. We all have callings and convictions, paths we are set to walk. Some are more well trodden than others. But I think we all struggle with knowing how to best carry the parts of our lives that make us human. It would be easier I suppose to walk without having to carry anything. But going on an adventure without gifts from friends? I can’t think of a time when that’s ended well. Maybe the love that beauty incites in us is itself a gift that we haven’t quite figured out how to use yet. A tool that will enable us to walk the various paths of our lives. Trust that God has called you to the path of your convictions and sparked your love through beauty. Learn how to use it. Let's learn how to wield this gift while we walk and stumble. Let us not run away from beauty. Nor feel shame for the love it incites, but rather let us with humility learn to rightly express that love.
Merton writes that the power to love another for their own sake, “is one of the things that makes us like God, because this power is the one thing in us that is free from all determination.” And that ultimately, “A man can love someone else, or God, for that matter so strongly that he can ignore all the rightful claims of affectio commodi [inborn self-love] and sacrifice life itself for the object of his love.” A Thomas Merton Reader, (1989) p. 314. This is the power of love that beauty can awaken…can inspire. Beauty can inspire us to freely lay down our own lives for the ones we love. And it is a good thing, because it reflects the nature of Christ.
Sarah Sparks in her absolutely wonderful song “The Artist” writes, “Don't let glory's reflection distract you from glory/Remember that all good things come from me”
Most of these instances utilize the words טוֹב (tov) or יָפֶה (yapheh). A sampling of these are: Sarah (Gen. 12); Rebekah (Gen. 24, 26); Rachel (Gen 29); Joseph (Gen. 39); Moses (Ex. 2); Saul (1 Sam. 9); David (1 Sam. 16, 17); Abigail (1 Sam. 25); Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11); Tamar (David’s daughter, 2 Sam. 13); Absalom (2 Sam. 14); Tamar (Absalom’s daughter, 2 Sam. 14:27); Abishag (1 Kings 1); Adonijah (1 Kings 1); Vashti (Es. 1); Esther (Es. 2); Daniel et al. (Dn. 1).
If you are to read anything on this subject I would highly recommend Tenderness by Eve Tushnet, particularly chapter 2, “Order in Same Sex Love.” Eve’s work greatly influenced much of my own thinking and I am grateful for her, and her often pioneering work.