The Forgotten Door: In our rush to prove truth, the Church forgot about beauty

I addressed the crowd with confidence: “Christianity is not about feelings, it’s about facts,” I declared.

A smattering of applause and the odd “Amen!” punctuated the air but, on the face of my non-Christian friend, I simply saw a broken hallelujah. He had agreed to come to the event and hear me speak because of a certain ‘spiritual longing’ that he was experiencing. Yet, in the space of one trite aphorism burned straight from Now That’s What I Call Evangelical Soundbytes, Volume 3, I had dragged him back through the looking glass from an imagined Wonderland and into the solid, sober world of Christian evidentialism. 

I had probably thought, as most young apologists do at some point, that I was the next CS Lewis, but Lewis himself would have admonished me for such a messy divorce of feelings and facts. 

Saying that Christianity is about facts and not feelings is, of course, itself not a fact, but simply an assertion. I had used it because I had heard it used elsewhere, by someone who had probably read it somewhere else. I followed it up by regurgitating the four established ‘facts’ agreed upon by New Testament scholars surrounding the resurrection of Jesus. This is all good and helpful stuff and does a fine job of knocking on the door of the mind with the news that Christianity is true. 

But my friend wasn’t there due to a wobbly mind. He was there because of a stirring in his heart, and I had quashed the idea of longing as a guide in his search for meaning. Deep was calling out to deep but, instead, I handed him armbands and directed him to the baby pool.

Deep was calling out to deep but I had handed him armbands and directed him to the baby pool

“There is a way into my country from all the worlds,” says Aslan in Voyage of the Dawn Treader (HarperCollins). It’s not just the wardrobe that contains a doorway into Narnia. Arguments from reason, science and history are splendid, but other doorways into the kingdom of God have been too long neglected, overgrown with moss and left to rust on their hinges. 

It’s as the poet Ingrid Godd-Maidoff said: “God spoke today in flowers and I, who was waiting on words, nearly missed the conversation.” Or, to quote Galadriel from The Fellowship of the Ring (HarperCollins): “some things that should not have been forgotten were lost”. 

But what exactly? 

Reformed and enlightened

I believe it is the knowledge that there are more than two transcendentals (aspects related to the spiritual realm) which can stir our rational faculties. Christian apologists have long waged a noble war for truth, and pastors and teachers everywhere expound goodness with great aplomb. But what of beauty? Where did we leave her? We left her with art and called her decadent. We witnessed her communing with myth and wrote her off as a fairy story. 

We might blame the Reformation, many proponents of which seemed to fear beauty. In a previous article for this magazine, Nick Page wrote: “The logic was that God is invisible, intangible, so he must be worshipped in an invisible kind of way. So down came the statues. The ecclesiastical furniture was destroyed, the wall paintings whitewashed. Protestant churches were painted the 16th century equivalent of a Dulux can of magnolia.”

The visual arts were largely exiled from the spiritual life of Protestant churches. Even today in most evangelical churches, ‘art’ has been reduced to Maureen’s tie-dye banner from the late 80s, now badly faded but still hanging in there. I suppose we might say that worship music is a doorway to beauty but, often, it’s too functional and structured to be classified as art. Beauty creates awe and stillness. Art isn’t afraid to beg a question without giving an answer. 

Composer Leonard Bernstein claimed that when he was in the presence of great music it was “like heaven, something we can trust that will never let us down”. Maybe I’m just becoming grumpy in my early middle-age, but today’s modern worship music seems more likely to hype us up than lead us anywhere transcendental most of the time.

On top of the Reformation, we have the Enlightenment to contend with, which made the search for meaning into a purely rational endeavour. Anything without empirical verification became irrelevant. Christian thinkers have always eventually sandbagged the flood of encroaching ideologies, but there’s a growing feeling that some of our current mission strategies too strongly resemble the story of Teruo Nakamura. The Japanese ‘holdout’ finally surrendered to the Allies in December 1974 – nearly three decades after the war he was still fighting had been lost. 

Time passes. Things change. What used to work well succumbs to the law of diminishing returns – the 4-4-2 formation in football, blonde jokes in comedy, prawn cocktail as a starter at a meal. Turn back the clock 20 years and unbelief seemed to be winning the battle for public allegiance, the four horsemen of New Atheism riding roughshod over their opponents with a scintillating marriage of science and sophistry. 

The battlefield on which they claimed their crushing victory seems quiet and overgrown now; their bandwagons ditched and derelict. The land that they took for their followers has not proven to be the fertile Elysium they mistook it for – and how could it be, frankly? It’s all well and good to use emotive phrases such as “We are all stardust!” (Brian Cox) but when the dust settles, all that really means is humans are nothing more than proto-plasmic sacks of chemicals with a limited shelf-life. People (and increasingly, young people) are looking beyond prosaic materialism. Just look at the recent stats of Bible sales and church attendance among young people. They are looking, whether they know it or not, for what Elizabeth Barrett Browning called the “poetry glorified” of Jesus Christ.

Nevertheless, we are still seemingly in what mythicist Martin Shaw calls “magpie times” – black or white, red or blue, right or left. If you look at magpies closely enough, though, you’ll see that they have these curious blue feathers between the binary. Beauty and myth speak a “blue feather language”, says Shaw. “They are meant to offer some third, artful perspective when culture is butting heads.”

How do they achieve this? By allowing for what Tolkien called: “the realisation of imagined wonder.” They describe without prescribing. 

The spiritual realm appears to us as a secondary world – you have to imagine it. But too much Christian evangelism doesn’t require us to imagine anything – simply to know, trust and believe. For a long while, evangelists such as Billy Graham could call people “back to God” because the listener had a sense of where they had strayed from – and where home was to be found. 

But this is no longer the cultural moment we are living in. Jesus is, for many people, an inconnu, a name without a face. The task facing us is not to shout people back into the pews, or beckon them over like unruly schoolboys, but to be more like Mr Beaver in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and call them “further in” to these tangled woods, down this uncanny path, up this gentle rise to the lone figure on the hillside.

Beauty is better

This new way is really just the old way, the forgotten doorway shorn of its weeds. Thomas Aquinas, one of the early Church fathers, defined beauty as id quod visum placet (that which being seen, pleases) while the prolific Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar said: “to contemplate beauty is precisely to contemplate Divine Love.”

Where beauty sets itself apart from the other transcendentals is in its singular lack of agenda or judgement. Truth will tell you where you’re wrong and goodness will show you how to do right, but beauty is deeply untroubled by our fallen condition. Beauty is the disinterested one, dancing like no one’s watching, free from shame, guilt-tripping and emotional blackmail, parading as an uncontained splendour around the double pillars of the true and good. As such, it is approachable and accessible. It does not prescribe a course of action but leads us gently over the sharp edges of argument and faction to a quiet place. There, we have a chance to ask the question that drives all art and every story: What if? 

Beauty does not prescribe a course of action but leads us gently over the sharp edges of argument and faction to a quiet place

Within that context, the spiritual seeker or invited guest is drawn in rather than ushered. The headstrong sceptic, with Jericho walls built firmly around his mind, is infiltrated at first light through the heart. In missional terms, what has always counted is finding an answer to the question: How are people won? When we consider the work of Elizabeth Oldfield and her podcast ‘The Sacred’, the writings of people like Shaw, or the re-emergence of Christian spoken-word poetry through artists such as the Premier Christianity columnist Joshua Luke Smith, it looks very much like myth and beauty are back on the menu. And not before time. Truth without beauty is just a fleshless abstraction, a mental assent to a set of propositions. Through beauty (whether in art, poetry, story or music), truth becomes incarnate. Words become flesh.

The tragedy of my own evangelistic message was not what I had learned to say, but what I had unlearned. The first demand we place on any communicator should not be “help me learn” but “make me care”.

My first foray back into church as an adult happened at St Mary’s Church in Stoke Newington, London. The vicar exposited and exegeted from a million miles away while the congregation, grown stiff with the ramrod of convention down their backs, made the “peace be with you” segment seem more like a notice of intended prosecution. This says nothing to me about my life, I remember thinking, quoting Morrissey to myself. 

But then a young lady with additional needs started dancing during a hymn. Set against the perfectly manicured rows of reverence, her joyous and chaotic movement looked like a protest, a defiant exception to the no-feelings rule. She was a blackbird who had flown into an examination hall; a one-woman flashmob who went ahead even when nobody else showed up. She saw me smiling and came to stand next to me. Then she held my hand briefly. When she left with her parents, she waved at me with the sort of wave you only really use to hallooo someone from across the other side of a large car park. I have zero recollection of what the vicar said that day. But I will never forget how that wordless young lady made me feel. 

Through beauty, truth becomes incarnate

In his book Beauty: A very short introduction (Oxford University Press), Roger Scruton writes: “Nobody who is alert to beauty, therefore, is without the concept of redemption – of a final transcendence of mortal disorder into a kingdom.”

My friend did eventually find his way to Christ, but not because of me. He read Beowulf. At the end of that epic saga, Beowulf kills the dragon but is mortally wounded in the process. The hero is given a lavish funeral, but the people are left exposed and unprotected. They foresee: “enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles…slavery and abasement.” Something in the beauty of the story opened his eyes to the truth. “I realised that we need a hero who is greater than death,” my friend said. “I finally got it – we need Jesus.”

Beautiful.