Episode Transcript  

One

What Beauty Is

Just as there are needs of the body we have needs of the soul. The soul has three parts: the intellect, emotions and the free will. The intellect needs to be fed by truth. That is why we hunger for knowledge. The will needs to be fed by goodness. The emotions need to be fed by beauty. But what is beauty? How would you define it?

Beauty is a combination of order and surprise. Order is just when something is right, when something is the way it’s supposed to be, or when something does what it’s supposed to do. Surprise is our response to something that isn’t obvious, what we did not expect. It’s new, fresh, clever, original, and therefore interesting. 

So imagine what it was like when your first child smiled for the first time, or took his first step, or said his first word. On the one hand, that’s just regular and normal, it’s right for people to talk, and to walk, and smile. But your kid hasn’t been doing any of those things, and suddenly, surprisingly, they are. It’s so good, so right, and so surprising that you can’t believe it, and you may start crying. 

That’s what beauty is. When you’re amazed at the rightness of things.

Two

How Beauty Corresponds to Our Nature

Beauty is a core part of the fulfillment of every human person. We all need beauty. We all need order and surprise. We need order because we’re intelligent creatures, and we have a desire to see how everything fits together, to see how things fulfill their natures, to see patterns that organize things in a proper way.

A clean and orderly room is restful because it’s been organized according to a clear principle, and so the mind can rest in that order. But we also need surprise, because we’re not just intelligent, we’re free. We want to know that life isn’t just following some rigid formula or mechanical law. We want to feel that reality itself is alive, personal, and freely given.

When something beautiful surprises us, a sunset, a melody, a child’s laughter, it reminds us that life is not a machine grinding on by necessity. It’s a gift. And when we glimpse that gift, that sheer gratuity of goodness, our natural response is wonder and joy.

So beauty is both order and surprise. Your wife will appreciate you if you go to work every day and come home every day. But if that’s all you do, she will find you boring. However, if you surprise her by doing something for her that she did not expect, she will think it’s beautiful.

Three

How Do We Find Beauty

We find beauty wherever we can recognize an order, a goodness, a rightness that doesn’t have to be the way it is. When we see the world that God made freely, and realize that there might not have been the regular pattern of snowflakes, of molecules, of trees, of solar systems, that all this order is the result of God’s creative genius, then we are seeing beauty.

When we think of how much work it takes, how much social ordering, to keep the lights on in our house, the planes in the air, the trains on track, the food on the table, when we realize this incredible ordering that is civilization, that’s only kept from utter chaos by people freely fulfilling their social roles, that’s beauty. When we experience the great masterpieces of art and music, or even of the kitchen table, and realize that unless someone had freely chosen to dedicate their genius, their years of discipline, and the bursts of creativity to this work, it wouldn’t have happened, then we are seeing beauty. 

When we see a friend or a family member act generously and fairly and kindly, even when they’re tired or in a bad mood and they could much more easily have been selfish in that moment, when we see people doing the right thing when they could have done the wrong thing, and we allow ourselves to be impressed, then we are seeing beauty.

When we think about how strange is our God who made us, then became one of us, then died for us, then forgives us over and over, and we remember that there’s no compelling reason for Him to do any of these things, then we are seeing beauty. Seeing beauty, then, is at its heart an act of gratitude that follows from the realization that things are much more right than they might have been. Which means if we’re willing to pause, look, and reflect, we can find beauty everywhere.

Four

How Do We Make Beauty?

It’s good to appreciate beauty. But it’s not enough to sit back and let the beauty flow in. We have to contribute to making the world beautiful. So how do we make beauty? By making something orderly and surprising. We use our intelligence to put order into things. When we clean, when we cook, when we organize our finances. When we plan our kids’ education, or our family vacation. When we work to implement a habit of prayer throughout the day.

But we also use our freedom to make sure that this order stays fresh. Beauty requires that we be creative, that we be open to doing new things, that we keep our leisure life, family life, work life, and prayer life from getting in a rut. That every new challenge in any of these areas becomes an opportunity to try something different. We should learn to like new forms of beauty. We should always, as long as we’re alive, open ourselves to appreciate new forms of beauty. And we should always, as long as we’re alive, open ourselves to taking on new challenges to serve and edify the people we love. 

Try to cook new dishes. Try to show you love for your wife in a new way you haven’t before. Travel to a new part of the country. Take a walk in nature or just sit in your backyard and look at the clouds, trees, and landscape. And at work, figure out what you can do for customers and coworkers that you haven’t thought of doing over the years. Make new order. Do good, right things in a surprising way. And you’ll be making beauty.

Five

How We Live Beauty

Beauty is order plus surprise. So if we want to live beautiful lives, like the saints, we just have to follow the formula of G. K. Chesterton, “break the conventions and keep the commandments.” If we keep the commandments, our lives will be right. They will be orderly. But if we break the conventions, our lives will be surprising. 

Feel free to challenge, like the saints did, those artificial expectations by which a secular society makes humanity homogenous. Do things differently, take on challenges other people don’t take on, and go without some of the things people mistakenly believe to be necessities.

Keeping the commandments and breaking the conventions is the path to being fully human. Fully orderly, fully surprising. Fully rational, and fully free. It’s the way to live a life of beauty.

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