Gregory S. Cootsona - The Telos of Beauty: A Common Quest for Theologians and Scientists

Gregory S. Cootsona's "The Telos of Beauty: A Common Quest for Theologians and Scientists," in the new issue of The Global Spiral, is a great essay on the nature of beauty from both a subjective and objective perspective. The article examines beauty "as the central purpose of the universe."

The Telos of Beauty: A Common Quest for Theologians and Scientists

By Gregory S. Cootsona

The twentieth-century mathematician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, offered this provocative statement in his mature philosophical work, Adventures in Ideas:

The teleology of the Universe is directed toward the production of Beauty.¹

This sentence from Whitehead points toward a rich and stimulating conception of beauty—not as mere ornamentation (ultimately as cosmetics), which one can place at the periphery or which possesses merely commercial important—but astonishingly as the central purpose of the universe. With this provocative assertion, Whitehead points toward the purposive or teleological element of beauty—what I will call the telos of beauty. As Whitehead is wont to do, he extends his claim as far as possible: beauty structures and directs the final aim of the universe. Or more simply, beauty directs the universe. Whitehead makes an assertion that combines beauty in science with art and metaphysics, which is not a far distance from theology.

Whitehead’s citation provides an intellectual springboard for a new place of beauty in the dialogue between science and theology, namely, as a nexus for common understanding. And so, after some clarifying definitions and a word about my personal motivations, I begin this essay by unfolding a theological understanding of beauty. I develop the concept of divine glory by building on key biblical texts and two major thinkers in the Reformed tradition, the eighteenth century American theologian and philosopher, Jonathan Edwards, and the twentieth century Swiss theologian, Karl Barth.

This choice immediately raises a question: Why select the Reformed tradition when Catholic theologians have pursued the concept of beauty with greater intensity? Why chose Edwards when any theology of beauty evokes the name of Hans Urs Von Balthasar, undoubtedly the greatest exponent of a theological aesthetics in the past two hundred years? And secondly, why Barth, who expressed a long-standing antipathy to “natural theology,” a category into which he would seem to place the concept of beauty as common vocabulary for the science-theology dialogue? As a theologian in the Reformed tradition, I would like to rehabilitate Reformed reflection on the topic on beauty. And there are profound and substantial insights in this tradition. Edwards in particular has been forgotten. For example, I have found no mention of him in von Balthasar’s massive multivolume study, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. And yet there are at least two qualities of Edwards that are relevant to this study: first of all, Edwards self-consciously fashioned his work in the wake of Newtonian physics and thus engaged in an ongoing dialogue with scientific insight. Secondly, his ideas themselves were beautiful, enough so that he has been called “one of America’s five or six major artists, who happened to work with ideas instead of with poems or novels.”² In other words, Edwards sought the beauty of thought both materially and stylistically. As for Barth, though this theologian of revelation was not particularly interested in the insights of science, his theological reflections on beauty and particularly its relation to divine glory are potent and provide remarkable theological groundwork for finding intersections between scientific and theological concepts of beauty.

In the third section, I will connect these theologians’ concepts of God’s glory and therefore beauty with how scientists have described the beauty of their discipline, particularly drawing on Henri Poincaré, Werner Heisenberg, and Alfred North Whitehead. I will exegete these comments and reflections on beauty from twentieth-century scientists, seeking to their understandings of beauty. I will then offer some reflections and a synthesis of these insights. This procedure leads to my final section, in which I will pose questions and present directions for a future research program on beauty as a nexus for the science-theology dialogue.

Some Preliminary Clarifications

We do not want merely to see beauty… We want something else that can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.
—C.S. Lewis

Before proceeding, I offer an initial caveat: it may appear that I have begun with a conception of beauty, which I then sought to apply to science and theology (and by extension, art). My procedure is actually the reverse and therefore more modest. I have researched the way scientists and theologians (especially in the Reformed tradition) describe beauty as rightly perceiving, and theorizing about, their objects of study and as a goal in their lives and work. I have then sought to connect these leading concepts with one another. Science and theology possess a significant overlap in their definitions of beauty. The fact that this paper proceeds in reverse is simply the desire for clarity. It is easier to begin with the general concept of beauty and then sound it out in specific locations.

I submit a few preliminary clarifications. In my definition, beauty is the grasp of rightness. It arises for both theologians and scientists through rightly perceiving and theorizing about their objects of study. It is thus a perception of truth. Beauty also provides a lure for study. In this sense, it is telic. For theologians, it can be grasping God’s true nature, God’s creation, and our ethical life. For scientists, it is the rightly perceiving, and theorizing about, nature. When this perception is made, it is accompanied by a sense of completeness.

One of the corroborating features of defining the telic aspects of beauty is historical continuity. There is a correspondence with elements of the Augustine’s triad of unity, order, and proportion, as well as the related definition of Thomas: integrity, consonance, and clarity (integritas, harmonia, claritas). With Thomas, consonance stands out most clearly in connecting with a right perception of God and nature. It is also close to integrity—that things fit together. Nevertheless, I do not present my definition as exhaustive. Instead it is the locus of significant overlap between science and theology. There are certainly other aspects to beauty in Thomas’ and Augustine’s definitions, let alone subsequent formulations. Secondly, beauty offers telos in that beauty is motivation, fulfillment, and direction. Beauty offers direction by luring theologians and scientists in their work. Theologians might even point to a glimpse of eschatological wholeness. Something beautiful points to the One who is Beauty. This teleological element of beauty is a component of the well-known insight that beauty pleases us. Though this pleasure has often been focused on the eyes, I submit that we receive beauty through a variety of faculties, and perhaps most importantly for this paper, intellectually, or through the “eyes of the mind.’ The examples below from scientists and theologians will sufficiently exemplify this point.

To set this definition in the context of theology (which is my specialization), beauty represents a component of the doctrine of creation. It is a part of the way that a creative, beautiful God has left a footprint in the creation. Beauty thus expresses itself in these forms: God and the world understood rightly (the domain of theology and metaphysics) and therefore life lived rightly (the related discipline of ethics). It is also when human beings understand nature understood rightly (science).

I realize that my definition of beauty—a beauty that can be grasped in science and theology—runs in the face of the common, narrow fixation on beauty as the physical perfection of women’s bodies, a fact that can be discovered by a simple Google or Amazon search. In this latter case, beauty equals cosmetics or sexual appeal. Though beauty certainly includes attractive women and men, this is an entirely restrictive view of the entirety of beauty’s scope. One does not want to subsume all beauty ultimately under sexual attraction and thus under fertility and survival (which is the general vector of neo-Darwinian thinking). Neither, however, can beauty be defined in a way that omits sexuality. Beauty as telos, I submit—but cannot unfold here—provides a resolution.

This project of unfolding the telos of beauty as a common quest for theology and science brings together for me a fifteen-year period of research into the dialogue of these two disciplines. Stated simply, I have observed that both science and theology recur with descriptions of beauty. I then join this observation with my earlier degree in comparative literature, where aesthetics plays a critical role.³ If theologians have largely forgotten how to talk about beauty, scientists in the past century or so do more frequently, but maybe less willingly. The study of literature then educated me with sensitivity to the aesthetic aspects of human life, whether that human be a scientist or theologian. And ultimately, I believe that we are all humans first and thus share a drive toward beauty—or perhaps better stated, beauty lures us all and motivates us in whatever discipline we find ourselves.

In this project, I am also seeking to undercut the emphasis that arose in the Enlightenment via Immanuel Kant and David Hume —and I believe the concept of the telos of beauty can do this—that beauty is purely subjective and that it therefore does not lead the perceiver to the “thing in itself” (das Ding en sich). Hume’s lapidary formulation is certainly worth citing: “Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”⁴ Kant’s resistance to the knower’s inability to penetrate to the reality of a thing “in itself” certainly includes human beings finding beauty. On the other hand, theological and scientific descriptions highlight that beauty can be discovered (and here I am leaning on the more literal meaning of “uncovered.”)

I propose that the discovery of the telos of beauty means that beauty has cultural variations to be sure, but there are also objective components in beauty that inhere in the object. In some way—but certainly with regional variations—theology and science (and art) seek truth of expression, whether it’s God’s, the world’s, or other forms. My definition of beauty therefore relates to both ontology and epistemology. Beauty exists outside of the knower. As well, it can be understood by the human mind. (Both of these assertions are important.) Accordingly, I am committed to a critical realism, in which reality exists outside of the mind of the knower and yet the interests and limitations of the knower interact with what is known. I take this position to be the current consensus in the dialogue of theology and science, and since not every related issue can be pursued here,⁵ I will proceed accordingly without further elaboration.

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Tags: Gregory S. Cootsona, The Telos of Beauty, A Common Quest, Theologians, Scientists, Religion, Science, beauty, theology, Alfred North Whitehead, purposive, teleological, Werner Heisenberg, art