We shall, today, start at the end, taking for our introduction very nearly the final line of Ferro’s article in Islander VI, a quote from Ruskin: “Taste is not only a part and an index of morality; it is the only morality…. Tell me what you like, and I’ll tell you what [you] are” (pg 58). Ruskin here at once penetrates to a very real truth and brushes with a very dangerous heresy. On the one side, ‘taste’- meaning the skill of perceiving beauty- is indeed very nearly aligned with morality, an important tool for the Christian. On the other side, the danger side, to make taste our epistemology is to dive head-first towards hell.

Ferro’s article calls for a deliberate cultivation of ‘taste’ in our society, in each of us individually and in the cultures which emerge from us by relationship and accretion. By ‘taste’ is not meant the recognition of ‘High Art’ which is really just a recognition of the Inner Circle; at best that gets us Brackton, at worst NICE. Modernity’s deliberate subjectivism, denying beauty’s reality, has left it with a different sort of aesthetic objectiveness: beauty is that which conforms to the high-society orthodoxy, transgressing the abhorred and repeating the scatalogical bromides.

So modernity’s ‘art’ recognizes two truths. First, beauty must have an objective standard; second, that standard is closely, closely related to truth, to the metaphysical, the ontological, and the anthropological. When I say ‘anthropological,’ do not hear of a soft science; hear instead of a branch of philosophy which is, in reality, a branch of theology, for man is made in God’s image (Gen. 1:26) and remade likewise (1 Cor. 15). The standard modernity presses, however, is vile.

Beauty is a reflection of God’s nature; man’s perception of it is his perception of God. True beauty is thus objective, being relative to the immutable, objective God in all His aseity. More, true beauty is interrelated with truth (what is) and morality (what ought to be), when the three are understood truly. As such, beauty-perception, ‘taste,’ is a faculty which is of immense use to the Christian in determining not only what is but what ought to be, in recognizing the proper arrangement of the world, in actuality or potential, and turning towards it.

Nevertheless, to make ‘taste,’ however refined, into a moral standard…. Such is the course of a fool (in the theological sense; meaning, one who does not submit to God’s wisdom). We can and should cultivate an appreciation, recognition, and understanding of beauty, as Ferro recommends, seeking out the truly beautiful and incorporating it into us via careful, deliberate, repeated experience (and creation, where possible; even the least artistic can make beauty in making good food, a clean house, an elegant equation, an ingenious chemical, a smile given freely). We, however, are incapable of infallibility and as a rule far from inerrant (1 John 1:10).

Taste and beauty cannot be our guide to right and wrong because we are tainted by sin, pervasively in our fallen state and still thoroughly when saved from damnation. Proverbs 3:5,7 warns us away from such hubris: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding…. Be not wise in your own eyes….” God gave us our beauty-faculty to aid us, but we may not use it in a way He does not permit. God gave us His word (2 TIm. 3:16-17) and His Spirit (John 14:26) to be our guides, not our own intuition, however enlightened, however developed.

Our perception of beauty should be an analytical tool, a means of motivation, a warning or an encouragement. It may not, however, become our epistemology for right-and-wrong, for then it becomes a cruel and false master. Morality rises from our love for Him (John 14:15) and our creature-duty (Gen. 1:28); beauty is coordinate and coequal with it, but beauty is not given as our metric for righteousness. If we try to make our love of the beautiful the foundation of righteousness we only destroy that love, turning it to support what is vile. Instead, we learn to love what is beautiful and to love beauty because it is right to so do, as He decrees (Phil. 4:8), a high duty culminating in our love of the Standard of beauty.

God bless.