Beauty and the Beast: An Essay in Evolutionary AestheticMcDowall, Stewart Andrew
Religion
Beauty and the Beast: An Essay in Evolutionary Aesthetic
McDowall, Stewart Andrew
Aesthetics
Yet as a whole we have moved a long way from the animal expression of
a need of its complementary animal. The whole world is related to us,
and in that relation we find beauty. And beautiful as it is we find it
very lovable, even though we cannot but feel that our love can never be
satisfied since we can give nothing back.
Yet something we can give, though not to it--something that makes
things clearer. In our minds we can give to this world a meaning, as
itself subordinate, yet the necessary means of our self-realisation,
and we can share this meaning with others. We find a meaning in life,
and that meaning is fellowship. We find a meaning in nature, and that
meaning dwells in the Creative Being of the God who is Love. Beauty,
more clearly day by day, becomes for us the expression of Reality, and
that Reality is the reciprocal relationship of persons. Religion gives
one pathway of approach, Beauty another, but both join to form the
highway of our God. There is more than room for beauty in religion;
there is more than room for aesthetic in theology; there is an absolute
need, if they are not to be in a measure inexpressive, lopsided, and
therefore ugly. Our concept of Reality must be symmetrical, or fail of
adequacy.
What is true of pictorial art is equally true of other forms.
Style--the higher art of language--demands education before it can be
appreciated. In literature again, the general public prefers Longfellow
to Keats, _The Passing of Arthur_ to _A Death in the Desert_, Ella
Wheeler Willcox to the _Divina Commedia_. Henry James demands a more
intimate appreciation of the spirit of man than does Dickens. In all
these there is beauty--the expression of an intuition--but those who
see furthest and most clearly have the smallest public. Most men cannot
even follow where they lead, and few indeed are the pioneers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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