Only A Little Copy

A strong place and wonderful was Isengard, and long it had been beautiful; and there great lords had dwelt, the wardens of Gondor upon the West, and wise men that watched the stars. But slowly Saruman had shaped it to his shifting purposes, and made it better, as he thought, being deceived--for all those arts and subtle devices, for which he forsook his former wisdom, and which fondly he imagined were his own, came but from Mordor; so that what he made was naught, only a little copy, a child's model or a slave's flattery, of that vast fortress, armoury, prison, furnace of great power, Barad-dur, the Dark Tower, which suffered no rival, and laughed at flattery, biding its time, secure in its pride and its immeasurable strength.

--J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

Perpetual Vision

When you were here you started the subject of Praise as Worship, which has led me to some bewilderment. Take the traditional language: glorifying, i.e. literally 'making glorious' what is already not only glorious but Glory itself and the source of all other glory--magnifying what is already infinite--exalting what is already highest. 

At first it is hard to see what all this means. It sounds like the most famous flunkeyism, like telling a rich man that he is rich: and I am sure that this impression has a powerful and repellent effect on modern people, especially in democracies. I take it the truth is that in so far as a creature sees God it cannot help in some way (not of course necessarily by words) telling Him what it sees (silence might be one way). Its 'praise' is a necessary reaction: the divine light sent back to its Source from the creature which has become its mirror. The sun is not brighter because a mirror reflects it: but the mirror is brighter because it reflects the sun.

On a lower level this necessity of telling the object what it is has been experienced by every man in love. True, he may tell the girl she is pretty in order to please her: but he'd have to tell her anyway. Thus 'exalting the Lord' is in reality indistinguishable from seeing Him. There's no question of flattery or even courtesy about it: the moment the Creator-Creature relation is normal (in the proper sense of the word normal) praise or worship is there automatically. The picture of Heaven as perpetual worship, a place, in the hideous words of the hymn

            Where congregations ne'er break up

            And Sabbaths have no end

which has tormented many a luckless child (finding one Sabbath per week a ration only too liberal!) comes alright when one sees the real meaning: the perpetual worship is the perpetual vision, the perfect exercise of all one's faculties on the perfect Object. Of that, one could never have too much.

--The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 970-71

Tob!

God looked at the billions of stars pouring out their light, and it elicited from Him a spontaneous exultation over what He had made: “Tob!” Essentially good and beautiful! He didn’t merely evaluate the precision of His handiwork; He made an aesthetic assessment of it all. He declared that it was beautiful by His divine definition and delightful to His divine sensibilities... Jean-Paul Sartre, the famous atheist philosopher, who insightfully noted that the basic philosophical problem is that something is there rather than nothing. To his observation, I would add this question: Why is what is there so beautiful? If the mere existence of matter confounds us, explaining its universal symmetries and harmonies is baffling. Matter is a problem. Beauty is a marvel.

~ Steve Dewitt; Eyes Wide Open

From Whence All Beauty Springs

The World is the Great Book of God

If we carefully and wisely reflect upon creatures, they will wonderfully fill our minds with admiration, and greatly inflame us with love of the Supreme Creator. For the whole universe is, as it were, a book written by the finger of God, in which each creature forms a letter. But as one who has not learnt to read, when he looks into an open book, sees indeed the characters of the letters, but understands not their significance and force; in like manner, he who perceives not the things of God, beholds the external aspect of creatures, but comprehends not their interior meaning. “The senseless man shall not know; nor will the fool understand these things” (Ps. xci. 7).

But the spiritual man, whose mental eyes are open, when he contemplates the external works of God, inwardly perceives how wonderful is the Maker of them; and from the fairness of those things which he is contemplating, he parses on to that Divine Beauty, which is fairer than all other beauty, and from whence all beauty springs. To him who is occupied with this joyful contemplation, all things are miraculous; so that in amazement he is forced to exclaim with the Prophet, “How great are Thy works, O Lord! Thou hast made all things in wisdom ” (Ps. ciii. 24); “Thou hast given me, O Lord, a delight in Thy doings; and in the works of Thy hands I shall rejoice ” (Ps. xci. 5).

~ Spiritual Works of Louis of Blois; CHAPTER XXVIII.

Alien Beauty

Nonetheless, the form and manifestation of the `beauty that saves’ is a strange and alien beauty that challenges and transforms all our assumptions. So it is only when aesthetics is liberated from the tyranny of superficial and facile images of the beautiful that it can begin to understand the beauty of God and its redemptive power amidst the harsh reality of the world. Indeed, the beauty of God which is hidden in Jesus the crucified Messiah, and supremely veiled from sight in the ugliness of the cross, can only be discerned through the gift of the Spirit. It is through the Spirit that we are enabled to see and hear what is manifest in God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. Moreover, it is through the Spirit that the beauty of God in the form of Jesus Christ becomes the power that attracts and transforms, bringing us through the painfulness of death and rebirth into conformity with the image of Christ (Galatians 4:19). And it is through the same Spirit that God inspires human creativity to reflect both the ugly pain of the world and the beauty of redemption... From a Christian perspective, the supreme image that contradicts the inhuman and in doing so becomes the icon of redemption is that of the incarnate, crucified and risen Christ. So it is not surprising that artists through the centuries have sought to represent that alien beauty as a counter to the ugliness of injustice. We are not redeemed by art nor by beauty alone, but by the holy beauty which is revealed in Christ and which, through the Spirit evokes wonder and stirs our imagination.

~ ~ John W. de Gruchy; HOLY BEAUTY: A Reformed Perspective on Aesthetics within a World of Unjust Ugliness

The Splendor of Holiness

Oh sing to the LORD a new song; 

   sing to the LORD, all the earth! 

Sing to the LORD, bless his name; 

   tell of his salvation from day to day. 

Declare his glory among the nations, 

   his marvelous works among all the peoples! 

For great is the LORD, 

   and greatly to be praised; he is to be feared above all gods. 

For all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, 

   but the LORD made the heavens. 

Splendor and majesty are before him; 

   strength and beauty are in his sanctuary. 

Ascribe to the LORD, O families of the peoples, 

   ascribe to the LORD glory and strength! 

Ascribe to the LORD the glory due his name; 

   bring an offering, and come into his courts! 

Worship the LORD in the splendor of holiness; 

   tremble before him, all the earth! 

Psalm 96:1-9

Barth on Mozart

In face of the problem of theodicy, Mozart had the peace of God which far transcends all the critical or speculative reason that praises and reproves. This problem lay behind him. Why then concern himself with it? He had heard, and causes those who have ears to hear, even today, what we shall not see until the end of time—the whole context of providence. As though in the light of this end, he heard the harmony of creation to which the shadow also belongs but in which the shadow is not darkness, deficiency is not defeat, sadness cannot become despair, trouble cannot degenerate into tragedy and infinite melancholy is not ultimately forced to claim undisputed sway. Thus the cheerfulness in this harmony is not without its limits. But the light shines all the more brightly because it breaks forth from the shadow. The sweetness is also bitter and cannot therefore cloy. Life does not fear death but knows it well... I make this interposition here, before turning to chaos, because in the music of Mozart—and I wonder whether the same can be said of any other works before or after—we have clear and convincing proof that it is a slander on creation to charge it with a share in chaos because it includes a Yes and a No, as though orientated to God on the one side and nothingness on the other. Mozart causes us to hear that even on the latter side, and therefore in its totality, creation praises its Master and is therefore perfect. Here on the threshhold of our problem—and it is no small achievement—Mozart has created order for those who have ears to hear, and he has done it better than any scientific deduction could.

— Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2004), 297–99.

Pied Beauty

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things—

  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

  Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

    And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

 

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                  Praise him.

~ Gerard Manley Hopkins

Sign Beauty

All of the things have been painted with beauty, but it is not ultimate beauty. The beauty of the created world was never meant to be the beauty that would fill the eyes of our hearts. It was never meant to be the beauty to which we would look for satisfaction and peace. It was never meant to be the beauty that we would give ourselves to search for, live for, cry for, and die for. No, the physical glories of this created world are meant to be sign glories. The amazing beauty that surrounds us every day was designed to be sign beauty. All of the beautiful things that we see, touch, taste and hear every day, were designed to be signs that would point to the ultimate beauty that can only be found in the One who created them.

~ Paul Tripp; read the complete post at:

http://www.christianity.com/blogs/paul-tripp/psalm-27-sign-beauty.html

Rose of Sharon

“I am the rose of Sharon.” Song of Solomon 2:1

Whatever there may be of beauty in the material world, Jesus Christ possesses all that in the spiritual world in a tenfold degree. Amongst flowers the rose is deemed the sweetest, but Jesus is infinitely more beautiful in the garden of the soul than the rose can be in the gardens of earth. He takes the first place as the fairest among ten thousand. He is the sun, and all others are the stars; the heavens and the day are dark in comparison with him, for the King in his beauty transcends all. “I am the rose of Sharon.” This was the best and rarest of roses. Jesus is not “the rose” alone, he is “the rose of Sharon,” just as he calls his righteousness “gold,” and then adds, “the gold of Ophir”—the best of the best. He is positively lovely, and superlatively the loveliest. There is variety in his charms. The rose is delightful to the eye, and its scent is pleasant and refreshing; so each of the senses of the soul, whether it be the taste or feeling, the hearing, the sight, or the spiritual smell, finds appropriate gratification in Jesus. Even the recollection of his love is sweet. Take the rose of Sharon, and pull it leaf from leaf, and lay by the leaves in the jar of memory, and you shall find each leaf fragrant long afterwards, filling the house with perfume. Christ satisfies the highest taste of the most educated spirit to the very full. The greatest amateur in perfumes is quite satisfied with the rose: and when the soul has arrived at her highest pitch of true taste, she shall still be content with Christ, nay, she shall be the better able to appreciate him. Heaven itself possesses nothing which excels the rose of Sharon. What emblem can fully set forth his beauty? Human speech and earth-born things fail to tell of him. Earth’s choicest charms commingled, feebly picture his abounding preciousness. Blessed rose, bloom in my heart forever!

Charles Spurgeon; Morning and Evening: Daily Readings - Evening, May 1

I Love This Artist

And I love this artist. I love His complexity, His layers, facets, and sides. I love and fear the turbulence and heat of His “moods,” if that is what we can respectfully call them. He blows my mind and rightfully so. He does not fit in any of our nifty boxes. He is neither Catholic nor evangelical, charismatic nor Reformed. He shatters the stereotypes of the old-school fundamentalists  and culture-current Christians with equal, breezy disregard. This One-in-Three torches towns, wipes nations off the face of the earth, then crushes the very instruments of His wrath, judging them for their excess of cruelty. He is untamed, unfathomable, unpredictable, yet utterly and infinitely good. This exuberant, flamboyant, violent Transcendence is a blazing furnace, a percolating cauldron of molten lava ready to blow. And when you wrap your arms over your head ready to cry out in terror, He touches your cheek, whispers your name, and tells you, “Don’t be afraid, I am your God, and you are my child. I will be with you always, even to the ends of the earth. I am your shelter, your strength, ever ready to help in time of trouble. Though the mountains may crack and tumble into the depths of the sea and its water roar and seethe, I am on your side, your strong citadel, your mighty God” (Psalm 46:1-3, author’s paraphrase). It’s difficult maintaining your balance around this God. He makes your head spin and your heart sing. He cannot be taken lightly or for granted. 

The God Who Smokes: Scandalous Meditations on Faith by Timothy J Stoner

Happily and Joyfully Enticed

Just how do we grow in grace and the power to say No to the world, the flesh, and the Devil? I’m convinced that we have only one of two options. Either we can devote ourselves and our time and our energy to demonstrating the ugliness and futility of sin and the world, hoping that such will embolden our hearts to say No to it as unworthy of our affection, or we can demonstrate the beauty and splendor of all that God is for us in Jesus and become happily and joyfully enticed by a rival affection.

~ Sam Storms; Pleasures Evermore: The Life-Changing Power of Enjoying God

Not Made for Mirrors

Why do we want to get near bigness and beauty and magnificence and excellence? It’s because that’s what we were made for. We were not made for mirrors. We were made for standing in front of what is infinitely beautiful, having it to satisfy us.

~ John Piper

Brilliant Sparks

... there is not an atom of this universe in which you cannot see some brilliant sparks, at least, of His glory.

~ John Calvin

Beauty Unexpected

http://philipnation.net/2012/11/beauty-unexpected/

Emanation of God's Glory

God is seeking his glory, seeks the good of his creatures; because the emanation of his glory (which he seeks and delights in, as he delights in himself and his own eternal glory) implies the communicated excellency and happiness of his creatures. And in communicating his fullness for them, he does it for himself; because their good, which he seeks, is so much in union and communion with himself. God is their good. Their excellency and happiness is nothing, but the emanation and expression of God’s glory: God, in seeking their glory and happiness, seeks himself: and in seeking himself, i.e. himself diffused and expressed, (which he delights in, as he delights in his own beauty and fullness,) he seeks their glory and happiness.

~ Jonathan  Edwards

Exquisitely Beautiful

Evidence gathered at the frontiers of modern physics tells us that if any one of a number of features of the universe had been even slightly different, life as we know it would be impossible. Various physical constants have the right values to an astonishing degree of accuracy. To take just one example, the ratio between the gravitational and electromagnetic forces must be fine-tuned to one part in 10 to the 40th power (that’s a one with 40 zeros after it!) Life is exquisitely beautiful, so it is the sort of complex good that a rational agent would value. Human life has immense value (why do we have to spell that out to humanists?) So our universe is much likelier if a powerful, rational agent designed it!

~ David Glass and Graham Veale; Five Ways Science Confirms the Existence of God

A Beautifully Composed Poem

(The universe is) a beautifully composed poem in which every mind may discover, through the  succession of events, the diversity, multiplicity, and justice, the order, rectitude and beauty, of the countless divine decrees that proceed from God's wisdom ruling the universe... But as no one can appreciate the beauty of a poem unless his vision embraces it as a whole, so no one can see the beauty of the orderly governance of creation unless he has an integral view of it. And since no man lives long enough to observe the whole with his bodily eyes, nor can anyone by his own ability foresee the future, the Holy Spirit is given to us the book of the Scriptures, whose length corresponds to the whole duration of God's governing action in the universe.

~ Bonaventure; The Breviloqium

We Cannot Forget the Beauty

Then we went to Constantinople and they led us to the place where they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or earth, for on earth there is no such vision nor beauty, and we do not know how to describe it; we only know that God dwells among men. We cannot forget that beauty.

~ Primary Chronicle of the Sent by Prince Vladimir of Kiev-Rus to Constantinople, as quoted in The Story of Christianity by David Bentley Hart, The Story of Christianity (n.p.: Quercus Books, 2008)

Swelling Fountain of Unfailing Sweetness

The soul must be awakened to the reach of its profoundest yearning: for the "Beauty, ever ancient, ever new," "holy delight," form beyond all the grace of created forms, most beautiful of beings, and Beauty of all beauties. Once glimpsed, the charm of God's Beauty can sweep the heart upward, to Himself, the swelling fountain of unfailing sweetness that alone can satiate the soul's deep thirst for beauty.

~ Robert J. O'Connell; Art and the Christian Intelligence in St. Augustine 

Think Backwards

Ever since the fall, our thoughts naturally flow in one direction: from the beauty to my enjoyment of it. Sin tilted created beauty toward us. But this is not beauty’s created purpose. Since created beauty speaks of God, our experience of it requires us to swim upstream. Beauty’s glory and satisfaction is found in the source, not the self. We must do what is counterintuitive to the sinner; in the wonder of beauty, we must think backwards.

~ Steve DeWitt; Eyes Wide Open

Springs and Causes

All goodness, grace, life, light, mercy, and power, which are the springs and causes of the new creation, are all originally in God, in the divine nature, and that infinitely and essentially. In them is God eternally or essentially glorious; and the whole design of the new creation was to manifest his glory in them by external communications of them, and from them.

~ John Owen

Ravished with Wonder

There is certainly nothing so obscure or contemptible, even in the smallest corners of the earth, in which some marks of the power and wisdom of God may not be seen. . . . As soon as we acknowledge God to be the supreme Architect, who has erected the beauteous fabric of the universe, our minds must necessarily be ravished with wonder at his infinite goodness, wisdom, and power.

~ John Calvin

Reflections of Himself

What is the world? What is it for? It is art. It is the best of all possible art, a finite picture of the infinite... This painting is by an infinite Artist. It is a reflection of Himself (could there be a better subject?), worked out in colors, lives, and constellations, in a universe that to us seems endless but is to Him a mere frame, a small space, a confining challenge for His artistry.

~ N. D. Wilson; Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

Mistaken Identity

Created beauty eclipses God’s beauty in the desire factory of man’s heart. It is a case of mistaken identity. Every created beauty was created by God to lead our affections to Him. That’s why He made the pleasures of earthly beauty so fleeting—so that on the other side of the pleasure we might experience either wonder and worship and ultimate satisfaction in God or the pursuit of the pleasure that beauty provides for its own sake. If we choose the latter, we will only be disappointed again.

~ Steve DeWitt; Eyes Wide Open

Nothing More Beautiful

There is nothing more beautiful, there is no more beautiful sight or even thought than that an infinitely perfect and happy being would descend into this world and sacrifice everything,  for ungrateful undeserving human beings like us.  That an infinitely happy being who doesn’t have to do, would tear his life apart for us.

~ Augustine of Hippo

Like Shining From Shook Foil

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

  It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

  It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

  And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

  And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

  There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

  Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

  World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

This Great Good of Visible Form

Let us, then, not seek in this beauty for what has not been given to it (and from not having what we seek for, this is the lowest form of beauty); and in that which has been given to it, let us praise God, because He has bestowed this great good of visible form even on the lowest degree of beauty.  And let us not cleave as lovers to this beauty, but as praisers of God let us rise above it; and from this superior position let us pronounce judgment on it, instead of so being bound up in it as to be judged along with it.  And let us hasten on to that good which has no motion in space or advancement in time, from which all natures in space and time receive their sensible being and their form.  To see this good let us purify our heart by faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, who says, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."

~ Augustine: The Writings Against the Manichaeans and Against the ;

Chapter 42. - Exhortation to the Chief Good.

Zion

Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines forth.

(Psalm 50:2)

Still Thou Art Hidden

Still thou art hidden, O Lord, from my soul in thy light and thy blessedness; and therefore my soul still walks in its darkness and wretchedness. For it looks, and does not see thy beauty. It hearkens, and does not hear thy harmony. It smells, and does not perceive thy fragrance. It tastes, and does not recognize thy sweetness. It touches, and does not feel thy pleasantness. For thou hast these attributes in thyself, Lord God, after thine ineffable manner, who hast given them to objects created by thee, after their sensible manner; but the sinful senses of my soul have grown rigid and dull, and have been obstructed by their long listlessness.

~ St. Anselm; Proslogium, Chap. XVII