Christianity, Darwinism, and Marxism

I was just entering high school when I developed an interest in the “scientific creationist” response to the Darwinian theory of evolution.  By the end of my formal theological education at what is now Providence University College I had become convinced that this response was deeply flawed.   While that may sound like the testimony of someone whose theology grew more liberal over time, allow me to clarify that the flaw that I had come to perceive in scientific creationism was to be found in the adjective and not in the noun.   Creationism is an indispensable part of the orthodox Christian faith.   It is present in the very first affirmation of the two most ancient and sacred Creeds.   “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth” the Apostles’ Creed declares, and lest there be any confusion about the issue, such as that generated by Marcion of Synope and other Gnostics who attributed the creation of the physical world to a lesser deity than the Father God of Whom Christ spoke, the Nicene Creed expands this to “I believe in One God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all things visible and invisible.”   As with all else affirmed in the Creeds, this is the clear teaching of the Holy Scriptures, which are God’s authoritative propositional revelation.  

 

Scientific creationism is the response to the Darwinian challenge to this affirmation that asserts that the evidence of the physical sciences better supports the most literal reading of the first three chapters of Genesis than it does Darwin’s theory.   The question of how literally these chapters should be read is a question of hermeneutics and not one that I am going to deal with at any great length.   Dr. RonDart has recently reminded us that the house of hermeneutics has many layers,of which the literal – the historical, grammatical reading of the sacred text–is the lowest.   He was making the point, quite correctly, that the emphasis on this layer to the exclusion of the others in the post-Reformation branch of the Christian tradition creates an impoverishment in hermeneutical meaning.  All that I will say about that is that in this day, when the truth of the Scriptures at the literal level has sustained relentless attack from every direction for centuries, it is important to remember that St. Augustine identified the literal level of meaning as the lowest layer because it is the foundation upon which all the others are built.

 

The flaw in the scientific creationists' response is that by asserting that the evidence of the physical sciences supports the literal reading of the creation account rather than Darwinism the scientific creationists affirm what is in fact the most questionable element of Darwinism – that that which emerges from the observations, hypotheses, tests and experiments of the empirical method can provide answers to such questions as “why am I here”, “why is there life on this planet”, and “why is there something instead of nothing.”   This confusion of the physical with the metaphysical, is problematic from the standpoint of both ontology and epistemology.   It is, in other words, deeply philosophically flawed.

 

One writer who was particularly influential on my thinking in this regards was Gordon H. Clark, the very Calvinist theologian who was chairman of the department of philosophy at Butler University from 1943 to 1973.   He is probably most remembered as one of the two leading figures in the development of the presuppositional school of Christian apologetics – and for his historical clash with the other, Cornelius Van Til.   Both men were among the circle of conservative Presbyterians that had formed around J. Gresham Machen when the Fundamentalist/Modernist controversy hit Princeton Theological Seminary and who helped Machen organize the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, although the clash between the two began almost immediately after when Van Til led the faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary, the conservative successor to Princeton that had been founded when the latter went Modernist, in opposing Clark’s ordination by the OPC’s synod in Philadelphia over a number of theological and philosophical disagreements that I am not going to get into here.  Clark’s The Philosophy of Science and Belief in God (1964) made a powerful case that since all scientific theories and laws involve contradictions and other logical fallacies and any truth claim based upon science reduces to the fallacy of asserting the consequent, science has only operational and utilitarian value and not epistemic value.   I found his argument to be quite persuasive and was further impressed by the inevitable conclusion to which it led, that the Christian response to the challenges posted by the claims of Modern scientism in general and Darwinism in particular must speak the language of philosophy rather than of science.

 

An excellent and simple illustration of a philosophical response to scientism can be found in C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia.   In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is the third volume in the fantasy series by order of publication, on one of the last islands that Prince Caspian, the younger two of the Pevensies, Lucy and Edmund, their cousin Eustace Scrubb, and the other characters visit in their journey, they encounter an old man named Ramandu who explains to them that he had once been one of the stars in the Narnian sky but had long since retired.   Eustace, whose very progressive parents have been sending him to a very up-to-date school, has only recently begun to escape the trappings of his scientistic and materialistic upbringing.   The following exchange takes place:

 

“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”

“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of. 

In other words, while you can produce an impressive and comprehensive description of something by scientific analysis – taking it apart and identifying its components – this will always fall short of answering the question of what that something is.  

 

This approach by contrast with that of the scientific creationist can be likened to the sort of physician who addresses the underlying disease rather than merely treating the symptoms.   Scientific creationists frequently identify Darwinism as the cause of all the problems of the last century and a half – Communism, Nazism, secularism, the erosion of morality, etc.   To do this, however, is to make the mistake of confusing one of the fruits with the tree.  

 

Let us consider the actual relationship between one of the evils mentioned in the previous paragraph and Darwinism.   It makes very little sense to say that Communism, or rather Marxism, the ideology of which Communism is the practical expression, comes from Darwinism, despite the fact that Karl Marx wrote that Darwin’s book contained “the basis in natural history for our view” in a letter to Friedrich Engels on December 19, 1860.  For when Marx wrote those words Darwin’s On the Origins of Species By Means of Natural Selection had only just appeared, having been first published in 1859.   The Communist Manifesto had been published eleven years previously.   Granted, some of the ideas that we associate with Charles Darwin had been brewing in the natural sciences for decades prior to the publication of his book, but then, something similar could be said about Karl Marx and his manifesto.    Moreover, only a year and a half later on June 18, 1862, Marx was writing to Engels, having come full circle on Darwin and denouncing his theory as an embodiment of the sentiments of Victorian era capitalism.   Perhaps, considering that years later Marx would dedicate the second edition of the first volume of the English translation of Das Kapital to Darwin and sent him a courtesy copy, he changed his mind yet again.   Darwin himself, however, although he thanked Marx for the book and the dedication, was on record as being opposed to the use of evolutionary science in support of socialism.   Indeed, while Marx’s initial, and possibly later, attraction to Darwin’s theory is probably best explained by his seeing in it a club with which to bash religion in general and Christianity in particular, which Marx notoriously despised, Darwin repudiated this use of his theory.  

 

The erroneous notion that Marxism is a fruit of Darwinism is a huge stumbling block to understanding the interaction between the two in the twentieth century.   This failure has had some rather ironic theological repercussions.

 

The history of Darwinism after Darwin is the history of the mainstream of the scientific discipline of biology.   It can be said of biology what Clark said about science in general, that it is “always false, but often useful.”   What happens to the utility of a science, however, when its methodology is subverted by the dogmas of a political ideology? 

 

The consequences can be devastating and disastrous.   As it so happens, just such a political ideology – Marxism – went to great lengths to subvert the science of biology in the twentieth century.   This was done in an obvious and overt fashion in the first country in which Marxism had attained control of the state – the Soviet Union.   For a full account of the notorious episode in which the USSR forced biology, and specifically genetics, to submit to Marxist dogma, see Valery N. Soyfer’s Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science (1994).   Lysenkoism also became official dogma in other Communist countries.  The period in which it was the party line in Red China corresponds to the years in in Mao was repeating all of the Soviet Union’s worst mistakes and reaping a similar harvest of famine and death in the “Great Leap Forward”.   For a description of this period that includes a discussion of how bad agricultural techniques, like “close planting” and “deep plowing”, derived from Lysenkoism contributed to the Chinese famine see Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (1996).

 

Outside the Communist bloc, Marxism never attained this sort of overt power in the state.   It had, however, attained a comparable degree of control in Western academe by the middle of the twentieth century, and this is where most science is done.   In 1959, the Professor of Botany at the University of Pennsylvania, Conway Zirkle, who ten years previously had written a book length treatment of Lysenkoism the year after the USSR officially condemned genetics as a “bourgeois pseudoscience”, published Evolution, Marxian Biology, and the Social Scene, which argued that the ideas which now bear the name of Trofim Lysenko can be traced directly to Marx and Engels themselves, who had cherry-picked ideas from Darwin, wed them to Lamarck in rejection of Mendel, and threw out completely both the Malthus who had influenced Darwin and the Galton who had been inspired by him, to produce an alternative “Marxian Biology.”   While it was only in the Communist bloc where this dominated the biology classroom, Zirkle maintained that the way evolutionary theory was understood in much popular culture and literature, reflected the Marxian version of the theory rather than the Darwinian, because it was pervasive in the Marx-dominated social sciences.

 

Zirkle passed away in 1972.   He did not live to see the controversy of three years later, when Edward O. Wilson, a research professor and myrmecologist at Harvard University published his massive volume Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, a controversy which would have provided him with plenty of material for an expanded edition of his own book.   Wilson’s book, which drew heavily on the elements of mainstream evolutionary biology which the Marx-Lysenko version rejects, explores the relationship between genes, adaptation, and the social behaviour of animals, culminating in the last, and most controversial, chapter on human beings.   Widely reviewed, the book was received well by those within the discipline of biology, but it angered many sociologists, illustrating well the difference between the two schools that Zirkle had highlighted. 

 

In the November 13, 1975 issue of the New York Review of Books published a letter which condemned Wilson’s book for reviving “biological determinism” for the political purpose of providing a “genetic justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race, and sex.”   It completely distorted Wilson’s thesis, of course, with the writer of the letter not hesitating to stoop to inserting an ellipsis into a quotation from Wilson at one point that completely inverted his meaning.   The NYRB had the decently to run a rebuttal letter from Wilson in the December 11^th issue.     The original letter was, of course, guilty of the very thing of which it accused Wilson – smuggling political views into biology.   The letter was signed by sixteen individuals listed in alphabetical order – and accordingly is attributed to Elizabeth Allen, et al, Allen, who was a pre-med student at Brandeis University at the time being listed first.  The signatories were mostly, perhaps entirely, people associated with Science for the People, a Marxist activist group the  raison d'être of which was to use science as a vehicle for the promotion of left-wing political views.   These included a number of biology professors, which would have signaled to anyone paying attention, as Zirkle most certainly would have had he lived to this point, that an attempted Marxist coup within the biology departments of Western academe is underway.   Sadly, not enough people were paying attention.   By the end of the twentieth century, one of those signatories, Stephen Jay Gould, who made little attempt to hide the Communist politics beneath the thin veneer of his science, was widely considered to be the face of evolutionary biology.

 

Indeed, the Marxian takeover of Western biology was by then so complete that when, in the year 2000, Bill Clinton hosted a big party at the White House at which he and Tony Blair, along with Dr. J. Craig Venter of Celera Genomics and Dr. Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project announced the completion of the mapping of the human genome, Venter made a point of declaring that the research illustrates that “the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.”    In other words, the completion of the most important research project in the history of the very branch of biology which Lysenko rejected, was being used to promote a concept, which originated in the social science departments where Lysenko’s Marxian views prevailed, in this case that of Boasian anthropology.   Although the regime he supported had gone the way of the dodo, Trofim Lysenko had his ultimate triumph.

 

At this point I would like to repeat the quotation from Gordon Clark that “science is always false, but often useful.”   The most obvious utility of a project like the mapping of the human genome is in the area of treating genetic diseases and conditions.   There are plenty of such conditions that afflict primarily or exclusively the members of a single race or ethnicity.   If the influence of Marxist Neo-Lysenkoism has become such in Western biology that the then-president of the private research company competing with the government sponsored scientists in this project, turned such an occasion into a platform for espousing Franz Boas and Ashley Montagu’s Marxist race denial, even going so far as to mislead his hearers into thinking that ethnicity cannot be determined from a gene sample, is this likely to have a positive or a negative effect on the usefulness of this research in treating such diseases?

 

This brings us back to the scientific creationists and their error of regarding Marxism as the fruit of Darwinism, an error unavoidable on their part because of their more fundamental error of attempting to answer the Darwinian challenge to the truth of Creation in Darwinism’s own scientific language thus accepting the same false scientistic premise as Darwinism that science has epistemic as well as utilitarian value.  It brings us back to this point because of the irony of the fact that one of the leading scientific creationists – perhaps the leading scientific creationist now that Henry M. Morris is no longer with us – Ken Ham, wrote an entire book which attempted to read the same Marxist concept that J. Craig Venter espoused at Bill Clinton’s garden party in 2000 into the Bible.

 

The book in question, One Blood: The Biblical Answer to Racism, was co-written with Don Batten and Carl Wieland and suspiciously appeared the same year as the aforementioned party.   It is based entirely upon semantic dishonesty – using the fact that we use the word “race” for both our species as a whole and for subspecies within it, rather than the distinct words we use for other species/subspecies, such as species = dog, breed = cocker spaniel, bull dog, Doberman, etc., to deny the existence of “races” within humanity because we are all “one race”, bad hermeneutics – Acts 17:26 means the opposite of what Ham et al., say it means, and the same sort of fallacious reasoning that secular scientific Marxists use to deny race – there is more genetic diversity within races than between races therefore there are no races.

 

If Ham and his co-authors had thought the last mentioned argument through they would perhaps have been more wary of employing it.  For the obvious response to this fallacy is to point out that the exact same thing can be sad, substituting “sexes” for “races.”   Would they accept the argument as formulated as being valid about “sexes” as well as “races” and declare “sex” along with “race” to be an invalid social construct?

 

Of course not.  When it comes to “sex” Ham and company are as guilty of the “biological determinism” – regarding biology as destiny – that Trofim Lysenko, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard C. Lewontin, and other Marxist biologists accuse hereditarian Darwinists of as the hereditarian Darwinists themselves.   Rightly so, from the standpoint of Scriptural and traditional Christian ethics.   Which is good cause for them to reconsider siding with the Marxists against the Darwinists on other matters.

Creation and Evolution

The doctrine of creation is a non-negotiable element of the Christian faith. By the doctrine of creation, I mean that which is asserted in the first section of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed:

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

In the Creed, as in the first verse of the first chapter of Genesis, the doctrine is properly formulated as a statement about God. It is not, whatever its implications for these matters might be, a statement about the age of the earth, the pre-history of mankind, or the interpretation of the fossil record. God is the subject, and what is predicated of Him is that He made everything else that exists.

The Creed asserts this of God the Father. Jesus Christ, as God the Son, is not part of the “all things visible and invisible” made by God the Father, but as the “only-begotten Son of God” shares the Father’s eternal nature and existence, thus the Creed asserts of Him that He is “begotten of the Father before all worlds” and that He is “begotten, not made”. It moreover identifies His role in Creation by saying of Him, in accordance with the third verse of the Gospel according to St. John and the sixteenth verse of St. Paul’s epistle to the Colossians “by whom all things were made”. So all things were made by God the Father, by or through, Jesus Christ the Son.

God the Holy Ghost, like Jesus Christ the Son, is not created but rather shares the eternal nature and being of God the Father from Whom He “proceedeth”, and therefore is “worshipped and glorified” with the Father and the Son.

The Nicene Creed is the most truly authoritative and “catholic” in the sense of belonging to the whole Church, of the ancient creeds or any other Christian confessions of faith. It is accepted by all the churches who can claim organic and organizational descent from the early undivided Church that formulated it, who traditionally recite it as part of the liturgy in the celebration of the sacrament of the Eucharist, and it is also accepted by the most orthodox of the sects and denominations of more recent founding. It was drawn up by the early, orthodox, Church to be a definitive statement of the faith taught by Christ’s Apostles, made in response to the myriad of heretical challenges to that faith that had sprung up in the first three centuries of Christian history. At the heart of these controversies was the Apostolic doctrine of Christ. The Docetists denied Christ’s humanity, the Arians denied His deity, and in one way or another each of these heresies denied what the Apostles had taught about Who Jesus Christ is. In these early heretical movements false teachings, of one sort or another, regarding creation, went hand in glove with their false teachings about the Person and Nature of Christ.

In 325 AD, the first ecumenical council of the Church since the council of Jerusalem recorded in the Book of Acts was convened at Nicaea in what is now Turkey, to address the controversy surrounding the teachings of Arius. Arius, a theologian in Alexandria, Egypt had taught that the Son of God was neither of the same substance as the Father, nor eternal. This had been condemned as heresy locally, at a regional council called by the Alexandrian Patriarch Alexander four years previously. By this time the heresy could not be contained regionally and so with the assistance of the deacon, Athanasius, who would later become his successor, Alexander made the case against Arianism at Nicaea. The council also condemned Arianism, and affirmed that the Son was “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father”. The confession of faith drafted and adopted at this council was the original version of the Nicene Creed, which was revised and expanded into the form still used in the East today, at the Council of Constantinople in 381 AD and then into the form used in the West by the Third Council of Toledo in 589 AD.

The Arian controversy was primarily Christological, about the Person and Nature of Jesus Christ, but it also concerned the doctrine of creation in that by denying that Christ was eternal Arius made Him part of creation rather than Creator. This is why the Creed affirms that it is by Christ that all things were made and makes the distinction “begotten not made”. (1)

In the century prior to the Arian controversy another challenge to Apostolic orthodoxy had come from Marcion of Sinope. Marcion believed that the Old and New Testaments spoke of different Gods. The God of the New Testament, he taught, was the Supreme God, loving and God, whereas the God of the Old Testament was the lesser deity of wrath and vengeance, the Demiurge. The latter, he taught, created the physical world, which was entirely corrupt and evil, whereas the true God belonged to the higher, spiritual world. Christ, he taught, was pure spirit who took on the mere appearance of a man. This denial of the Incarnation, identical to the spirit of the antichrist of which St. John had written in the New Testament (2) was therefore inseparably connected to a denial of the doctrine of creation. These heretical teachings, to which the affirmation that God the Father is the “Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible” was orthodoxy’s response, were shared by the various sects and movements that are collectively referred to as “Gnosticism”.

This name given to these early foes of Apostolic orthodoxy is significant. It is derived from gnosis, the Greek word for knowledge. In Gnostic doctrine, salvation was usually conceived of as a process of enlightenment whereby the “divine spark” in man was liberated from its prison of corrupt matter through the achievement of gnosis or knowledge. In orthodox Christianity, salvation is equated with knowledge as well. In orthodox Christianity, this knowledge is the knowledge of God, through Jesus Christ, (3) to be proclaimed to the world in the Gospel and received through faith and the prison from which it ultimately liberates us is both spiritual and physical, the prison of sin and death. This saving knowledge is available to man precisely through that which the Gnostics denied, the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. (4) The secret “knowledge” claimed by the Gnostics, the orthodox Church Fathers declared to be the “false knowledge” of which St. Paul wrote to Timothy. (5)

What makes this significant is that once again today it is widely denied, in the name of “knowledge”, that God, the Father Almighty, is “Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible”. We use the Latin equivalent to speak of this new “gnosis” and so call it “science”.

The new Gnostics are in many ways the mirror image of their predecessors. They do not demonize the physical world the way the Gnostics of old did, on the contrary they make it out to be the only world that exists, or at any rate the only world which can be known or is worth knowing. Salvation, to the new Gnostics, lies not in our liberation from the physical world but in our control over it.

Evolution is the name of the Demiurge to whom the new Gnostics ascribe the creation of the physical world - or at least the living things in it – rather than the true and living God. Just as the Christian doctrine of creation can only be properly understood as a statement about God – that God the Father, created everything that exists, through Jesus Christ the Son – rather than a statement about the age of the earth or the fossil record, so the Gnostic doctrine of evolution must be understood as a denial of the Christian doctrine - as the assertion that we, through the process of natural selection “made ourselves” in a world where order arises out of chaos by chance - rather than merely a set of observations, such as those made by Charles Darwin, about how species have adapted in order to survive.

The Church’s response to this challenge has been disappointing. Some theologians have reinterpreted the Christian teaching on creation to accommodate evolution – examples of this include theistic evolution, the Day-Age theory, and progressive creationism. Others have rejected evolution but in its place have accepted what they ironically call a “literal” understanding of the book of Genesis that includes interpretations that would never have occurred to anyone prior to the last 150 years, such as the idea that the “waters above the firmament” were some kind of vapour canopy that made the entire planet a tropical region prior to the Deluge. What the accommodationists and the “scientific creationists” have in common is that both have bowed their knees to the modern pagan idol of Science, accepted that false god’s claims to be the ultimate arbiter of what is true, and interpreted the words of the true and living God accordingly.

Science, however, in the modern sense of the word, has neither the right nor the ability to determine what is true and what is false. It is not about truth at all. Modern science, stripped of its exalted status, is merely the process of accumulating observations about the physical world, postulating theories on the basis of those observations, and conducting experiments to test those theories. The purpose of this process is not to arrive at truth. In the nineteenth century it was thought that to be scientific a theory had to be verifiable, that is to say, that it had to be able to be demonstrated true through experimentation. In the twentieth century, however, it came to be accepted, through the arguments of Sir Karl Popper, that to be scientific a theory must be falsifiable which means that it must be vulnerable to being shown to be false by further experimentation. This new understanding of what makes a theory scientific was intended to safeguard the integrity of the experimentation process against the formulation of theories that could not be overthrown regardless of the outcome of the experiment. Nevertheless it demonstrates that science is no reliable standard by which to judge truth, for by the standards of logic that which is falsifiable must also be false..

This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the history of modern science, the end of which has never been truth but power. “Knowledge is power”, Sir Francis Bacon said, and while he was speaking of the knowledge and power of God, he extended it to human knowledge by saying that it is by examining the world around us and learning about causes and effects that we will be able to bend nature to our will and produce the effects we desire. This is the true nature of what we have called “science” ever since. The true litmus test of whether a theory is scientific is not whether it is verifiable or falsifiable, but its utility. If science can produce a vehicle that can transport us through the air from one side of the world to the other in a fraction of the time it would have previously taken us then science has fulfilled its purpose and been of use to us regardless of whether the hypotheses with which it was working to produce the vehicle are later debunked.

Modern man in his neo-Gnosticism tends to equate utility with truth and justice. He looks at all that modern science has given us and concludes that since it has in so many ways enhanced our lives therefore everything it tells us is true and everything it does is right. This is a dangerous error. Truth and justice are immutable standards, external and transcendent, that impose limits upon man’s will and hold him accountable. Utilitarian science, however, recognizes no external limits upon man’s will in its endless search for newer ways to bend the world to that will. It is the duty of orthodox Christianity to insist upon these limits and to remind man that he is but a creature, a part of creation, subject to and accountable to the Creator in Whose image he was made.

This means re-affirming our faith in “one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible” against the new Gnosticism, that equates the utility of modern science with truth and justice, and declares that we through the process of natural selection (6), created ourselves, a theory which, like others of its era, (7) is merely man’s self-justification of his attempt to seat himself upon the throne of his Creator.

(1) The verb beget means to sire, to carry out a father’s role in reproduction. A father begets, a mother conceives and gives birth. Ordinarily, the word begotten suggests a point in time, a beginning. Fathers and mothers, however, in begetting and conceiving children, pass on their own nature to them. Eternity, having neither a beginning nor an end, is part of the nature of God, which Christ shares with His Father. Therefore when the Creed speaks of Christ as being begotten, this denotes an eternal relationship rather than an event in time.

(2) “And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.” (1 John 4:3)

(3) John 17:3 “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”

(4) John 1:18, John 14: 8-9

(5) 1 Tim. 6:20

(6) The basic idea of natural selection, that a species adapts to a changing environment through the spread of traits that enhance its ability to fit in and survive and the disappearance of traits that hinder such, is merely an observation about the nature of life in the world. It is when it is expanded into an all-sufficient explanation of how we got here, with life supposedly developing from non-living material then gradually evolving into higher life forms, and ultimately us, that is becomes patently absurd.

(7) Such theories include positivism, the idea of progress, and the Whig theory of history.

What is Beauty?

Beauty is the only finality here below. – Simone Weil

Art is the production of things which are beautiful. Beauty is what the artist strives to create. Beauty is what we seek to enjoy and contemplate in works of art. But what is beauty?

If asked to define beauty we might start by saying something like “the property of being pleasing to the eye”.

This definition is insufficient, however, because it is not only visible objects that are beautiful. Sound can be beautiful too. Bach’s Brandenburg concertos, Haydn’s Creation, Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, and Beethoven’s 9th symphony are all works of tremendous beauty. Yet none of them can be seen.

We could solve this problem by expanding our definition to “the property of being pleasing to the eye and/or the ear”? This then begs the question of why the other senses are not included as well. We have other words to describe what is pleasing to our senses of taste, smell, and touch. Why do we conceive of that which is audibly and visually appealing as a single category?

That is a difficult question to answer but that is what we do.

There is another question which our expanded definition of beauty raises. Is beauty “the property of being pleasing to the eye and/or the ear” or is it “the state of being considered pleasing to the eye and/or the ear”?

Note the importance of this distinction. If beauty is the former, then it has tangible existence as a quality of things which are beautiful. If it is the latter, it is a projection of our own minds.

The saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” would seem to suggest the second understanding of beauty. People do differ in what they consider beautiful. Yet they also agree.

In some circumstances, two people will disagree over whether a particular person or a particular painting is beautiful. In other circumstances, there is virtually unanimous agreement that someone or something is beautiful or is not beautiful. Sometimes, disagreements about beauty appear to be entirely subjective. They are matters of personal taste. On other occasions, the disagreement indicates that something is wrong with one person’s perception.

Naomi Wolf, in her best-selling book The Beauty Myth, (1) took the position that beauty is an artificial construction. The concept of beauty, Wolf wrote, was created to support the male power structure of society and keep women in a subservient position. The emphasis upon beauty in advertising, the cosmetics and fashion industries, and surgery, she argued, is that male power structure’s response to the blow it received from the triumphs of feminism earlier in the century. Wolf’s book helped launch what is called “Third Wave feminism”.

It is undoubtedly true that many young women have been led into unhealthy behavior patterns by an obsession with beauty that magazines, television, and movies have in part contributed to. In this Wolf was correct, although the statistics in her book appear to have been greatly exaggerated. Is there merit then to her idea that beauty is a social construct the purpose of which is to maintain male dominance?

Not really. Beauty is far too universal a value for it to be explained as an idea invented to serve as a political tool. The fact that differences of opinion as to what can be considered to be beautiful exist from individual to individual, society to society, and at different eras in a society’s history, does not negate the universality of beauty. As Matt Ridley has pointed out:

And yet this flexibility stays within limits. It is impossible to name a time when women of ten or forty years were considered “sexier” than women of twenty. It is inconceivable that male paunches where ever actually attractive to women or that tall men were thought uglier than short ones. It is hard to imagine that weak chins were ever thought beautiful on either sex. If beauty is a matter of fashion, how is it that wrinkled skin, gray hair, hairy backs, and very long noses have never been “in fashion”? The more things change, the more they stay the same. (2)

How then does Ridley explain the phenomenon of beauty? He says that it is in our genes.

There is a reason that beautiful people are attractive. They are attractive because others have genes that cause them to find beautiful people attractive. People have such genes because those that employed criteria of beauty left more descendants than those that did not. (3)

This is the explanation of evolutionary psychology. (4) The concept of sexual selection goes back to Charles Darwin. The basic gist of it is that among species that reproduce sexually, genes which produce traits which are considered attractive by the opposite sex are more likely to be passed on to subsequent generations than genes which do not, which also ensures that the genes which cause someone to consider those particular traits to be attractive are more likely to be handed down than others. Thus, a particular image of beauty is reinforced and refined through evolutionary selection over a long period of time. Evolutionary psychology attempts to explain why these traits would have been considered attractive in the first place in terms of reproductive fitness. Since females are by biological necessity the sex which bears, gives birth to, and nurtures the young, it has been the role of the male to provide for and protect women and children. This, the evolutionary psychologist says is reflected in our concept of beauty. The physical traits men find attractive in women are indicators of fertility (5) and the physical traits women find attractive in men are indicators of strength.

This explanation of beauty, arising as it does out of evolutionary theory, displays the strengths and weaknesses of that theory. Materialistic science is good at discovering and explaining how things work. The connections which evolutionary psychologists have found between physical beauty and reproductive function are real. When treated as the final and complete explanation of why people are beautiful – or why we find them beautiful – it seems to be extremely reductionist, however. Long ago the Socratic school of philosophy reacted against the materialistic reductionism of the earlier Milesian school, rejecting its early scientific emphasis on questions about the makeup of the physical universe in favour of an emphasis upon questions about the higher truths of goodness, virtue, truth, and beauty. The result was a golden age for philosophy and culture in Greek civilization that would be foundational to the later Roman and Christian civilizations.

In his book Beauty, (6) English aesthetician and philosopher Roger Scruton argues that evolutionary psychology provides us with an insufficient and unsatisfactory explanation of beauty. He reasons that because sexual selection could have occurred in a different way that “we cannot use the fact of sexual selection as a conclusive explanation of the sentiment of beauty, still less as a way of deciphering what that sentiment means.” (7) This does not mean that beauty and sex are unconnected. Indeed, Scruton suggests, they may be “more intimately connected” than the causal relationship proposed by evolutionary psychology implies.

What does he mean by this?

Scruton contrasts the theories of the evolutionary psychologists with the ideas of Plato. Beauty was an important topic of discussion in a number of Plato’s dialogues. Plato considered beauty to be the object of eros. According to Plato, eros (love) exists on a higher and a lower plane. The lower eros is sexual desire – the wish to sexually possess the person whose beauty has inspired one’s eros. The higher eros seeks to contemplate beauty itself, i.e., beauty in the abstract, the idea or “form” of beauty.

There are problems with Plato’s theory too. Scruton writes:

[I]t requires only a normal dose of skepticism to feel that there is more wishful thinking than truth in the Platonic vision. How can one and the same state of mind be both sexual love for a boy and (after a bit of self-discipline) delighted contemplation of an abstract idea? That is like saying that the desire for a steak could be satisfied (after a bit of mental exertion) by staring at a picture of a cow. (8)

That is a good point, and Scruton expands upon it by questioning whether it is proper to speak of beauty as the object of desire. Beauty leads us to desire another person, but our desire is not fulfilled by our coming into possession of that beauty. “What prompts us, in sexual attraction, is something that can be contemplated but never possessed”. (9) This observation separates eros from other forms of desire and links the beauty which leads to sexual attraction with other kinds of beauty, such as the beauty of art. A thirsty person, has a desire for water which can be quenched by any glass of water. Eros is not like that. You fall in love with a particular person and your desire for that person cannot be fulfilled by another person. It is a particular person you want and not a generic member of a class for whom any other can be substituted.

There is another way in which eros is different from other desires. If you fall in love with someone, and that person reciprocates your love, the two of you may give yourselves completely to each other, but this will not cause the desire to go away, the way drinking water causes thirst to go away. Scruton writes:

And maybe this has something to do with the place of beauty in sexual desire. Beauty invites us to focus on the individual object, so as to relish his or her presence. And this focusing on the individual fills the mind and perceptions of the lover. (10)

This elevates human eros above the level of the merely biological sex drive we share will all other sexual animals. Eros is further elevated when we understand the beauty of the loved one to reside not in body only, but in the soul as well. (11) We would do well to ponder what this says about the powerful trends in contemporary culture towards the dragging of eros back down to the level of mere animal instinct. That is a subject for another essay however.

It is the contemplative element which the beauty which inspires eros shares with the beauty we find in nature and the beauty we create in art. Beauty inspires us to ponder and reflect, and this leads us back to look at it, or listen to it again. Perhaps here we have at least a partial explanation of why we conceive of that which appeals to sight and sound as a single category distinct from that which appeals to smell, taste, and touch.

Philosophy takes us further in our understanding of beauty than science does or can. Philosophy can only take us so far, however. After that we must rely upon theology.

In her essay “Forms of the Implicit Love of God” published in the posthumous collection Waiting for God, Simone Weil wrote that before the soul is visited by God and can give or refuse Him direct love the soul can only love God indirectly through other objects. This is what she calls the “implicit love of God” which she says:

[C]an have only three immediate objects, the only three things here below in which God is really though secretly present. These are religious ceremonies, the beauty of the world, and our neighbor. Accordingly there are three loves. (12)

Immediately before expanding upon each of these in reverse order, she writes of this “veiled form of love” that:

At the moment when it touches the soul, each of the forms that such love may take has the virtue of a sacrament. (13)

That is strong language. A sacrament is an event in which something ordinary, everyday, and earthly is transformed by the presence of God so that His love, mercy, and grace are communicated to the soul through it. Weil repeats the comparison a number of times in her discussion of how the soul can love God through the beauty of the world. Man, she writes, has been an “imaginary likeness” of the power of God, to empty himself of in imitation of the kenosis of Christ. This emptying consists of renouncing our claim to be the centre of the universe. This the love whereby we love the true centre of the universe, God, through our neighbor and “the order of the world” which is the same thing as the “beauty of the world”. The beauty of the world is the “commonest, easiest, and most natural way of approach” of the soul to God, for God “descends in all haste to love and admire the tangible beauty of his own creation through the soul that opens to him” and uses “the soul’s natural inclination to love beauty” as a trap to win the soul for Himself. (14)

The idea that through beauty the soul connects with God is the next step beyond the Platonic notion that we progress from love of beauty on earth to contemplation of the higher beauty which exists in the realm of the forms. Weil goes on to say that the beauty she is talking about belongs to the universe itself, which is the only thing other than God which can properly be called beautiful, all other things being called beautiful in a derivative sense because they are part of the beautiful world or imitate its beauty. “All these secondary kinds of beauty are of infinite value as openings to universal beauty” she writes “But, if we stop short at them, they are, on the contrary, veils; then they corrupt.” (15) This is similar to Plato’s view of those who are satisfied with the consummation of the lower eros and do not go on the higher eros which is the contemplation of beauty itself.

It is here that Weil makes the observation that forms the epigram to this essay. “Beauty is the only finality here below”. (16) What she means by this, is that beauty exists for its own sake rather than as a means to another end and that it is the only thing in this world of which that can be said. This, she contrasts to all other things, saying that “all the things that we take for ends are means” and that beauty “seems itself to be a promise…but it only gives itself; it never gives anything else”. It is because of this, she argues, that beauty “is present in all human pursuits”. It is present in the pursuit of power, for example, and it is present in art, science, physical work, and carnal love. (17)

Of art she writes:

Art is an attempt to transport into a limited quantity of matter, modeled by man, an image of the infinite beauty of the entire universe. If the attempt succeeds, this portion of matter should not hide the universe, but on the contrary it should reveal its reality to all around. (18)

Weil does not hesitate to take this to its logical conclusion:

Works of art that are neither pure and true reflections of the beauty of the world nor openings onto this beauty are not strictly speaking beautiful; their authors may be very talented but they lack real genius. That is true of a great many works of art which are among the most celebrated and the most highly praised. Every true artist has had real, direct, and immediate contact with the beauty of the world, contact that is of the nature of a sacrament. God has inspired every first-rate work of art, though its subject may be utterly and entirely secular; he has not inspired any of the others. Indeed the luster of beauty that distinguishes some of those others may quite well be a diabolic luster. (19)

It is interesting, upon reading these words about art, to reflect upon the familiar verse from the Book of Genesis which tells us that God created man in His own image. We are God’s workmanship, His art. What does it mean that we are created “in His image”? Theologians have puzzled over that question for centuries. Where is the “imago Deo” to be found? Is it in our rational faculties as many have proposed?

Dorothy Sayers did not think so. In an essay on the subject of “the image of God’ in her book The Mind of the Maker, she wrote:

It is observable that in the passage leading up to the statement about man, he has given no detailed information about God. Looking at man, he sees in him something essentially divine, but when we turn back to see what he says about the original upon which the "image" of God was modelled, we find only the single assertion, "God created". The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things. (20)

This characteristic, creativity, manifests itself in what we call art. If God’s image in man lies in his creativity this surely lends weight to the idea that there is something “of the nature of a sacrament” about true art. It is interesting that these two women, one an orthodox Anglican, the other a very unorthodox convert to Christianity who refused baptism on the grounds that God wanted her to identify with the unbeliever (21), writing at approximately the same time, would strike upon thoughts that in a strange but fitting way complement each other.

We have pursued beauty, from the scientific explanation of a trait which generates reproductive fitness by attracting sexual partners, to a philosophical view of beauty as an object of contemplation which elevates man from the level of the beast, to a spiritual view of beauty as a meeting place between the human soul and God. There is no higher ground to seek.





(1) Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women (New York: William Morrow, 1991)

(2) Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003) p. 281. The first edition of this book was published in hardcover by Penguin in 1993.

(3) Ibid, p. 280.

(4) A layman's introduction to evolutionary psychology is Robin Wright’s The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).

(5) Ridley discusses the late Devendra Singh’s research into the correlation between the “hourglass figure” and fertility, and also points to the connection between feminine beauty and youth.

(6) Roger Scruton, Beauty, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). This book was reissued this year in paperback as part of Oxford’s “Very Short Introductions” series, now bearing the subtitle “A Very Short Introduction”.

(7) Ibid, p. 32.

(8) Ibid, p. 35.

(9) Ibid, p. 36.

(10) Ibid, pp. 38-39.

(11) Ibid, pp. 39-43

(12) Simone Weil, Waiting For God, (New York: Harper Perennial Classics, 2001) p. 83. This is a reprint of the translation by Emma Craufurd first published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1951. The French edition came out in 1950, seven years after her death in England.

(13) Ibid, p. 84.

(14) Ibid, pp. 99-103, quotations taken from pages 99, 100, and 103.

(15) Ibid, p. 104.

(16) Ibid, p. 105.

(17) Ibid, pp. 105-112, quotations taken from pages 105 and 106.

(18) Ibid, p. 107

(19) Ibid.

(20) Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (London: Methuen, 1941) p. 17. http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/dlsayers/mindofmaker/mind.02.htm

(21) Simone Weil was born Jewish but converted to Christianity. Waiting for God is a collection of letters and essays that was published after her death. Most of the letters were written to her friend Dominican priest Father Joseph-Marie Perrin explaining why she was turning down his pleas for her to be baptized. These were written around the time of her flight from France in 1942.