Jonathan Edwards on the Experience of Beauty

It appears in the vision of a multi-hued sunset, or in the raptures of a Beethoven symphony, or in the quiet contemplation of a flower. In such moments we are aware that we are in the presence of beauty. In each of us there is a longing for such a presence. C. S. Lewis describes this longing as a bittersweet aching sensation not just to appreciate beauty but actually to experience it: “We do not want merely to see beauty, though God knows that is bounty enough. We want something else which 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.”1 For Lewis, God is the fulfillment of that longing. It is however, in the works of another Christian writer, who wrote a couple of hundred years before Lewis, that God as the fulfillment of our longing for beauty is portrayed in a breathtaking vision of religious experience. That writer is Jonathan Edwards, noted eighteenth century preacher and philosopher-theologian. For Jonathan Edwards the experience of God’s saving presence is an aesthetic experience of the deepest kind. For Edwards, to experience God’s Holy Spirit is to experience Beauty, itself; and all worldly beauties, as rapturous as they may be, are but inferior shadows of that Beauty.

Beauty Defined

“Wherein is one thing excellent and another evil, one beautiful and another deformed?”2 Edwards posed that question in the first entry of a private notebook entitled “The Mind.” There he set forth his understanding of the nature of beauty. Edwards defined beauty in a very traditional way in terms of certain relations such as equality, symmetry and proportionality. Something was said to be beautiful if it could be related to something else. The sides of an equilateral triangle or two circles of identical radii were beautiful in their relations of equality. More complex beauty became manifested when the relations became more sophisticated. The various shapes within the human face, although not equal in size and length, were nonetheless proportionately related, forming an integrated whole.

Music provides a helpful illustration of what Edwards means. Voices singing in unison portray a simple beauty of equality, each individual voice singing the same notes. However, a choir singing in four-part harmony evidences a more sophisticated beauty. Although the various voices are not singing the same notes, the notes are proportionately related through harmony. The more sophisticated the relations, the more intensified the beauty becomes. Thus the music produced by a large choir, accompanied by a full orchestra, performing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, may be said to be intensely beautiful.

In a charming essay entitled “Beauty of the World,” Edwards describes all natural beauties (those perceived by ear and eye) as consisting in these various relations:

‘Tis very probable that that wonderful suitableness of green for the grass and plants, the blue of the sky, the white of the clouds, the colors of flowers, consists in a complicated proportion that these colors make one with another, either in the magnitude of the rays, the number of vibrations that are caused in the optic nerve, or some other way. So there is a great suitableness between the objects of different senses, as between sounds, colors, and smells—as between the colors of the woods and flowers, and the smell and the singing of birds—which ‘tis probable consist in a certain proportion of the vibrations that are made in the different organs…. [W]hat an infinite number of such-like beauties is there in that one thing, the light; and how complicated an harmony and proportion is it probable belongs to it.3

Edwards says that we are surrounded by beauties in the sounds, sights, colors, motions and shapes of the natural world. So much beauty surrounds us that “almost all men, and those that seem to be very miserable, love life: because they cannot bear to lose sight of such a lovely world.”4

The Beauty of Love

All natural beauties, consisting in these various relations, even when intensely beautiful, are in Edwards’s philosophical system inferior to another kind of beauty. Natural beauties of equality, symmetry and proportionality, etc., comprise what Edwards calls secondary beauty. Secondary beauty always points beyond itself to what Edwards calls primary beauty. Like secondary beauty, primary beauty involves certain relations. However, in primary beauty the relatedness is between minds capable of volition. The relatedness is a matter of choice and an exercise of will. Here beauty is defined in such terms as harmony, as in a harmonious society of people or a church relating in harmony; consent or agreement, as between people actively agreeing on a particular point; and most especially love. Love is the ultimate form of primary beauty. Thus to experience love is to experience beauty; to be loving is to beautify; to be filled with love is to be beautiful. However, for Edwards, all beauties, both primary and secondary, are derived from that which is the highest beauty and the source of all beauty.

God’s Beauty

Edwards’s understanding of beauty is grounded on his understanding of who God is:

God is not only infinitely greater and more excellent than all other being, but he is the head of the universal system of existence; the foundation and fountain of all being and beauty; from whom all is perfectly derived, and on whom all is most absolutely and perfectly dependent; of whom, and through whom, and to whom, is all being and all perfection; and whose being and beauty is, as it were, the sum and comprehension of all existence and excellence: much more than the sun is the fountain and summary comprehension of all light and brightness of the day.5

For Edwards, all beauty flows from God and is related to God’s beauty.

The foundation principle is Edwards’s understanding of God as Trinity. For Edwards, God is a triune society of love and beauty. In Edwards’s doctrine of the Trinity, the Father is the “Lover,” the source of love; the Son is the “Beloved,” the object of the Father’s love; and the Holy Spirit is “Love,” the relatedness within the Godhead. In aesthetic categories one could say that the Father is the “Beautifier;” the Son is the “Beautiful;” and the Holy Spirit is “Primary Beauty.” Edwards writes that “the Holy Spirit is the harmony and excellency and beauty of the Deity.6 He further states:

[God’s] infinite beauty is his infinite mutual love of himself…. But he exerts himself towards himself no other way than in infinitely loving and delighting in himself, in the mutual love of the Father and the Son. This makes the third, the personal Holy Spirit, or the holiness of God, which is his infinite beauty, and this is God’s infinite consent to being in general…. ‘Tis peculiar to God that he has beauty within himself, consisting in being’s consenting with his own being, or the love of himself in his own Holy Spirit.7

Beauty is a constitutive element of God’s very being. For Edwards, God’s Holy Spirit is Beauty, what we might call ontological beauty. Put more simply, for Edwards, beauty is not so much a what as it is a who. Beauty has a personal identity. All other beauties are derived from and point to God, who, in very being, is Beauty.

Beauty Displayed

This conclusion concerning the definition or identity of beauty is a weighty and wonderful realization in and of itself. However, beauty plays a significant role in many other important areas of Edwards’s thought. One aspect, already implicit in our discussion of primary and secondary beauty, is that creation exemplifies or manifests God’s beauty. Indeed, says Edwards, it is the role of the Holy Spirit to bring beauty to the world: “So we read that ‘the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters’ or of the chaos to bring it out of its confusion, into harmony and beauty.”8 And in another place he says: “It was more especially the Holy Spirit’s work to bring the world to its beauty and perfection out of chaos, for the beauty of the world is a communication of God’s beauty.”9 As all truth is God’s truth, so all beauty is God’s beauty. To perceive beauty in the world, to look for it, to appreciate it wherever it may be encountered, is to honor God, its ultimate source.

Although for Edwards, nature displays God’s beauty, it is in Jesus Christ that beauty is especially manifested. In a sermon entitled “The Excellency of Christ” Edwards describes the person and work of Christ in the language of beauty. He shows that Christ is intensely beautiful by demonstrating that antithetical qualities are harmonized or conjoined in Him. (Remember that beauty becomes intensified when the relations become more complex or sophisticated.) Explicating Rev. 5:5-6, Edwards portrays Christ as both a lion and a lamb. He writes that in Christ there is conjoined: infinite highness and infinite condescension; infinite justice and infinite grace; infinite glory and lowest humility; infinite majesty and transcendent meekness; self sufficiency and entire trust.10 The sermon continues in a wonderfully relentless fashion as Edwards describes how in Christ’s person and work infinite polarities are conjoined; and that such a harmonization renders Christ infinitely beautiful.

It is also in Christian believers that God’s beauty is experienced and made manifest. For Jonathan Edwards, a saving experience of God’s grace involves a certain kind of communication of God. This experience is not just head knowledge about God, but heart knowledge, an actual experience of God. This experience comes through what Edwards calls “the sense of the heart.” Through the sense of the heart, believers (whom Edwards calls “saints”) experience an infusion or an indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The sense of the heart is thus an aesthetic experience, an experience of beauty, or more properly, Beauty, itself: “The Spirit of God so dwells in the hearts of saints, that he there, as a seed or spring of life, exerts and communicates himself, in his sweet and divine nature, making the soul a partaker of God’s beauty.”11 Edwards expresses this same idea in that which was his first published work, a sermon entitled “God Glorified in Man’s Dependence,” etc.:

The [saints] have spiritual excellency and joy by a kind of participation of God. They are made excellent by a communication of God’s excellency: God puts his own beauty, i.e., his own beautiful likeness, upon their souls…. The saints are beautiful and blessed by a communication of God’s holiness and joy…. The Holy Spirit becoming an inhabitant, is a vital principle, in the soul.12

For Edwards, to experience God’s saving presence is to experience beauty. Such an experience fulfills that longing C. S. Lewis described, not just to appreciate beauty, but actually to experience it, to have beauty within us.

Edwards makes a further application of this experience of beauty in the life of a believer. For Edwards, the experience of God’s beauty, through the sense of the heart, results in a manifestation of beauty in the godly living and affections of the saints. Religious Affections, written by Edwards in 1746, is a classic analysis of the psychology of religious experience. In that work Edwards identifies a number of “signs” that may or may not point to a genuine work of God’s Spirit. One of the formal or positive signs of the authenticity of regeneration or of genuine religious experience, which Edwards notes in Religious Affections, is that saints will manifest beauty in their lives: “Another thing wherein those affections that are truly gracious and holy differ from those that are false is beautiful symmetry and proportion.”13 In another place he says that saints are to be “proportioned Christians” displaying a “concatenation” of the fruit of God’s grace and beauty in their lives. Saints are especially to manifest God’s love, which is primary beauty.14 True saints become, themselves, a work of art showing forth the presence of the Divine Artist, the One who is Beauty, living within them. The life of sainthood is a life of beauty both experienced and manifested.

The beauty of proportioned affections becomes manifest in the life of the saint in several ways including the light of an enlightened mind and the heat of an affected heart. Gracious affections are accompanied by a change of nature in the person, evidencing itself in such qualities as “evangelical humiliation” and “the lamblike, dovelike spirit and temper of Jesus Christ.” “Gracious affections,” says Edwards, “soften the heart, and are attended and followed, with a Christian tenderness of spirit.” In a true saint, the more these affections are manifested, the “more is a spiritual appetite and longing of soul after spiritual attainments, increased.” In contrast, the false affections of “hypocrites”

…are like the waters in the time of a shower of rain, which during the shower, and a little after, run like a brook, and flow abundantly; but are presently quite dry: and when another shower comes, then they will flow again. Whereas a true saint is like a stream from a living spring; which though it may be greatly increased by a shower of rain, and diminished in time of drought; yet constantly runs…. Many hypocrites are like comets, that appear for a while with a mighty blaze; but are very unsteady and irregular in their motion…and their blaze soon disappears, and they appear but once in a great while. But the true saints are like the fixed stars, which, though they rise and set, and are often clouded, yet are steadfast in their orb, and may truly be said to shine with a constant light. Hypocritical affections are like a violent motion; like that of the air that is moved with winds (Jude 12). But gracious affections are more a natural motion, like the stream of a river; which though it has many turns hither and thither, and may meet with obstacles, and run more freely and swiftly in some places than others; yet in the general, with a steady and constant course, tends the same way, till it gets to the ocean.15

Finally, it is in Christian practice that “gracious and holy affections have their exercise and fruit.” Edwards teaches that the saints will continue to grow in beauty both in this life and throughout eternity in heaven:

How soon do earthly lovers come to an end of their discoveries of each other’s beauty; how soon do they see all that is to be seen…. And how happy is that love, in which there is an eternal progress in all these things; wherein new beauties are continually discovered, and more and more loveliness, and in which we shall forever increase in beauty ourselves; where we shall be made capable of finding out and giving, and shall receive, more and more endearing expressions of love forever: our union will become more close, and communication more intimate.16

For Jonathan Edwards heaven is a world of love and beauty in which saints will eternally delight in the increasing manifestation and discovery of beauty in God and in themselves. As believers produce, discover and appreciate beauty in this world, and especially as they recognize the presence of God in their lives, they enjoy a foretaste of heaven.

This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 9, No. 6 (Nov/Dec 2003).