‘Fittingness’ implies a judgment about the degree to which something or someone exhibits beauty

How Can I See The Beauty of God? Now.

What is God’s beauty?

 Can we see it? 

Can we feel it? 

As you know, for many of us, beauty is a very subjective concept, and divine beauty is for us a really abstract concept. 

If we go looking for His Beauty in Scripture, what are we looking for? 

If we go looking for His beauty in creation, where do we find it?

Today, right here we love talking about beauty — God’s beauty, Christ’s beauty, the beauty of the cross even. 

And we should. 

Aesthetically, we are moved by beautiful music, beautiful paintings, and beautiful images and videos we like. 

We respond to beauty instinctually.

Divine beauty is objective — it’s defined by a certain fittingness.

 Let’s dive right into it. 

 Explain this connection between beauty and fittingness in Scripture.

‘Fittingness’ implies a judgment about the degree to which something or someone exhibits beauty.

The definition of beauty that I start with as my baseline is coming from the early classical patristic and medieval period. The concept then wasn’t a sideline matter or a subjective thing. The gist of the definition of beauty is something like this: beauty is an intrinsic quality of things which, when it’s perceived, pleases the mind by a certain kind of fittingness.

Now it’s contextual, but within a given context, when you’ve perceived something, you see it both as an objective and as a subjective response elicited to it. I applied the idea of fittingness as an overarching term, which captures the range of aesthetic properties that identify innumerable qualities of beauty. The same type of quality may or may not be fitting within a given context of beauty.

That’s why I think it’s a very good term, more of an umbrella type of term, but a term that can be applied. You wouldn’t just say the delicacy of something or the boldness of something is a fine quality. You would say that within a certain setting, a certain dimension, a certain context, that it is or is not fitting.

The judgment of fittingness implies a judgment about the degree to which something or someone exhibits beauty. That something or someone is not limited to an object or a thing as we normally think of in such terms; it includes actions and expressions as well.

Right at the very beginning of Scripture, when God created the heavens and the earth, of course, in the Greek that’s captured by the word cosmos. And cosmos itself implies an ordered arrangement of things. It’s a combination of both orderliness and adornment. It’s embedded within that meaning.