From this it is clear that Lloyd Geering still likes to cast his teaching in the form of a Grand Narrative, a big story about where we have all come from and where we are going. His plot owes much to Feurbach and Karl Jaspers, to C G Jung and Teilhard de Chardin. Readers of Sea of Faith magazine will enjoy this book, and Ronald Pearse (address on page 2) tells me he is importing forty copies for members who have ordered them. So you should be able to borrow one in due course! [We regret that reviews of several more books of interest have had to be held over. In the next issue Stephen Mitchell reviews the Bishop of Oxford’s response to Anthony Freeman (but see also page 20)] REDEMPTION BY BEAUTY David Bryant There is a sickness in the world that needs healing. Two recent events convinced me of that. One was a visit to a ‘lifer’? at a top security prison housing dangerous men.
The other was a breakfast-time scrutiny of Amnesty’s full-page spread on political torture, illustrated in horrific and pathetic detail by the victims.
The question is, How do we heal the sickness? The Christian view is that the world has already been saved or redeemed by Jesus on the cross and that if we can only stick it out to the end, eternal life will be our reward.
There is a flaw in this. It might be true for Christians but it wouldn’t ring any bells in the staffroom of the London comprehensive school where I taught for ten years. Nor would it mean much to Buddhists, Moslems, Jews, or humanists - or my ‘‘lifer”. What we need is a healing, redeeming idea that is inter-faith, cross-cultural, not specifically religious and able to speak for us all.
One largely neglected candidate for the post is beauty.
Dostoyevsky explored this in his novel The Idiot. Prince Myshkin was intended to stand for the wholly beautiful man who lived in a corrupt society as a redeeming influence, scattering compassion and healing wherever he went. This might have worked if Dostoyevsky hadn’t shot himself in the foot by claiming that ‘‘there is only one beautiful man in the world: Christ’’, thereby dispatching his theory to the waste-paper basket for all but orthodox Christians.
Is it possible to have a free-floating idea of beauty that isn’t limited to one person (Christ) and at the same time avoids becoming an abstract Platonic idea, too remote from our experience to be any help? In his book / and Thou Martin Buber showed how this might be possible. If we view a tree as ‘‘It’? we are seeing it as an object outside ourselves, something that is there to provide us with firewood, shade, furniture and fruit, but not intrinsically valuable. If we can learn to see the tree on a deeper level, not just as grist for the chainsaw but as a cherished and precious part of the world order to which we and the tree belong equally, two things will happen.
We will no longer feel lonely and alienated from the rest of nature, and because we have such a close ‘*T-Thou’”’ relationship to it we will be unwilling to do it any harm.
The beauty of the tree has in this way become truly healing and redeeming.
Quantum physicists and the exponents of Gaia theory (who see the world as a unified living organism) have taken the idea a stage further and shown that ther: is more to beauty than meets the eye. It has unlimited dh.
Underneath its outer skin there is an incredible world of randomness, chaos, perplexity, order, harmony and fullness which adds a new lustre to life. We needn’t despair any more because life is empty. Far from being empty, the world is pregnant with beauty just waiting to be discovered.
Beauty in human relationships also operates on different levels. The skin-deep physical beauty to which we might respond in a stranger only changes us to a limited extent.
Love makes us see the world through rosy spectacles as it might be, and the person we love in an idealistic way. But relationships of this kind are claustrophobic and sel ‘h.
They shut us off from the world and turn us inwards so that we become self-centred and sometimes possessive.
But passion can expand into something much more self-less. As we develop from being physical lovers to ‘soul mates’’ our private, secret world is no longer wide enough to contain all our cherishing, beautiful, loving emotions, and it bursts open. All our love and beauty can then flow out onto the world as a healing, redeeming force.
The most powerfully healing face of beauty lies in a curious contradiction at its heart. What is apparently ugly can be viewed as beautiful. In other words, beauty isn’t just something that is ‘‘there’’ or ‘‘not there’. We an actually make it by looking at what is in a positive way.
Rembrandt took the face of a toothless crone and painted a masterpiece of beauty. The drawn, starving faces of children in Ethiopia are horifying but at the same time can appear so unbearably beautiful that we feel compelled to reach into our pockets and take some action.
If we search hard enough we can often find beauty where others see only ugliness. The sulphurous, smoking wasteland lying behind the British Steel plant at South Gare is in one sense a desolate, ravished world, but it can be viewed as a Turneresque portrait in which fire, sn) ‘ke and cinders have a weird and gripping beauty.
We are like artists, observing people and landscapes and free to choose any pastels from our box with which to paint the world. If our eyes light on the beauty in people (including those society considers ‘‘ugly””) we are less likely to torture, rape, exploit and kill them. If we perceive beauty in nature we are less likely to treat it as a human battlefield up for national grabs, and to destroy it with radiation, acid rain, motorways, vandalism and litter.
There is much in the world that we cannot change. But if we teach ourselves to pick out and concentrate on the hidden beauty all around us, we are making a small contribution to healing the sickness of the world.
David Bryant is vicar of Sowerby and Sessay, North Yorkshire, a prison visitor and a former teacher.