Why Beauty Matters

When we publish books at Oaks Press, we look for books that combine, to a high degree, six factors: goodness, truth, beauty, importance, uniqueness, and relevance.

Beauty is especially important to me personally. But why does it matter, exactly? What is it about beauty that captures us? Let me share briefly why I believe beauty is not only important but vital to our lives.

We typically think that beauty is a cherry on top of life, a bonus for “when we have time” to enjoy things. It’s a good meal, an art exhibit, or a good story in a new show we watch. Yet there’s more to it.

Theology and Beauty Must Go Together

Theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar dedicated all seven of the books in his Theological Aesthetics series called “The Glory of the Lord” to this topic. While I have not read those books yet, I was helped by A Key to Balthasar: Hans Urs von Balthasar on Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, which is a guide to better understanding this rich and important theologian of the twentieth century.

From this book, I understood that Balthasar wrote about aesthetics from a theological standpoint because aesthetics has to do with what we experience in our bodies—our senses. We experience beauty in our bodies with our eyes, ears, hands, mouth, and nose. This is important for us as humans because God created us with bodies and senses. He sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to adorn humanity not just with salvation but with an embodied salvation. “Only what is assumed can be saved,” many have written. Because Christ assumed a body just like ours, our bodies can be saved.

Our Bodies Matter for Discipleship

So when we experience beauty through our bodies, we’re affirming the embodied nature of our existence. God didn’t make us just as spirits floating in the air—and that’s not our impending after-this-earth fate, either. He granted us the ability to enjoy our senses, within limits, and while we might be tempted to diminish aesthetics in the name of abstinence, holiness, or propriety—all good virtues in their own right—we must resist the temptation of a core gnostic lie throughout history: that our bodies do not matter for our discipleship journey.

We can enjoy, as Paul said, “everything God created [as] good … with thanksgiving” (1 Tim. 4:4). In fact, those who forbid certain foods for disciples of Jesus are following some pretty deep lies taught by the enemy (1 Tim. 4:1).

A Cheers to Beauty

So this is a short ode to beauty and my cheers—my l’chaim—to the fact that God has given us bodies to enjoy the goodness of his creation. That’s the heart of beauty, and why it’s so important to us at Oaks Press.

We try to publish books that are beautiful in both content and design.

And that’s why we are excited about Winfield Bevins’s book about beauty itself: How Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Power of the Arts for the Christian Life (on Amazon here).