Glory and Splendor - part 3: The Beauty of Language
Well, we've been talking about beauty. Let's talk more about the beauty of language, and thus talk a little more about language.
Well, we've been talking about beauty. Let's talk more about the beauty of language, and thus talk a little more about language.
This brings us to a second aspect of beauty that's related but quite different, namely, the relation between beauty and goodness.
One of the threads that I'd like to start talking about has a number of names: glory, splendor, hierarchy, height, formality.
The desert, Balzac once declared, holds everything and nothing for God is there, and man is not.
People need beauty. In so many areas of modern life in pop music, in television and cinema, in language and literature beauty is being displaced by raucous and attention-grabbing clichés.
At any time between 1750 and 1930, if you had asked an educated person to describe the goal of poetry, art, or music, beauty would have been the answer.
The sciences aim to explain the world: they build theories that are tested through experiment, and which describe the workings of nature and the deep connections between cause and effect. Nothing like that is true of the humanities.
In an age of declining faith art bears enduring witness to the spiritual hunger and immortal longings of our species. Hence aesthetic education matters more today than at any previous period in history.
A controversy recently erupted in Sweden over an article published by the philosopher, Roger Scruton, in a magazine called Axess. He argued in it that Western art no longer had any spiritual, let alone religious, content; indeed, it had become afraid of the beautiful, from which it shied away as a horse from a hurdle too high for it.