As this urge passed, my mind immediately jumped to a line from the movie Fight Club:

I felt like destroying something beautiful.
- The Narrator

Those who have seen the movie will understand both the motivation and manifestation of the Narrator’s desire.

The next day I tried to understand where my urge to “build something beautiful” came from.  I am good at putting furniture together, but I am not what you’d call “good with my hands” in any sense.  My crafts are more of the digital variety.  But as I read more about the Covenanters, about Christian aesthetics and culture building in general, I have lately been overcome with a desire to produce something real.  I am not really sure what yet, maybe it’s as simple as piece of pottery, or as complex as a treehouse, or any number of things in between.

Whatever my piece of culture turns out to be, it’s clear to me that the Narrator’s urge to destroy beauty is the natural consequence of his nihilistic outlook on life.  To the nihilist, the idea of beauty, of value, is a false one, invented and perpetuated by man over the centuries.  Therefore, the destruction of beauty (or anything with value) is actually an act of liberation from the prison of human constructs.  Conversely, a person who understands that we live in God’s world, and that beauty is not a human idea, but proceeds from God’s very essence, will try as much as possible to reflect that beauty in the world around him, either through art, music, child rearing, planting a garden, building a website, or whatever, as a way to point to true liberation: new creation life in Jesus Christ.

In the battle between creating and destroying, what side are you working for?  I would humbly suggest that you build something beautiful, to the glory of God.

What we have been trying to work out in particular are the implications of that concept for culture building.  What would a Christian culture look like?  Mr. Jones and Mr. Wilson tell us to follow the beautiful, that where we find beauty, we will find God, because beauty in this life is and can only be the reflected beauty of the One who IS beauty itself.

Given the choice between modernism and Medieval Protestantism, how shall we decide?  Many strategies have gone before us.  But why not judge the respective visions by their beauty?  Which vision tells the better story?  Which has poetic grace and rich color?  Most us realize the legitimate place of syllogisms and rational grounds.  But the rational rarely satisfies even modernists.  Pascal explained that “every man is almost always led to believe not through proof, but through that which is attractive.  This way is low, unworthy and alien, and so everyone refuses to acknowledge it.”  All of us are led on by beauty.  Pascal thinks that this is base, but it seems to be the way God designed us.  We can never know enough arguments to be omniscient, but we can judge fruit.  And beauty is fruit.

It seems that, for the authors, beauty is a key to truth.  This idea is one I am interested to explore more.  David Bentley Hart, in The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, makes a similar claim, that to a postmodern culture, the beauty (and peace) of the Christian story can be used as a convincing proof of it’s truth.  Food for thought indeed.