Thursday, November 17, 2011

Beauty: God's creation vs. man's

The topic of beauty has been brought up once again, and once again I find my opinions to be in the minority. Instead of saying that art should not be allowed to surpass nature, they are saying that art is by it's nature unable to surpass nature in terms of beauty.

Their argument is quite simple. This is my understanding of them. "God is perfect(ly beautiful), and man is not, therefore what God creates must be more perfect and beautiful than what man creates." Also "man's art is an imitation of God's art, therefore the most perfect it can be is no more beautiful than what it is trying to imitate." Before countering these with my own theoretical arguments, I would like to bring it to the practical level.

Which is more beautiful, an ancient forest, or a cathedral that was made from it? The bird singing, or the cello? The raindrops or the fountain? Don't let mundaneness get in the way of beauty. It may be hard to pick one side over the other. You find a tree in it's natural state, you think it looks quite good but it could use a trim. You trim the tree, and you think it has become even more beautiful than it was. But how is this possible, did you just improve upon God's design? Or did you make it worse? Here is my answer.

God designed the tree so that it would look better after you pruned it.
And he designed you, so that you could prune it, and make it look better.

This shows how incredible God's design is, not only did he design the trimmed tree, the fountain, the cello and the cathedral. But he also designed the way they would be built and designed. So, can we create art more beautiful than God can? No, clearly not. But we can create things more beautiful than what God gave us here on earth. I'm sure that heaven is more beautiful than human artist's renderings, but that doesn't mean that nature must always be more beautiful than art.

Apparently, if I make this post too long, no-one's gonna wanna read it. I think I have sufficiently rebutted their arguments, but if I didn't, drop a comment and I'll try to clear things up.

P.S. If you haven't yet, read my last post "Art and the idealist."

1 comment:

K said...

Agreed, for this is the purpose God gave to Man after his creation: to take dominion over all forms of creation.