A Christian account of beauty is shaped not primarily by envisioning a return to a paradise lost, but rather anticipating a glory yet to appear—a glory or beauty already seen in Jesus Christ but that is being spread about through the Holy Spirit. The beauty we discern now is a preview, given by the Spirit, of a beauty yet to come in the new heaven and new earth. It is being revealed in the midst of a creation still groaning in anticipation (Rom. 8:20–22). Earth’s most dazzling beauty is thus only a glimpse of the beauty to come.

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing—to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from.”

—C. S. Lewis

At age eleven classical music started it all for me. My parents, wanting to divert me from what they viewed as the corrupting rock ‘n’ roll of the sixties, got me a set of LPs introducing the great composers: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, Chopin, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, and a few others. I listened to them over and over during my early teenage years. I came to love them, to know them by heart. I got a taste of how beauty works, how it settles down deep in the soul, stirring feelings both noble and aching and giving glimpses into regions unknown.

Maybe this all started the day when my fifth-grade class got to go to the symphony orchestra. We were loaded onto a school bus, given sack lunches, and driven to the civic center and concert hall in Orlando. We joined hundreds of other elementary school children, finding our seats, watching the orchestra warming up on stage amid the buzz of voices. We had been instructed on some things about an orchestra: what it was, the various instruments, the kinds of music it played, the role of the conductor and the concert master. We were to applaud when the conductor entered and when an entire piece (not just a movement) was finished.

The orchestra played a whole Beethoven symphony and Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. My eyes could not move fast enough and my ears were not skilled enough to take it all in, but it was both fascinating and magical, glorious and mesmerizing. Unforgettable. What was this thing I had experienced?

Philosopher Roger Scruton, in Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, wrote: “beauty is an ultimate value—something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations.”1 This trio—the true, the good, and the beautiful—are traditionally known as the “three transcendentals.” They were called that because they were viewed as the three qualities that God possesses in infinite abundance.

Hans Urs von Balthasar spent much of his career seeking to reclaim beauty as one of the great transcendentals. In a world where sin and error are rife and truth and goodness hotly contested, beauty has a key role. Beauty, he says, can sail under the radar of our arguments over what is true and good and, in the process, smuggle in a ray of the beatific vision. Beauty can pierce the heart, wounding us with the transcendent glory of God. Beauty, he says, “dances as an uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another.”2

Concerned about the neglect of beauty by Christians in our time, writer and poet Dana Gioia spoke of “the necessary relationship between truth and beauty, which is not mere social convention or cultural accident but an essential form of human knowledge—intuitive, holistic, and experiential.” It is a form of human knowing that “awakens, enlarges, and refines our humanity.”3

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I grew up in a Christian tradition that highly valued truth and goodness but in which beauty had no intentional place—and certainly not as an “ultimate value” worthy of pursuit for its own sake.

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