The Divide between Truth and Beauty
Genesis 3:6:
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate.
At the point of the fall, Adam and Eve saw the pleasingness of form of the tree in opposition to what God had said to them, namely, that it would lead to death. The deception of the devil was that God had lied to them, that the fruit of the tree was really good for them whereas God had told them otherwise. Intimately bound up with the deception of the devil and the fall are the notions of truth, freedom, goodness, obedience, etc. Many important aspects of the fall must be examined. However, the fall also introduced into man’s heart a perceived split between Beauty and Truth.
The split that we experience between Beauty and Truth takes on different forms, perhaps, in every age, but it is fundamentally the same for all men with the stain of original sin. Man was made for Beauty as he was made for the Truth, and he seeks to fulfill these longings in many ways.
Classically, when the Gospel is unknown, the experience, appreciation, and appropriation of Beauty is sought through mythologies. The part of man that must be addressed through images, legends, myth, words, and song was not destroyed by the fall. Man without knowing the Gospel, then, uses primarily nature and the fundamental experiences of human life, conception, birth, mating, fighting, death, etc., to grasp at some encounter with the transcendent Beauty that eludes him. These longings are in themselves good, and the pagan expressions that arise spontaneously are not completely corrupt, but they are deficient and erroneous to varying degrees.
The knowledge of Truth is classically sought through philosophy. Part of man longs to know the First Cause of all things, to know what is eternal, solid, objective, and independent of man. Pagan philosophy grasps at the Truth and discovers it to certain degrees, but it cannot satisfy. What pagan philosophy discovers are perhaps facts; it is at best merely accurate. Man longs for more than this, for more than rote knowledge of true propositions.
In our own age, aesthetic relativism is rampant. In this attitude, the beautiful is seen to be radically and purely a matter of subjective taste. This leads modern man to seek to gratify his own taste without reference to what is true or good for him. Like a child who eats too much candy, modern man makes himself sick on entertaining trivialities and fleeting experiences. He needs an authentic experience of the transcendent but seeks it unknowingly through a flood of the superficial.
Christ offers the only remedy to the schism in our hearts between the longing for Beauty and the longing for Truth. He offers us the greatest story ever told, the true philosophy. In Christianity, man’s need for mystery and myth is super-satisfied but not with falsehoods that ultimately poison our souls. Rather, our capacity for Beauty is overwhelmed with Beauty himself, who is the Truth, not only in our imaginations but in reality.