Michael Morwood begins a recent article with the statement, ‘Christianity is presently being split on the most central aspect of Christian belief—our understanding of “God” and how human beings are in relationship with God’. Morwood identifies three prevailing views. The first is the extreme theistic view of an ‘elsewhere’ god who is a law-maker, judge and heavenly gate-keeper, a god who intervenes in human affairs, often in ‘mysterious ways’ and sometimes leaving faithful people with troubling questions like, ‘Why did God do this to me?’ A second position conserves the scriptural notion of a god who has to be worshipped as powerful and holy but brings this God ‘down to earth’ so to speak. This god is always present with us. The third and most radical of the three positions allows an understanding of God to be informed by contemporary knowledge about the universe and the development of life on this planet. According to this position, God is everywhere in the unfathomable vastness and complexity of the cosmos. This view, says Morwood, challenges Christians ‘to take seriously a concept of ‘God’ that embraces God’s activity in all places, at all times, in every part of this vast universe’.
This is quite a challenge and I am not about to tackle it—at least not ‘full on’. What I would like to do instead is to share some reflections on just one outcome of God’s cosmic activity—the human ability to perceive beauty in nature, that is, the ability to experience aesthetic pleasure.
Aesthetic pleasure
Aesthetic pleasure is the feel-good emotion we have whenever we encounter beauty in nature or anywhere else. This emotion is the ‘beauty buzz’. The ‘buzz’ can range from gentle delight at one extreme to heady euphoria at the other. It is both a ‘feel-good’ (rewarding) and a ‘get-up-and-go’ (arousing) experience. Regardless of how strongly it is experienced, aesthetic pleasure is always good for us. It gives us an emotional lift and it stirs our minds by heightening awareness, arousing curiosity, stimulating inquiry and inspiring creativity. For many people, aesthetic pleasure is also strongly linked with spirituality.
The impact of aesthetic pleasure is easily appreciated if you have experienced it at the level of euphoria. After more than 30 years, I can still recall one such experience almost as if it were happening to me still. It occurred at the end of a long, hard day of trekking in central Nepal. I was walking a little apart from my companions, weary and looking forward to reaching the campsite. I arrived at a small saddle and there in front of me was the full eastern face of Mt Dhaulagiri rising the best part of 7000 metres from the valley of the Kali Ghandaki River. I was overwhelmed but I remember exclaiming, ‘It can’t be true!’. Time stopped for me as I was totally caught up in the spectacle. I do not know how long I remained there, utterly transfixed. When I finally made my way to the camp, fatigue was completely forgotten. I might as well have been walking on air. Somehow the world seemed a better place. Others would call this a peak or optimal experience, but I prefer Mark Gibbard’s label, ‘high moment’.
Gibbard describes high moments as natural forms of contemplation, that is, as experiences that provide a sense of the transcendent and of oneness with the cosmos. This is how it was for me. While I sat gazing at the mountain, I felt drawn out of myself and into the grandness before me. This was high-level aesthetic enjoyment, a powerfully charged experience in which I perceived the landscape with peculiar fidelity and absorption. I was lost to myself—to my self-awareness and self-concern. It was an experience, also, in which I sensed immensity beyond the scene itself, something to which I was connected in the core of my being and something that I had to acknowledge in my understanding of the cosmos.
High moments are particularly vivid examples of aesthetic pleasure but what happens in high moments is typical of episodes of aesthetic pleasure generally, the emotionally subdued as well as the momentous. All involve the emotions of delight and arousal, a suspension of self-awareness and an urge to be more engaged with the object of attention.
Aesthetic pleasure, happiness and inspiration
Aesthetic pleasure is a source of both happiness and inspiration. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Martin Seligman, both prominent figures in the positive psychology movement, maintain that the combination of pleasure and fulfilment lies at the core of authentic happiness. Aesthetic pleasure offers just this combination. I recall an occasion, for example, when I was with a bushwalking companion as she encountered a particularly stunning panorama for the first time. After an awed silence she murmured, ‘It makes you glad to be alive!’ She was not indulging in hyperbole but making a statement of fact. The aesthetic pleasure she so obviously experienced made her more appreciative of her ‘aliveness’. She was conscious of an added ‘reason for being’. This is genuine fulfilment, not of the kind that is linked with success or accomplishment but of a different type altogether. This is fulfilment arising from a sense of involvement with ‘goodness’ and, on occasions, with the ‘best’.
Aesthetic pleasure inspires by prompting us to ‘do’ something—often to do little more than to stop and gaze but sometimes to embark on a significant journey of the mind and spirit. This can be a journey of discovery, adventure, creativity or spirituality. Much of the richness of human accomplishment in the sciences, arts and the conservation movement can be traced to the focussing and motivating effects of aesthetic pleasure.
Aesthetic pleasure is a gift
Until recently, I was content to enjoy natural beauty without thinking much about it. I was also happy to fall in line with the common view that nature’s beauty is a declaration of God’s supreme artistry and a cue to regard the Divine Artist with awe and reverence. As I began to look more deeply into the human mind’s response to nature, however, I came to realise that this view is based on a misunderstanding. We experience aesthetic pleasure because our brains have the remarkable ability to perceive something in nature that is not actually there. Beauty is not really ‘in’ nature; it is not like shape and colour, for example, that are physically defined properties of objects. Beauty is ‘created’ in the brain; it is a quality that the human brain ‘gives’ to things. The beauty of a flower, for example, exists only as a bundle of busy neurones in the observer’s brain. In the absence of brains able to experience aesthetic pleasure, beauty would not exist.
Beauty, as such, is always to be marvelled at, but we should be equally awed by the fact that beauty is perceived at all—by the fact that there exist creatures like us who have been given brains capable of appreciating and being inspired by beauty. We do well to ask, therefore, what lies behind the ability to experience aesthetic pleasure. Why is the ability part of our make-up? And what does it tell us about God, nature and ourselves?
The why and how of the beauty buzz
The favoured scientific explanation of aesthetic pleasure is couched in evolutionary terms. Human beings are the product of forest and woodland environments and over hundreds of thousands of years, chance biological variation in combination with natural selection equipped us for survival in such environments. Among our survival tools was the ability to experience aesthetic pleasure. Our brains have evolved to associate beauty with those aspects of the natural environment that are directly or potentially beneficial, such as water and woodlands, and to regard as ugly objects like snakes and putrefying carcasses that should be avoided, modified, or destroyed. Gordon Orians, a leading eco-psychologist, is adamant that without this ability humanity would not have survived.
This is a compelling explanation but it is incomplete. It is certainly true that there is a striking match between perceived beauty and natural features that are propitious to human biological survival. But we are left wondering why a complex response like aesthetic pleasure evolved rather than some other less elaborate mechanism, one that operates subconsciously, for example. Aesthetic pleasure impacts on the human mind in a way that is clearly superfluous to the demands of physical survival alone. There is no necessity for the process to be elaborated by the mind in the way that it is. Nor is there any necessity for it to be a source of happiness and a stimulus to human creativity and enterprise. It does operate in this extravagant way, however, and we need to ask why.
The Oxford theologian, Keith Ward, points us towards the answer. He proposes that evolution doesn’t just happen but is guided by intention: God’s intention. Aesthetic pleasure is not, therefore, the random outcome of ‘pure’ chance but a foreseen and intended endpoint. Years before Richard Dawkins, the arch proponent of the evolutionist’s worldview, captured public attention with his book, The God Delusion, Ward had exposed the flaws in the claim that evolution accounts for all of the universe’s complexity including the emergence of humans as sentient beings. In his book, God, Chance and Necessity, Ward demonstrates that the combination of chance and natural selection falls well short of explaining why biological entities are as they are rather than something different. Evolution involves a sequence of changes. Not only is each change one of many possibilities but so too is the sequence. This means that the outcome of evolutionary process is just one of many possible destinations. The pathway by which the ability to experience aesthetic pleasure came to be part of our make-up could have diverged at any one of countless stages. But it didn’t, despite the enormous probability that it would. To say, therefore, that aesthetic pleasure is an entirely random outcome, the result of chance alone, is to strain credulity to the limit. It is much easier to accept that God’s intention somehow gave direction to the process. Evolution provided the means but it did not determine the end; God did. This ‘theistic’ view of how evolution works is accepted by many scientists, including A R Wallace, the co-discoverer with Darwin of the principle of natural selection, John Polkinghorne, priest and former Cambridge plasma physicist, and Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project.
Some theological implications of the beauty buzz
Our ability to enjoy aesthetic pleasure is, firstly, a sign that God values beauty for its own sake. We are accustomed to thinking of God in terms of the values that define goodness: love, mercy, justice, forgiveness and so forth. But I believe that beauty, as well as goodness, drives God’s cosmic agenda. In other words, God created the cosmos for the sake of beauty as well as goodness, not as a display of power and creativity to impress us (God is not a show-off) but as an end in itself. God enjoys the beauty of the cosmos and wants us to do the same—to resonate with this beauty. And God gave us the ability to do so, not because it was necessary, but because it was God’s gracious desire. When we exercise the ability we are actually sharing in the mind of God.
Secondly, God’s desire that we enjoy the beauty of the natural world is a declaration that the cosmos is part of the Kingdom of Heaven. In Christian thought, this is the kingdom where God’s will prevails. This being so, it is not a kingdom confined to human affairs. It has to include the natural world, because that is where God clearly is in charge. Christianity has been slow, perhaps even reluctant, to recognise this. The entwined doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin have been unnecessary and unfortunate stumbling blocks. To think of nature as ‘fallen’ and tainted by the consequence of human sin is unjustified. The ‘Fall’ is not a sustained Biblical theme. It is mentioned only twice in the Scriptures and not at all by Jesus. The natural world is not fallen; it is exalted.
Finally, in giving us the gift of aesthetic pleasure, God displays an incredibly high view of humanity. God clearly believes that we can share the divine commitment to beauty and goodness. God even invites us to be co-creators, to find in natural beauty the inspiration to be creative with our minds and bodies. Thus, to create something of beauty, however modest it may be, is to honour God and to celebrate our ability to experience the beauty buzz.
Since retiring from a position of associate professor at the University of Sydney, Les Higgins has combined his academic and leisure interests in a study of the psychological relationship between the human mind and nature.
This article first appeared in Eremos Magazine, August 2009. Reproduced with the permission of Les Higgins and Eremos Magazine.
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