Perceiving Beauty as Cultivated Discipline

SOURCE:  https://www.christiancentury.org/features/beauty-and-how-see-it

KEYWORDS:  Beauty, Wonder,  Awe, Grace, Love, Aesthetics, Apologetics

ONE SENTENCE

Koons argues that seeing beauty—and ultimately seeing God—is less a matter of waiting for extraordinary experiences than cultivating habits of attention that teach us to perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary. 

SUMMARY

Koons begins with advice the 20-year-old Van Gogh gave his brother Theo: “Find things beautiful as much as you can.” Rather than treating beauty as an occasional interruption of ordinary life, Van Gogh suggests that the problem may lie with the beholder: most of us simply have not learned to see.

Koons identifies two practices by which Van Gogh cultivated this vision: walking and writing. Van Gogh walked constantly, not merely for transportation but as consolation, companionship, moral formation, and eventually a kind of pilgrimage. Walking placed him in sustained proximity to the world. Writing—especially his enormous correspondence with Theo—forced him to attend closely enough to describe what he encountered: light, weather, trees, fields, people, color, shape. 

Long before Van Gogh became a painter, he was training himself to see like one.

His paintings therefore emerge from what Koons calls a “discipline of attention.” Van Gogh painted ordinary things—shoes, sunflowers, wheat fields, workers—but had developed the capacity to perceive extraordinary beauty within them. His artistic imagination did not escape reality; it attended to reality intensely enough to discover what was already there.

Koons then makes the theological turn. Perhaps our problem is not simply that we encounter too little beauty but that we have uncultivated eyes. And perhaps the same is true of God. We assume God’s presence must break dramatically into ordinary life, when God may already be present throughout creation. Koons invokes Emmaus: Christ was present throughout the disciples’ walk even though they recognized him only later. His provocative conclusion is that perhaps we suffer not from too little of God’s presence but from an inability to perceive the divine traces surrounding us.

QUOTABLE QUOTES

• "Seeing beautiful things is, in other words, a matter not of taste but of a cultivated discipline of the eyes and mind." 
• "Walking instead facilitates a particular kind of side-by-side communion, where direct confrontation is opened out into a space for the mutual exploration of wider horizons, furnishing a posture for the imagination to search, wonder, and dream."
• "His paintings and letters are left to us as an antidote to a world hollowed by a lack of beauty—or, better, a world that has lost the eyes to see the beauty that is already everywhere."
• "We don’t find much God, either. Many of us say we believe in God, but far fewer would say that we reliably or regularly see or experience God’s presence. What if this too is something we can change? What if this too is not a matter of God’s inactivity but a consequence of our uncultivated eyes?"
• "To put it more directly: What if what we suffer from is not too little of God’s presence but too much? Bonaventure wrote of St. Francis that he pursued God everywhere, through the divine traces impressed on things. Bonaventure could just as well have said that St. Francis found God in things as much as he could. Most people find too little God."