on beauty.

The English 395: Senior Seminar curriculum attempts to cover all the major questions of the discipline: the right use of language, ethical limits on writing, the nature of knowledge, what counts as literature, hermeneutics, the high brow. This week, we've been talking about beauty.

Elaine Scarry, professor of Aesthetics at Harvard, wrote our text: a short treatise called On Beauty and Being Just. Beauty, she argues, has ethical significance. It matters for how we live in the world. Beauty prompts us toward justice.

Beauty is preexistent; it is in the world without any action on the part of humankind. It does not rely on us for its being; we may create beauty, but we are "only collaborators in a much vaster project," which sounds a lot like shalom to me.

"Beauty is a call," available to our sensory perception in a way justice is not, characterized by symmetry, and generously present to all people at almost all times. When we experience it, we undergo what Scarry calls "radical de-centering." We are surprised into giving up our imaginary position at the center of the world and following the motion of beauty toward a presence beyond our own, which Scarry doesn't call Christ, but I do. Confronted with beauty, we are humbled. We are moved to create. And we are moved toward creating justice that mimics the equality and generosity of beauty. Beauty is a single mark that we are not entirely selfish creatures; we wish to protect even paintings we will never see and mountains we may never visit.

The book's philosophical underpinnings were widely debated in capstone this morning, but all of us were moved, and this in a class brimming with opinionated writers, linguists, philosophers, historians, marketers and poets. We approached the conversation with the strange, compelling reverence native to art museums and cathedrals. Beauty matters, and we had been reminded.

In gray days of paper-writing and coffee-drinking, on mornings when I am late for school or forget my lunch, on long evenings in a cold house, I am reminded to look for beauty and to practice it. I will be generous with myself and with others and the world, and I will create justice in response to loveliness that bids me "attend to the aliveness of our world." I am blessed to know a beautiful God, who calls me to this.

[katie van zanen]