Wary of Beauty

Wendell Kimbrough

2007 Academy Fellow Wendell Kimbrough reports on his changing attitude toward beauty in a fallen world.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the concept of beauty. My mother is an artist, so over Christmas break I spent a lot of time at home gazing at her artwork. After three months at the Trinity Forum Academy, I found I had a new capacity to be enamored by her work. My mom is always creating new paintings and rearranging the house to reflect her art; my childhood unfolded within an evolving display of color and light. Naturally, this shaped me as a person. By the time I was 19 and leaving for college, I had a healthy, if sometimes naïve, appreciation for beauty and its effect on human beings.

But over the last few years, despite my childhood, I unconsciously developed a deep skepticism toward beauty. Whether it was beautiful people or beautiful places, I discovered that beauty can often be used as a veneer to hide ugly things.

Men and women sculpt their bodies into seemingly perfect forms while maintaining eating disorders or other self-destructive habits. Some of the most physically attractive people, like the celebrities our society worships, are thus among the most unbalanced and unhealthy.

I became cynical, too, toward beautiful places, like the campus of Furman University where I was an undergraduate. Several experiences have nurtured in me a concern for people who are marginalized and disadvantaged by society. My first reading of these experiences led me to see gorgeous homes and immaculately landscaped lawns as manifestations of the injustice that characterizes this broken world. Nowhere was this more apparent than in South Africa—I traveled there in winter 2005 with a group from Furman—where, under the tyrannical laws of apartheid, black laborers constructed some of the most beautiful resort locations on earth—for privileged white people. As I realized that beauty could be used as a disguise for sin, I began to feel hardness in my heart toward virtually any manifestation of beauty.

I began to see the creation of beauty (the arts, landscaping) as an activity unrelated to—even opposed to—the work of social justice. I guess I felt a little self-righteous about it. Those who labor to make things beautiful often serve only those with wealth, and I wanted no part of that. I wanted to do the work of social justice.

Thus the irony when, in September, I found myself at the Osprey Point Retreat and Conference Center, where the Trinity Forum Academy is housed in a breathtakingly beautiful environment on the Chesapeake Bay. I could not have landed in a more awkward place for someone wary of beauty. Not only is the place naturally beautiful, my work here could easily be called “beautification”—making the bathrooms spotless, polishing the silverware until it looks like little mirrors, and preparing and serving impeccable plates of delicious gourmet food.

Being at Osprey Point has allowed me to identify and to reconsider some of my skepticism toward beauty and those who work to achieve it. This has happened on a purely practical level—it’s hard to despise people who work to make things beautiful when you and your friends are those people—and on a more theoretical level.

I’m thinking specifically about what is often called “the cultural mandate” in Genesis 2. God creates humans, male and female, in his image to “have dominion” over the earth. He tells them to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it. What does this mean? One way of expressing the historic Christian interpretation is this: when God says “fill the earth and subdue it,” he intends Adam and Eve to make the earth more beautiful by ordering and taming its forces and materials in a way that gives glory to God and extends his image and purposes. He made a beautiful, good earth, yet he gave Adam and Eve further work to do: Tend the garden. Before the fall, this must have meant creative, artful acts like animal-naming and landscape architecture (Gen 2:15). In other words, humans were to order and arrange God’s good creation in such a way that made it even more beautiful.

Everything, of course, changes dramatically after the Fall. Genesis 4 and 5 have no attention for beautification of the created world. Cain murders his brother and is banished to wander and build a city. Crime and social injustice crop up everywhere. This is the world that we live in now. How can anyone concern themselves with cultivating gardens when the world is full of injustice?

What does the cultural mandate look like in a world that is fallen? Are we to ignore the pre-Fall directive to make the earth more beautiful and glorifying to God? I don’t think so. But now, social justice work is necessarily integrated into the fulfillment of the original mandate. The seemingly separate pursuits of art/beautification and social justice are actually complimentary tasks on a continuum toward the fulfillment of God’s design. This recognition is melting my secret cynicism toward beauty.

The fact is, we cannot simultaneously make beauty and neglect the work of justice; the decay of the world—war and crime specifically—will corrupt and destroy our art. Just as the briar and thistle will overcome our gardens if we do not fight them back, graffiti, theft, or war may eventually shatter the environs we work to make beautiful.

Neither can we sustain social justice work without eyes to see and love beauty. The goal of working for justice cannot simply be the alleviation of such social ills as poverty. Those who work with the needy must have a positive aim, some conception of the beautiful society toward which they seek to move. It is essential that those who love justice also taste and see what is beautiful; if they do not, their work will be marked by cynicism and despair.

When I think back to my parents’ living room and my mother’s artwork, I smile. I do not think it is a coincidence that, after growing up in a household filled with warmth and beauty, I have come to care about social justice. Tasting and seeing what is beautiful has taught me why I must care for the needy—not merely to alleviate suffering, but to invite others to enjoy and participate in what is good and beautiful about God’s world.  

Wendell Kimbrough is an 2007 fellow at the Academy. When he’s not plotting how to desegregate American life, he enjoys writing and playing music on his guitar. He also enjoys fireside chats and sunshine in the winter.

4 Responses • Fellows, Tue 20 Mar 2007