The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
—John W Gardner, Carnegie Foundation
Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right,
whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.
—Philippians 4:8
In my previous post, I wrote that, because we live in an objective, shared universe, there are things which are neither dependent upon nor affected by a particular opinion about them. The sun rises in the morning whether I like it or not. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second no matter how I feel about it. No matter how much I wish it otherwise, I will probably find out more than I want to about Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears.
For a theist, the most compelling case for an objective reality is God. God is the transcendent reality; it doesn’t matter whether a person believes in his existence or not; he exists. Not only that, his qualities are nonnegotiable. Of course we can argue about what those qualities are, but we are really only discussing our perceptions or assumptions about him, not influencing who he actually is. In fact, our discussions are attempts to discover what he’s really like.
For the Christian in particular, not only is God objectively real—though perceived through faith—he has revealed certain essential, unchanging qualities about himself. Two of those qualities are crucial to our consideration of taste. First, God is good. Jesus was unequivocal: “No one is good—except God alone” (Mark 10:18). Jesus implies that God’s goodness is not merely our assessment of him. God defines good itself. He is the standard against which the goodness of all other things are measured. So, for the Christian at least, goodness is not simply an opinion, it is an objective fact.
A second quality is divine beauty. In the same way God is objectively good, he is objectively beautiful. The Psalmist writes, “Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God has shone forth” (50:2). Here the idea of a perfect beauty is associated with God’s emanation through Zion. This idea holds true throughout the scriptures. Beauty of any kind is correlated to God’s. Any departure from God’s essential nature means a loss of genuine beauty (see Eze 28:12-19). Beauty may be in the eyes of the beholder, but for the Christian, that beholder is God.
For the Greeks—and in the New Testament—good and beauty are expressed by the same word, καλός, the sense of which can be brought together under the idea of what is ordered or sound (see 1Co 14:33). This is a key term in Greek thought, and turned into a noun means the good, virtue, and the beautiful. Adopted by the writers of the New Testament, this concept becomes unified in God. He is the exemplar of both goodness and beauty, both order and soundness. God is objective excellence.
When we speak of taste we generally mean a sense of what is fitting, harmonious, or beautiful. Taste is the perception and enjoyment of what is excellent in any given thing, an appreciation for what is worthy of appreciation. Good taste, then is that which recognizes and appreciates the extent to which something reflects God’s essential nature. Bad taste, on the other hand, does not. From this standpoint, taste is not only about liking, it’s about seeing.
The issue, then, is discerning whether or not, or to what degree, something is indeed excellent—or participates in the excellent—and then responding appropriately.
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As NT Wright would say, beauty is an “echo of a voice;” certainly not the voice itself, or even proof that there is a voice. However, when you begin to hear the voice, you can recognize the echo for what it is.
Wright’s comment has a kind of C.S. Lewis feel to it.