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Beauty’s Bonds with Truth and Goodness:

Reflections on "Pied Beauty"

Jeffrey Wattles, May 2003

            Approaching truth, beauty, and goodness as a religious philosopher, I present a poem and commentary, extended by phenomenological and theological remarks.  There follow four theses on beauty’s relations with truth and goodness, which ground a critique of three varieties of aestheticism, leading to a conclusion on crossroads of aesthetics.

1.  The poem and an initial commentary

            “Pied Beauty” (1877), by English poet and Roman Catholic priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, provides a springboard for reflections on a wide range of themes.

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things—

  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

  Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

    And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                                Praise him.

The poem has three parts: an opening exclamation, a descriptive enumeration of examples of dappled things, and a concluding invitation.  The poet takes for granted that the reader believes in God; and the poem, like a psalm, proclaims a confident reading of nature as God’s handiwork.

            The second and third lines of the poem give clear examples of dappled things (e.g., “skies of couple-color”) to engage the imagination and provide a distinct grasp of what is being celebrated.  We then get a burst of Hopkins’s characteristic innovative language, combining meanings densely, without obvious literal sense, though conveying a clear collage of images: “fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls,” the embers in the fire of freshly fallen chestnuts).

            The poet leads us toward the culminating vision by taking us through an ontologically striking sequence: a natural element, the sky; living things; the humanly worked landscape; equipment; humans themselves; and contrasting pairs of general properties.  The concluding contrasts embrace all creatures (swift, slow), and the full range of human experience (from adazzle to dim).  Unlike the first examples, some things manifest dappled beauty only in virtue of their association with beings that manifest the contrasting quality.

            A relaxed unknowing (“Who knows how?”) and the juxtaposition, “adazzle, dim,” prepare the culminating vision, the fulfillment of the highest intention elicited by the poem, not only by the introductory phrase, “Glory be to God,” but more especially by the quality of evocation of what we can perceive.  All is bathed in observant delight and warm appreciation.  The truth of things appears through the poet’s religiously heightened sensibilities.

The type of beauty first in view, “pied beauty,” is not ideal perfection, but the loosely patterned contrasts of our world.  God is not dappled, however, so there remains a contrast between the beauty of God and created beauty.

            There is a gentle ethical touch in the generous appreciation that covers “whatever is fickle.”  In most contexts, fickleness is a foible.  It is not yet a vice, situated in an acceptable region of a spectrum whose unwelcome extreme is indecision, inconstancy, default, and betrayal.  The embrace of the fickle expresses the unselfconsciously merciful attitude of a person caught up in a humanly divine way of seeing.

            The last two lines shift the level of focus to the Creator, mentioned at the outset, now described expressively: “He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change.”  Though the concluding line is grammatically an imperative, it spoken not as a command but as an invitation: “Praise him.”

2.  Phenomenological reflections on the poem

            Considering three phenomenological themes—foundedness, the appearing reality of value, and intention and fulfillment—will enhance our interpretation of the poem and what it presents.  To focus first (and most extensively) on the theme of foundedness, consider Edmund Husserl’s description, in Logical Investigations, of an experience of joy.

A joy may be built on the assertion of a state of affairs, a joy in that state of affairs.  The joy is not a concrete act in its own right, and the judgement an act set up beside it: the judgement rather underlies the joy, fixes its content, realizes its abstract possibility for, without some such foundation, there could be no joy at all.[i]

In  “Pied Beauty” the most obvious founding layer is the presentation of dappled things, and the most obvious founded layer is the charm of these things, in which we take delight.

            To go a stratum deeper (following the geologic metaphor), note that the judgment that something is dappled is an aesthetic judgment founded on a prior judgment that the descriptive conditions for the application of the term “dappled” are satisfied.  We accept the description of the wings of finches as dappled (the aesthetic judgment), since we intuit (perhaps dimly) that they have the loose patterning of color that makes it fitting to use that term.[ii]

In more general terms, the awareness of a particular variety of beauty is founded on a presentation.  The aesthetic judgment, “This is dappled,” rests on the presentation in imagination of the skies, cows, trout, finches’ wings, and so on.  Enjoying the charm of dappled things is founded on a grasp of the truth of the things mentioned.

            We must be careful in extending the insight that the appreciation of beauty is founded on the interpretive grasp of truth.  On the deepest level of life prior to determinate acts of consciousness that may be expressed in judgments, our perceptual, aesthetic, and practical impulses seem to mingle.  The primacy of truth is hard to validate on a level where attention to the emerging truth of things is itself prompted by aesthetic attraction and practical purposes.  Hopkins’s innovative noun phrase, “Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls,” expresses the indistinctness of this pre-predicative level.  Nevertheless, when it comes time to clarify the basis of a judgment of value, we ask, “What is the truth of this?”  “On what observation is that based?”  “What contrasts are harmonized by this artwork?”  We inquire, ready to modify our momentum of aesthetic appreciation and practical engagement.  Within the realm of inquiry the primacy of truth may be more clearly sustained.[iii]

            Having started on the level of dappled things and uncovered two founding layers, let us now return to that initial level to uncover two higher, founded layers.  A higher level of foundedness is that enjoying the charm of dappled things serves as a basis for appreciating the Creator.  This higher foundedness relationship is the overall point of the poem.  Aesthetic appreciation founds the religious recognition. 

            The highest foundedness relation indicated in the poem is between the founding experience of the eternal and unchanging beauty of God and the founded, directly interpersonal act of praise given to the Father.

            The temporal complexity of founding-founded relationships is that the highest founded act of previous experience becomes sedimented in present experience, affecting more elementary levels.  The poet’s initial perception of dappled things is already invested with the celebration of the Creator.

            Another quotation from the Logical Investigations helps explain the complexity.

Joy, e.g., concerning some happy event, is certainly an act.  But this act, which is not merely an intentional character, but a concrete and therefore complex experience, does not merely hold in its unity an idea of the happy event and an act-character of liking which relates to it: a sensation of pleasure attaches to the idea, a sensation at once seen and located as an emotional excitement in the psycho-physical feeling-subject, and also as an objective property—the event seems as if bathed in a rosy gleam.  The event thus pleasingly painted now serves as the first foundation for the joyful approach, the liking for, the being charmed, or however one’s state may be described. . . .  Sensations of pleasure . . . may continue, though the act-characters built upon them may lapse.  When the facts which provoke pleasure sink into the background, are no longer apperceived as emotionally coloured, and perhaps cease to be intentional objects at all, the pleasurable excitement may linger on for a while: it may itself be felt as agreeable.  Instead of representing a pleasant property of the object, it is referred merely to the feeling-subject, or is itself presented and pleases.[iv]

Implicit in the poem is that faith in, and worship of, God as Creator adds to the meaningfulness of contemplating nature.  Even after the religionist turns from divine worship, the lingering pleasure of worship infuses the appreciative observation of dappled things.

            In sum, we have the following layers in the poem:

            a.  the primal layer of indistinct experience: e.g., “fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls.”

            b.  the layer of perception of sensory contrasts: e.g., “a brinded cow.”

            c.  the layer of aesthetic valuation: “dappled.”

            d.  the layer of appreciation of God’s beauty: “whose beauty is past change.”

            e.  the layer of praise directed to the Father.

In addition to the obvious sequence of layers of foundedness, one may note in the implied speaker the mind’s retention of the pleasant afterglow of previous religious experience pervading present perception.

            A second phenomenological theme is the experienced reality of value.  When we feel the beauty of something, we don’t experience ourselves as merely projecting a value on it.  The object shows itself as having such a quality.  To be sure, our ability to feel the beauty has been cultivated through a long and unfinished cultural and personal history; but that history is tacit, implicit, sedimented in the appreciation of the object.  A philosophical skeptic may take that appreciation as projection, but phenomenology describes the value as given in the experience.  As Alois Roth summarizes Husserl, “The value is grasped primordially and immediately in the glimpse of feeling.”[v]

            To be sure, Husserl in Ideas I insisted on bracketing the transcendence of God in order to articulate a presuppositionless phenomenology.  Religious explanation of experienced value goes beyond phenomenology (though there could be a phenomenology of that trajectory of explanation).  Nevertheless, since phenomenology is a description of the structures of experience, and since religion modifies experience, the phenomenology of religiously transformed experience will be different from the phenomenology of experience within a naturalistic attitude.  If a believer may be said to “constitute in consciousness” a faith-awareness of nature as creation, the believer must also be said to do so spontaneously in response to what feels like divine prompting.  In other words, whatever one’s final philosophical judgment on religious consciousness may be, a phenomenological account of that consciousness needs to acknowledge the experienced reality of the values appearing in that experience.

            There is a puzzle here.  Though phenomenology does not imply the validity of religious consciousness, it must describe it faithfully.  But, if as Husserl notes we must engage ourselves aesthetically in order to grasp aesthetic values, why should it not be the case that then one must engage oneself religiously in order to grasp religious values?  If this suggestion is problematic, it is well for phenomenologists frankly to address the issues, especially in light of the dearth of accounts of religious experience within the broadly Husserlian tradition of phenomenology.[vi]

            A third phenomenological theme is intention and fulfillment.  When we see an apple on the table, we may pick it up and take a bite.  Seeing it as an apple is an intentional experience, and in every successive, coherent moment of experience with the apple, we gain increasing fulfillment of the intention.  However, we may be surprised.  Picking it up, we may find it to be merely a painted, wooden decoration.  The intention is exploded.  In other cases, we intend what is not present, and the intention is fulfilled or not as we search and find, or not, what we thought was there.

            In the experience of great art, the fulfillment of one’s initial intention leads to a heightening of that intention, as the mind is led toward a higher level of intellectual and spiritual realization.  Successively exploring the work’s given features, we find fulfillment—with surprise, leading the original intention to be transformed.  New meanings emerge, which found the recognition of new values.  New strata of the work come into view, in harmony with the other strata.  Indeed, our overarching intention in turning to a painting or poem is to be drawn into such a movement.  “Pied Beauty” leads us to form the intention of finding a series of examples of dappled things.  We begin with obvious examples, and are led through a conceptually expanding series of less obvious examples, and thence to the Creator-Source of beauty.

            Could the possibility for an ideal interpretation of “Pied Beauty” depend upon a capacity for an analogous spiritual experience?  In spiritual experience, one paradigm of transformation of intention is the movement from verbal prayer conducted by the mind to transverbal worship conducted by the spirit.  In this process worship is a founded experience.  We worship God for what we comprehend him to be.  Prayer leads us to bring to mind something of our concept of God.  As we release our prayer into God and open ourselves to the divine response, we begin to feel something of that response, which leads the soul to surrender to the leading of the spirit.  Thus the mind rises toward the heights of worship.

            A poem can serve as the trampoline for the process of eliciting and fulfilling a sublime intention.  Poetry lifts the potentials of language to uncommon heights.  Words in their definite, factual character suggest meanings that open out into a vista of values.  We turn to the Value-Giver, and away we go, aloft for a moment.

3.  A t heological remark

            Although the thought of beauty “past change” might recall the eternal beauty of Plato’s Symposium, the innovative verb, “fathers-forth,” evokes a theistic context.  Hopkins’s grasp of the fatherhood of God culminates in a realization of beauty that may help carry us past the debate over gender and language in religion.  Here the fathering-forth transcends the metaphorical use of language, which is founded on the grasp of something in our world, the human parent.  The metaphorical account is part of the story, but not the heart the story.  The poet’s vision authorizes an analogical use of language: fathering-forth is primordially a divine, eternal, and heavenly function, such that human parenting and creativity reflect the static-dynamic paradigm on high.

            To explain the idea in a bit more detail, consider the Thomistic distinction between metaphor and analogy.  If one says, “God is a rock,” the predication is metaphoric.  A rock is, in the first instance, something we encounter in the world.  On the basis, say, of the enduring strength of the rock, we predicate the term of God.  By contrast, saying, “God is good,” one may well regard God as the prime exemplar of goodness, such that the good things of creation are good by participating in God’s goodness.  The open question is this.  If we call God “Father,” are we speaking metaphorically or analogically?  One answer is that in our psychological and religious development we use the term “Father” metaphorically until such time as our experience matures beyond biological connotations of maleness and sociological connotations of masculinity.  As experience becomes too deep for words, it becomes harder to explain the fatherhood of God.  There is no more image of an old man with a beard, let alone a paternalistic deity.  Hopkins’s religious and poetic gifts let him give voice to fatherhood in a way that links the unchanging eternal with creative dynamism.

4.  Truth, beauty, and goodness as divine values

            The preceding comments come from a framework congenial to what may be glimpsed in “Pied Beauty.”  To state the broadest lines of that framework enables further comments about beauty’s links to truth and goodness.  I content myself here with four theses that may seem dogmatic, but are in fact themes for ceaseless inquiry.

            First, truth, beauty, and goodness in the highest sense are divine values.  They are gifts proceeding from divine love, and they unify us with divinity.

            Second, truth, beauty, and goodness are intertwined.  The beauty of truth comes to be realized in its simplicity after decades while the mind learns painstakingly to find the beauty of truth on differentiated physical, intellectual, and spiritual levels.  Exploring the helpfulness and limits of a dozen strategies of theodicy is part of the process.  The beauty of goodness is realized in its simplicity only through supreme personal commitment to goodness.  The beauty of beauty dawns on us as we realize its truth and goodness.

            Third, truth, beauty, and goodness, while being divine values, are also values that we can live.  Of course there is disillusionment along the way; but the lure reappears to the feeling soul again and again.  For example, when our commitment to goodness slips, our vivid feeling of the living reality of goodness declines.  Nevertheless it is retained in memory, abidingly luring renewed commitment that revives our spontaneous anticipation—protention—of a marvelous destiny.  In Husserl’s terms, the retention does not fade into obscurity if we do not delay too long in reviving our commitment.  Otherwise, it is necessary to reenter the blessed quest again.  We have lost its immanent fragrance; it becomes “only a memory,” and needs to be recalled actively.

            Finally, truth, beauty, and goodness are realized on physical, intellectual, and spiritual levels.  Aesthetics finds its proper context within the full matrix of philosophic inquiry, including reflections on science, religion, nature, and ethics.

5.  Implications: Critique of Aestheticism

            From the preceding framework we can address an issue of aesthetics at the crossroads.  One strand in aesthetics is aestheticism, defined as a narrowing of the field of value that gives undue prominence to beauty.  I note three varieties, taking time to illustrate only the third.

            The first variety is radical, revolutionary aestheticism.  As we know, the “return to beauty” since the 1990s followed a period when ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness were neglected, denied, or assailed.  Let us imagine in caricature an extreme critic, who sees science merely as revisable, philosophy as a matter of opinion, religion as illusion, and ethics as artificial.  Thus giving up on basic commitments to truth and goodness, he turns to beauty.  In his radical aestheticism he hopes to replace through beauty what has been lost through failed intellectualism and failed moralism.  However, beauty in such arbitrariness descends readily into ugliness.  Art presented as protest may fail to give even a glimpse of anything higher than that which is being protested.  In sum, cutting beauty’s bonds to truth and goodness dooms beauty, too.

            The second variety is forgetful aestheticism.  This variety exalts the power of the imagination to such an extent as to forget, at times, the balancing recognition of the landscape of facts, meanings, and values—actual and potential—within which the imagination takes flight.  Aestheticism may forget that the adventure of freedom and creativity succeeds only in responsibility to this many-dimensioned field.

            The third variety of aestheticism takes beauty as a new foundation for truth and goodness.  Here science, spirituality, and morality are affirmed aesthetically.  Poet Frederick Turner’s 1991 book, Beauty: The Value of Values, illustrates this variety of aestheticism.[vii]  Turner denies the concept of a universal divine Creator, citing “the logical, moral, and psychological problems generated by the dogma of a transcendent, immaterial, single, omniscient, and omnipotent deity” (35).  He characterizes the “old synthesis” of the Thomistic Great Chain of Being as “static, unchanging, creationist, eternal, and cyclic,” and as working through “a fundamentally top-down causality and ordering process” (116-17).  Instead, Turner conceives of an emerging world soul, an Anima Mundi, in whose evolution we participate.  The universe is self-organizing.

            A few quotations illustrate Turner’s aestheticism.

Beauty is the guide of politics, as it is the core of morality and speculative understanding . . . (35).

Beauty is the defining property of Being, but only if Being is conceived of as complicated, interfered-with, reflexive, epistemological, and at least potentially aware in its very essence (35).

At the core of the new value system that is emerging is beauty.  The capacity that our extraordinary self-evolution as a species sharpened, accelerated, and deepened was the ability to recognize and join in the creation of beauty.  Beauty is the creative principle of the universe, the feedback process that generates an ordered world with a chaotic boundary in time” (127-28).

            If beauty is as it is described here, it must also be, as Keats said, the fundamental source and hallmark of truth.  If truth is conformity to fact, and fact is the product of a feedback process that we intuitively perceive as beauty, then beauty is the way we perceive and intuit truth (128-29).

Turner contrasts beauty and goodness by taking beauty at its fullest and goodness in a limited sense.

Beauty is an attractor; goodness is a duty.  Goodness is the faith and will that puts us in the way of grace; but beauty is gratis, is the grace itself, gratuitous, unwilled, in an anguished but delicious near-communion with the whole of the universe.  Goodness operates by policies, commandments, principles, conscientiously seeking the best angle and most economical path to catch the spirit in its flight.  Beauty is the confident joining with and participation in the spirit (134).

I have hardly scratched the surface of Turner’s richly articulated concept of beauty and of his reflections on how evolution has prepared us biologically to respond to the actuals and potentials of beauty.  We clearly have a worthy interlocutor in Frederick Turner.  My personal correspondence with him indicates that his thought on these themes is in motion.  My critique of the 1991 book is that it could benefit from a more adequate concept of goodness and also from a grasp of truth that integrates theistic spirituality with his evolutionary process model.  The aestheticism that makes beauty the sole foundation of truth and goodness oversimplifies things.  On these issues we can use a both-and approach, rather than an either-or approach.

            In our dappled experience, as divine and human inputs cascade into consciousness and blend in our deepest receptivity-and-activity, we may contribute to the evolving, divine synthesis of truth, beauty, and goodness, which is both the Anima Mundi of Frederick Turner’s aesthetic-scientific vision and also the telos implicit in the faintest stirrings of conscious life as interpreted by Husserl.[viii]

Conclusion: Aesthetics at the Crossroads

            Sooner or later, our world will witness a new age when the arts will flourish based on lives integrating truth, beauty, and goodness.  This will be the artistic phase of a world-wide spiritual renaissance.  Nothing less can clear the current log-jam of interconnected social, economic, and political problems.  Whatever is incomplete in aestheticism will be healed, in part, by spiritual experience that traces the path of the transformation of intention sketched above.  Aesthetics will be at a crossroads for as long as it takes to accomplish this change.

Kent State University