Beauty is not superfluous. But why?
Ms. Mason tells us that education shouldn’t be utilitarian, about the tangible only – but should speak to the person, to all that it means to be a person: body and spirit. But how?
Two questions arise almost simultaneously - the first, an affirmative recognition:
“And what could be more intangible than beauty!?”
The second, a quest for permission:
“But can beauty educate?”
Ms. Mason argues a convincing yes.
Beauty of form, sound, proof, idea, and equation have the ability to captivate where explanations fail. Beauty creates a longing that fixes attention and allows understanding to steal in.
An education obsessed with the tangible will fail to find a place for beauty because it can’t be handled, quantified, and graded. In so doing it will miss the person.
The elegance beyond function that lies within the pivotal equations, art, music, poetry and prose, the ideas behind the great discoveries. These are the things that speak to, and so educate, a person. But even here caution is required. Even here it is easy to fall into the pit of utility. Even here there is temptation to harness beauty for the purpose of utility, of function.
Resist.
Education should have a higher goal - not only the merely tangible but of the spiritual. Here we pause and begin to tread with caution, for we know that one cannot be “educated” unto salvation - that is the work of God alone. What then is the part education may rightly claim?
I suggest that beauty has the role of crying out in a wilderness of the finite, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”
All beauty is a metaphor for God who is the culmination and author of all beauty. To mingle the ideas of Ms. Mason & C.S. Lewis, the longing beauty creates not only drives self-education but sets desire for something unattainable in this realm – draws us into the spiritual. An education laced with beauty has the ability to tune an ear, train an eye, calibrate a heart… “make straight (a) pathway”.
Beauty is not superfluous but vital, vital for both the tangible and intangible goals of education. Vital to utility and function - but also to eternity. It is the very thing that must not be nudged out, must be prioritized - for beauty is the conduit by which Beauty Himself may speak.
Sara Timothy 2022
*This piece was originally written for and published by Common Place Quarterly. Please consider subscribing to their amazing work.
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