Painted sunset (Turner) and real sunset
I was sitting on my balcony enjoying the beautiful sunset, which reminded me of the sunset paintings of JMW Turner. Both the real sunset and the painted sunset evoked the same aesthetic sense in me. I felt the beauty of each of them in the same emotional way.
My theory of art is rather simplistic: the artist has a vision in his mind; he executes that vision into a painting, in order to communicate that vision to others; people like me see that beauty and feel like they have caught a glimpse into the mind of the artist.
It follows that my appreciation of the beauty of a real sunset affords me a glimpse into the mind of someone or something that is communicating its vision. Call it ‘God’ if you like, but I prefer to call it ‘Mind’. It’s a version of creationism: if beauty exists, then it must have a creator.
I’m not trying to make a religious screed. Religious people make the illogical leap to morality. If there is God the creator, they argue, then there must be right and wrong. That makes no sense at all. To me, the creator of the sunset has no moral qualities at all.
In fact, the ancients saw the beauties of the sun and of the moon; they saw glimpses into quite different kinds of mind, and they chose different gods of different creations, like the sun god and the moon god.
Just as I can distinguish a Van Gogh from a Monet, so the ancients could distinguish between the works of different gods.
The poets have linked beauty to the divine. Everyone is familiar with Joyce Kilmer’s ode to the beauty of trees: “Only God can make a tree”. Or how about Blake’s
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
The poem goes on to mention the difference between the tiger and the lamb – two very different versions of beauty, and he asks the tiger:
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Did the same god create the beauties of the lamb and of the tiger?
This is almost a claim for polytheism.
The next time you see (or hear) something really beautiful, ask yourself if there is Mind, or a creator of that beauty. If not, where, then, does its beauty come from?