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Genesis 2:9, Aesthetics, and Objective Beauty
When one reads the first few chapters of Genesis, he notices the simple economy of words in revealing foundational truth underlying a biblical worldview. Genesis 2 begins the history of mankind with the toledoth structure in Genesis 2:4.
Toledoth
Toledoth is the Hebrew word translated “generations” thirteen times in Genesis and divides up the early history of mankind from the perspective of God. It follows the record of the people, of mankind, with God recording what occurred. Genesis 1:1-2:3 record the creation of God, a unique period in history. The earth He created begins then bringing forth as an active partner in “making.” 2:4 heads a new section in the narrative with the first toledoth emphasizing what happened with the beautiful and perfect world that God had created. It connects what precedes with what follows, pushing forward the history with another account.
The first toledoth does not use the name of a person — there was no history of men yet. However, all the history that follows proceeded from God’s creation of heaven and earth. Genesis 1:1-2:3 is a record of creating not begetting. When we get to Genesis 2, earth is an active partner in making. It sprouts plants (2:5) and the dust of it begets man himself, the product of earthy dust.
In Genesis 2:10-14, Moses wrote a description of the surrounding geography of Eden from a present-tense perspective of a pre-flood observer. It gave the reader in that day a sense of the immensity of the original Garden of Eden. Based on the geographic parallels in a post-flood world, the Garden was 3,500 square miles. God had major possibilities available for a faithful, obedient Adam and Eve.
Genesis 2:9
The few words take on maximum importance in communicating what God wants the reader to know and how and where to focus. Genesis 2:9 says the following:
And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
The LORD God made out of the ground to grow every tree. These trees were the means by which the pre-sin world would live. After sin and then the flood, men would survive based on the sweat of his brow, operating according to tilling a soil with thorns and thistles.
Pleasant to the Sight
The first quality of the trees of Eden God says are “pleasant to the sight” and second, “good for food.” It was important to God that the trees and the Garden looked beautiful. In modern cooking shows, chefs speak of food presentation, the process of arranging food to make it look better on the plate. This started with God and is in fitting with his nature and the nature of man.
If scripture says the tree was “pleasant to the sight,” then something must also be “unpleasant to the sight.” For beauty to exist, ugliness also exists. However, right at the beginning of creation, in the nature of God is the making of something beautiful to see.
For man made in the image of God, what was beautiful for him to see was also beautiful for God to see. God created people who would have the same aesthetic standard as Him. This is the beauty of God’s holiness. Beauty conforms to the perfections of God’s attributes, His glory. This is seen in His creation in its symmetry, order, proportion, harmony, and diversity. God Himself is the standard and everything beautiful conforms to who He is.
The Garden of Eden looked good. This was a first priority and within the nature of God. It wouldn’t be trashy, unkept, disorderly, or messy. These qualities do not conform to God. Any reader should assume that he knows what was pleasant to the eyes of Adam and Eve in their sinless conditions.
The Importance of an Aesthetic Value
My major point in this was the importance of an aesthetic value. God emphasizes the beautiful. True believers should and will judge all forms of art as to its beauty and reject what contradicts the nature of God.
Beauty is a second term issue. By that, I mean that God assumes we know what pleasantness is. The syllogism would read like the following:
The Trees of the Garden Were Pleasant to the Eyes
Symmetry, Order, Proportion, Harmony, and Diversity Are Pleasant to the Eyes
Therefore, the Trees of the Garden Had Symmetry, Order, Proportion, Harmony, and Diversity
You could write a similar syllogism with the adverse qualities of ugliness. The qualities of objective pleasantness must conform to the nature of God. What doesn’t is in fact ugly. Nothing is beautiful in its own way. Everything is beautiful according to the nature of God.
Perverting Beauty Perverting Truth and Perverting Truth Perverting Beauty
Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four
God and Beauty
God is one. All truth, goodness, and beauty proceed from God. Since God is one, His truth, goodness, and beauty are one. You can’t take away from one of these three without taking away from the other two. Each of those relate to God, so their perversion perverts an understanding of God, creates a false god or false gods, and/or takes glory from the one and true God.
God is beautiful and beauty itself also issues from Him. He defines beauty both in His essence, in His acts, and in His creation. Man made in God’s image, functioning according to His likeness, produces or generates beauty and beautiful works. Of course, sinful man operating in his flesh does not do that; only his performing according to the image of God. This requires regeneration. After conversion, he can, and should generate only beauty and beautiful works, but still must submit to God to do so.
The production of beauty and beautiful works means the skillful formation or formulation of what reflects God’s nature and achievement. One judges the formation or formulation according to standards aligned with revealed truth about God and what He does. A believer can know beauty. He can know he forms or formulates it. He can know when someone else does. How does he know? He knows based on the testimony and application of God’s Word.
How Do You Know Beauty?
Scripture states in a sufficient manner truth, goodness, and beauty. A believer then applies these to the world. God enables believers to do that. I call this truth, goodness, and beauty in the real world. Believers don’t just know these three in the Bible. They know them also in the real world.
God’s Word says a truth such as “flee idolatry,” “flee fornication,” or “let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth.” It assumes that you will understand the application of that truth in the real world. You can’t say that you didn’t know that. You can also understand and apply, “think on whatsoever things are lovely” or “worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness.”
When Proverbs 7:10 says that a young man met a woman “with the attire of a harlot,” the passage doesn’t explain the attire of a harlot. It assumes you know already. People are still responsible for things that God does not explain. Lack of explanation does not permit dressing like a harlot.
Like many other applications of the Bible, music and art require honesty and setting aside lust or self-will. God gives the necessary capacity for judgment. As is so often the case, the problem isn’t with intelligence, but volition.
Departure from Beauty
The Standard for Beauty
Does someone leave the truth when he departs from beauty? Or does a departure from beauty stand alone, totally isolated, disconnected from the truth? Does leaving beauty start with a flight from the truth?
The view that beauty was neither true nor false, that it made no pronouncements about the world, that it just reflected the mind or feelings of an artist was a completely novel view when it appeared with the origins of modernism in the late 18th to the early to mid 19th century. Truth was true in itself, goodness, good in itself, and beauty, beautiful in itself, separate from the judgment of any man. All of this came from God. If someone can criticize beauty, it could only be because there is some objective standard outside of the object by which to judge it.
Absolute beauty requires principles by which to judge them. If not, then beauty is meaningless. Beauty must be beautiful in itself, not from a mind or feelings, Its judgment comes from external criteria. The standard of beauty transcends the beautiful thing. For something beautiful to exist, something not beautiful also must exist.
Kant and Mill and Beauty
Immanuel Kant in his 1790, Critique of Judgment, introduced the concept of subjective beauty, beauty in the eye of the beholder. He said concerning beauty, that it was
a judgment of taste . . . not a cognitive judgment and so it is not a logical judgment but an aesthetic one, by which we mean a judgment whose determining basis cannot be other than subjective.
John Stuart Mill, English philosopher, later in the 19th century popularized the notion that art was nothing more than the intrinsic personal feelings of an artist. Beauty was just an expression of subjective emotion. An assertion of a thing as beautiful described the state of mind of the one asserting. Beauty did reflect reality, but now only a person’s perception of reality.
You can see how that man dethrones God when he decides what is beautiful. Man becomes final arbiter of beauty. Value becomes subjective based on his thinking or feelings.
Beauty Doesn’t Care About Your Feelings
God and Science
Some might say subjective beauty is a matter of freedom. You can say what you like or don’t like. You’ve heard the phraseology, especially made popular by Ben Shapiro, “facts don’t care about your feelings.” How does that relate to beauty?
Isaac Newton, believer in God, and others like him stand as the foundation of scientific progress of the last three hundred years, which started with God as the standard. God’s Word inspired science. It did not disregard man’s senses. In accordance with God’s Word, Newton and his colleagues recognized the place scripture gave to man’s reason, his senses, and evidence. This was different than elevating man’s thinking and his feelings to the only source of truth. They must function in subjection to God within His world.
Empiricism: Senses as the Source for Beauty First and then Science Second
Kant and Mill established a secular approach to beauty. They elevated man’s senses as the sole source for beauty. Empirical beauty. Not long after, empirical methods became the sole source for truth, a philosophy called empiricism. A secular approach to knowledge and truth followed a secular approach to beauty. Sensory experience formed the basis for both and it started with beauty.
Very often today, Christians say that truth is objective with the Bible as final authority, but they judge beauty with their feelings as the standard. They might confuse the feelings with a mystical experience from God or the moving of the Holy Spirit. Long ago many churches ejected to various degrees from objective beauty. Today we see many of those churches capitulating in objective truth and goodness. This follows along the pattern of the first effect of empiricism on the arts with Kant and Mills and the second with science.
View of Beauty Shapes View of God
When someone starts with God on beauty, he will have the right view of beauty. He will produce, support, and endorse only the beautiful. However, the opposite is also true. Someone’s view of beauty shapes his view of God. He might have God in his doctrinal statement, but his imagination of God will accord with his depiction of beauty. The view of beauty and the view of God will both match.
Easily the world deceives on beauty to pervert the imagination of God. The non-beautiful or what is ugly will draw someone away from the true God. At the same time, he thinks he has or sees God. The two views cannot coexist.
Two people might say they are Christians. They should be similar, shaped by the transcendent view of truth, goodness, and beauty. Their standard is the same.
If two professing Christians’ thinking on beauty is different, their Christianity will seem like two different religions. They are. One has the true God. Very often, depending on the extent, the other does not. He has God on his doctrinal statement, but he imagines a different God, not in fitting with the God of the Bible. What I’m explaining occurs today by far more than it ever has in my lifetime.
So Which Is It, Truth or Beauty? Authenticity
One can say that truth is beautiful and beauty is truthful. When you look at beauty, actual beauty, it is true. It is real. If it is not beauty, it is not true or is in error.
If it is beauty, it is not just someone’s imagination or feelings. Very often today, when it is feelings, people call that authentic. They say it’s authentic, because from the perspective of the performer, it is how he feels. However, it may not and probably does not represent the truth, which mean it is not authentic.
I think I can say the following is ironic. Authenticity isn’t authentic anymore. Authenticity is now a lie.
In the past, authenticity meant true. It wasn’t leather. Instead, it was naugahyde. It wasn’t a diamond, but it was cubic zirconia. If it is not beautiful according to the nature of God, then it is not authentic. In this way, it is not true.
If the lie starts with beauty, treating the non-beautiful as beautiful, that spreads to the judgement of truth. This is where our world is today. You can’t say something is true, but that started with eliminating objective beauty. Today your truth can be your truth, but for a longer time, your beauty is your beauty.
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