Therefore, the man who said “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” was on the right track, even if he seemed a bit weak on the objectivity of beauty. He may well have been a solipsist who doubted the reality of everything outside himself, or one of those skeptics who thinks that no valid judgments are possible–that no knife can in reality be pronounced sharp, nor any custard done to perfection. It doesn’t matter. Like Caiaphas, he spoke better than he knew. The real world which he doubts is indeed the mother of loveliness, the womb and matrix in which it is conceived and nurtured; but the loving eye which he celebrates is the father of it. The graces of the world are the looks of a woman in love; without the woman they could not be there at all; but without her lover, they would not quicken into loveliness.
So it’s neither objectivity nor subjectivity — a wholly ridiculous dichotomy. Neither is possible and both extremes are the stuff of meaningless and endless grad-student-level “discussions.”
No, it’s intersubjectivity.
In other words, it’s not about you. And it’s not about them. It’s about us.
As Steve Brown said recently, “I know it’s about God. I’m a Calvinist. . . . But it’s about you too.”
Have you ever spent any time considering that our eternity will not be spent on a cloud somewhere strumming a harp? God’s not a Gnostic. Our eternity will be here, on this earth — all made new.
God’s stuff is very good. Not as opposed to our stuff, but including our stuff. Somehow.
It’s not God v. me. It’s God and us. Somehow. And that’s beautiful!
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“And that’s beautiful.”
Yes it is.