Human beings see beauty everywhere: beautiful paintings, beautiful buildings, a beautiful sunset. Of course we recognize beautiful people, too, in which physical good-looks might stand as a proxy for good health and fertility. But in animals we imagine they only see the beauty in their mates as fertility markers. Why couldn’t it be that animals see beauty widely and for the pleasure of beauty alone just as we do?

            Unitarian Universalist communities gather around a set of shared values, not beliefs, as in a Christian church that names their shared beliefs in a creed statement, and not in actions, either, as in a corporation or a non-profit organization defined by a mission statement.

            We are defined by our shared values, many of which are named in our statement of Seven Principles.  The values of:

Individual worth

            Justice between individuals

            Equity

            Compassion

            Acceptance of one another

            Personal growth

            Personal freedom

            Responsibility

            Truth

            Democracy

            Broad community

            Peace

Liberty

Justice within social groups

And respect for the structure that connects every part of existence to the whole.

That’s a good list.  

But our Seven Principles miss a few important values.  The value of “love,” for instance, doesn’t appear in our Seven Principles.  Joy is an important value for satisfying lives, not named in the Seven Principles.  The value of service isn’t in our Seven Principles.  Neither is the value of wisdom.  

            Today, I want to talk about another value important to me personally, and I think to all of us in some way, and even to all humanity and perhaps to all existence:  the value of beauty.

            In seminary, I was introduced to the theological concept of the transcendentals.  Not the Transcendentalists whom we know from our Unitarian history, but the transcendentals.

            The transcendentals are a list of qualities which answer the philosophical question of what constitutes the ultimate ground of existence.  Behind and beyond the physical stuff, what is the background?  What transcends physical existence, to lie as the fundamental of all existence?

            Plato asked that question in reference to the value of justice.  What is justice?  How do we know when an action is just?  When we judge whether an action is just or unjust, we seem to be comparing it to an ideal of justice.  But where does that ideal come from?

Plato theorized a source of ideals he called the form of the Good.  The form of the Good being the realm of the transcendentals, the ultimates that exist separate from particular instances of the value in question:  ultimate justice, equity, compassion, love and all the other values such as the ones contained in our Seven Principles.  We know what justice is when we see it because we connect mentally, or perhaps spiritually, to the form of the Good, and the ideal form of justice contained there. Plato explained his idea of “the form of the good” using an analogy of the sun, which is not sight itself, but which allows us to see all other things.

            In theology, God is the religious name for Plato’s “form of the good”, lying behind all existence, and the model by which we make judgements of good and bad, just and unjust.  So if we’re looking for ultimates, one could ask what are the qualities of God?  And, because striving toward the perfection of God is the chief spiritual aim of humanity, what should be the ultimate desires of humankind?

            What are we seeking, spiritually?  What are we living for?

            But can we actually reach beyond our human natures to access an ideal realm?  Aristotle questioned how an ideal or ultimate form could have any bearing on the physical world.  Can we know God directly?  Does my mental image of “justice” really refer to something outside myself?  And is the form of the Good only one thing, like God, or should every value be considered as a transcendental in its own right, as many gods?

            Philosophers noted that there are three senses that humans use, beyond our physical senses, by which we access the transcendental realm.  We have a rational sense, or “logos” in Greek, by which we judge the true and false.  We have an ethical sense, or “ethos” in Greek, by which we judge between the good and bad.  And we have an aesthetic sense, or “pathos” in Greek, by which we judge the beautiful and the ugly.

            This gives us a way to understand how we can reach beyond our physical existence to access a transcendental realm:  we use our rational, ethical, and aesthetic senses to get there.  And this observation of three non-physical senses also gives us a reason to limit the list of transcendental values to three:  the true, the good, and the beautiful.  Each could be said to be an attribute of God, or “the form of the good” in Plato’s phrase.  And each of the three, combine and intermingle, as in God’s nature, so that what is true is good and beautiful, what is good is beautiful and true.  And that which is beautiful is true and good.

            The question is still debated, of course, as is every question in philosophy and theology, but the answer most commonly accepted currently, is that what we desire, ultimately, the transcendentals we strive and search for and what gives us pleasure and satisfaction when we find it, and that which defines perfection of existence are three.  These three:  The good, the true, and the beautiful.

            We desire the good.  That which is morally right.  This is our sense of Ethics.

            We search for the true.  That which is factually accurate.  This is our sense of Reason.

            And we look for beauty.  This is our aesthetic sense.

            But here we must pause.  What do we mean by beauty?  What is beauty?

            Imagine a beautiful landscape.

            In the foreground the ground is even and covered with green grass growing up to ankle or knee high.  Through the green is scatted wildflowers of yellow and blue.  Butterflies animate the air above the grass and flowers.  To either side are scattered trees, darker than the sunlit center of the scene but still with light filtering between the leaves, and still green, hinting at coolness, and habitat for birds and animals.

            In the middle of the landscape, angling through the grass is a path leading away, or perhaps a stream.  The sun reflects off the water. Rocks and stones line the bottom, with taller plants standing up on the banks.  You can hear the sound of the moving water and maybe a frog or the buzz of insects.

            And behind all of that, too, are taller trees, and rising ground giving way to hills, and maybe distant mountains. Maybe snow on the peaks of the mountains:  fresh and clean.  And above the peaks a clear blue sky, some scattered clouds, a hint of bright sun light.

            Sounds beautiful, right?

            We’re all seen dozens of paintings capturing that scene.  Or maybe you’ve taken a trip recently to enjoy California’s “superbloom.”  If you were there you would probably pull out your camera and take a picture to share with your friends.  

Well you were there, if not recently, then long ago.  Our human ancestors grew up in a landscape just like that one:  a grassy plain, scattered trees, a river or a path cutting through the center, leading toward higher ground in the distance.

One theory is that we find that landscape beautiful because it is encoded in our DNA.  Beauty isn’t merely defined by cultural tastes because people who live in very different environments, who have never lived in a place like the plains of Africa, still find that scene beautiful.

Universally we find that scene beautiful.  Universally too, we see beauty when someone performs an action with expertise:  whether a craftsman making a tool, or a sculptor making a statue, or a basketball player making a jump shot.  Although tastes differ, beauty isn’t only in the eye of the beholder, it also includes universal qualities we all find beautiful.

And that implies that beauty has a genetic component.

Consider the fact that studies have shown that the human faces which we call most beautiful, can also by measurement be shown to be the most symmetrical.  The eyes and ears the same size and shape and the same distance from the nose.  The nose itself right at the center and shaped symmetrically.

Why would we think that symmetry equals beauty?

Well, some theorize that symmetry is a proxy for good genes.  Symmetry means good health.  And the male beauty of strong muscles and height, or the female beauty of round hips and breasts, promise good mates, physically able to care for children, and passing on their genetic advantages.

These evolutionary explanations for beauty make sense to me.

But they don’t explain all of beauty to me.

Because I don’t see beauty just in landscapes or in human bodies and faces, which seem to have clear correspondence to evolutionary issues.  I see beauty everywhere.

Why do I find a landscape painting by Constable beautiful, but also a landscape by Cezanne, that doesn’t look like the real world?  I love that “plains of Africa” image but the desert southwest is also beautiful to me.  The moon is beautiful, but I don’t want to live there.  Why do I find abstract paintings beautiful?  Or the abstract beauty of music?  Why are some sounds beautiful to me but not others?  And why can even ugly sounds and images work to make beauty when they are included in certain contexts?

             Some theories of beauty explain that beauty is related to qualities like balance and harmony, order and organization.  Beauty emerging from the composition of a painting.  Or the form of a symphony.

            But I find beauty in disorganized things as well:  a Jackson Pollack, a lopsided tree clinging to the edge of a cliff, a dog with a blotch of dark fur on one side, a grocery bag that splits at the bottom and scatters all its contents on the floor.  That might be a mess, but it might be a beautiful mess.

            Even when I’m looking at a beautiful face, there’s something in me that rejects the notion that everything I’m seeing that I find attractive is only because it’s a signifier for good genes.  It feels like my attraction is to beauty itself. Beauty not as a dependent quality attached to things, but beauty as a transcendent quality of its own.  A value for itself.

            Beauty for beauty’s sake alone.

            And it turns out, Darwin, too, didn’t think that beauty could be reduced to being merely a signifier for genetic fitness.  He thought there could be a different evolutionary mechanism working here.

            I read about Darwin’s theory of beauty in a New York Times article about three years ago, and then I went on to read one of the books mentioned in the article published two years earlier, a book called, The Evolution of Beauty by Richard Prum, published in 2017 and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

            Prum is primarily an ornithologist, so his examples of beauty in nature are mostly taken from observing birds.

            Prum describes, for instance, the extravagant courting ritual of a class of birds called Bower Birds.

            A bower, you know, is a pleasant, shady spot beneath trees or a trellis of climbing plants in a garden or wood.

            The male bower bird builds a bower to attract a mate by laboriously clearing a space on the forest floor.  He creates an upright enclosure from twigs.  He decorates the enclosure with bits of color and shiny objects.  He creates a path across the cleared space to the bower.  Some birds even arrange objects along the path from small to large creating a perspective illusion.  His manipulation of the natural world requires far more complex effort than the simple tool making of chimpanzees.

            And if, after all this, his bower attracts a female, she then, further judges him by the color of his feathers, and the sprightliness of the topknot on his head and the length of his tail feathers.  And if all of that is still working for him, then he begins a carefully choreographed and exacting dance of bobbing, and hoping, and hiding his head with his wing, and puffing himself up large, and turning about, and on and on.

            And if all of that succeeds, if the female at last approves, the two will mate for a few seconds and then never see each other again.

            So, it does, eventually, come down to mating.  But here is the difference between the two theories.

            The traditional evolutionary theory, although not Darwin’s theory, would be that all of that work the male Bower bird does is effective in finding a mate, only because the female Bower bird interprets all of that work as good genes.  “Oh,” she says, he must be strong, he must be healthy, maybe it means he’s intelligent, or crafty.  This interpretation would imply that any other way he could demonstrate his strength and good health would be just as effective.  The bower itself, and the color, and the dancing, the beauty of the whole thing, irrelevant in themselves but effective only as proxies for what the female really cares about:  genetic fitness.

            The other evolutionary theory though, Darwin’s theory, and argued for by Prum and other contemporary biologists, is that the female Bower bird actually likes the bower.  She likes the bower itself.  She likes the colorful decorations, and the careful arrangement.  And she likes the dance.  And she likes the color of his eyes and the movement of his tail feathers.  She finds it all beautiful.  She thinks he’s beautiful.

            Evolution is still at play, here.  The Bower bird didn’t create the whole bower building, decorating, dancing ritual in a single generation.  But the evolutionary driver might be beauty itself, not beauty as proxy for genetic fitness.

            A long time ago a female bird liked it when a bower bird arranged a few twigs, or added a pretty rock, or bopped his head a certain way.  The beauty pleased here.  It attracted her aesthetic sense.  And the birds mated and the next generation male Bower bird made a beautiful bower again, and added a new innovation, even more beautiful.

            The elaborate display evolved, not because it signified to the female a healthy mate with good genes, but because she desired beauty, and she choose as her mate the male that looked most beautiful to her, the bird who created the most beautiful bower, that danced the most beautifully.

            When we humans love a beautiful painting it’s because it’s beautiful, not because the beauty signifies something else.  Beauty, for us, is enough.  We can love the beauty of a dancer’s leap or an athlete’s jump just because it’s beautiful, not because it shows they have good genes.  Beauty for humans is just beautiful:  an irreducible, ultimate.  A transcendental quality of existence.  A piece of the divine.

            And if beauty is truly a transcendental for human beings accessed through our aesthetic sense, it ought to be accessible for other creatures, too.

            That would mean that the female bower bird doesn’t only see beauty in a beautiful mate, but she has an eye tuned to beauty in other places, too, just as we do:  the beauty of the forest, the beauty of the sky, the beauty of the light glinting on the river, the beauty of the stars at night.

            I don’t know which of these two theories is true, the traditional theory that beauty is simply a proxy for good genes, or whether beauty might be the attractor in itself.  I don’t even know how you could devise an experiment that would test the two theories.  Or the truth might be a little of both.  But I like the second theory better.  It’s a more beautiful theory to me.

            For one thing, I like the part of the theory that says the world gets more beautiful generation by generation, because females decide what is beautiful and then choose mates who best conform to their ideal of beauty.

            But more than that, I like that the theory shares the appreciation of beauty with all existence.  Rather than saying that human beings enjoy beauty in painting, and music, and dance, and architecture, and animals are only looking for good genes, the theory of beauty says that animals, too, perceive beauty, that beauty is available everywhere, to all eyes and ears, beauty everywhere, behind and beyond all things.

            Beauty as a transcendental, like the morally good and the factually true.  A divine aim for all of us, and for all creatures on this earth, humans and animals alike.

A beautiful world, beautiful today, and increasingly beautiful as we make our choices.

For the beauty of the earth,

Source of all, to thee we raise this, our hymn of grateful praise.