The Need for Beauty
In Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, Irish poet, theologian, and philosopher John O’Donohue explains, “In a sense, all the contemporary crises can be reduced to a crisis about the nature of beauty.”1 For instance:
It has become the habit of our times to mistake glamour for beauty. This concern is expressed trenchantly by Robert C. Morgan: ‘Beauty is not glamour. Most of what the media…the fashion world…Hollywood…the art world has to offer is glamour. Glamour, like the art world itself, is a highly fickle and commercially driven enterprise that contributes to…the “humdrum.” It appears and disappears…No one ever catches up to glamour.’2
O’Donohue adds, “Glamour too has but a single flicker. In contrast, the Beautiful offers to us an invitation to order, coherence, and unity. When these needs are met, the soul feels at home in the world.”2
In other words, misunderstanding the nature of beauty is serious because we are unable to identify a need of the soul. When this need goes unmet, O’Donohue recognizes that, “we turn away from all that is wholesome and true, and deliver ourselves into an exile where the vulgar and artificial dull and deaden the human spirit…because they lack the coherence to embrace the inner form of the soul. They are not a presence but an absence that evicts.”2
On the other hand, “Beauty quickens. It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid, animated, living, worth living.”3 Beauty saves lives and directly confers the gift of life.4 Referring to the writings of French novelist Marcel Proust, this is how Elaine Scarry, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University, describes beauty in her book, On Beauty and Being Just.
A Beautiful Threshold addresses the design challenge of educating the public about the need for true beauty in hopes that others would choose to pursue beauty in their own lives. By shining a light on the true meaning of beauty that is often overshadowed by imitations that fail to fully enliven the human spirit, my hope is to shift one’s perspective and understanding of beauty so they may have discernment and courage to accept its invitation when it calls.