Beauty in Modernity
One of our professors told us that the powerful tool for capturing the attention of the people nowadays is beauty. It is evident nowadays that the trends of the young people nowadays has something to do with aesthetics. In Filipino terms, we say it as “estetik”, whenever we describe someone or something as attractive or beautiful. It's a compliment that captures the essence of aesthetic appeal. I think it is more relevant at the moment how this “estetik” affects the way we perceive modernity in light of society and the Church at large. Beauty has long occupied a central place in philosophy and theology as a mode of encountering truth and reality. In classical and medieval thought, beauty was inseparable from goodness and truth, understood not merely as aesthetic pleasure but as a disclosure of being itself. Yet modernity has witnessed a profound crisis in the understanding of beauty. Through suspicion and reductionism modes of existence, beauty has increasingly been detached from transcendence and reduced to subjective preference or consumable appearance that somehow loses its truest value. Here, after hearing the lecture of Dr. John Vervaeke, I wish to explore the primacy and crisis of beauty by drawing from various perspectives of aesthetics. It argues that beauty remains a privileged mode of disclosing reality and may provide a pathway for overcoming the contemporary crisis of meaning.
Divine Reality of Beauty
In the classical Christian tradition, beauty was never regarded as a superficial ornament of existence but as a revelation of reality itself. This understanding is deeply rooted in the metaphysical thought of Thomas Aquinas, who, in his Summa Theologiae, presents divine simplicity as one of God’s essential attributes. God is described as actus purus, pure act, and ipsum esse subsistens, subsistent being itself, meaning that God is not composed of parts or potentials but is fullness of actuality (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q.3). Because God is pure being, all created realities participate in divine goodness, truth, and beauty.
For Aquinas, beauty (pulchrum) is closely linked to truth and goodness. He famously describes beauty through three characteristics: integrity (integritas), proportion (consonantia), and clarity (claritas) (Summa Theologiae I, q.39, a.8). Beauty thus emerges when reality manifests an intelligible order that invites contemplation. Rather than merely pleasing the senses, beauty reveals being. This Thomistic insight echoes the thought of Augustine of Hippo, who saw beauty as the radiance of divine order, and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who argued that beauty participates in God as the source of harmony and attraction. In this sense, beauty is sacred because it discloses truth beyond appearances. Ancient philosophy therefore understood beauty as a moment of realization, a perceptual event in which one encounters something deeper than surface appearance. Beauty was not reducible to pleasure or preference, it revealed reality.
Modern Crisis of Beauty
The modern age, however, brought about what may be called the “fall of beauty.” One major reason for this decline lies in what Paul Ricoeur called the hermeneutics of suspicion, shaped significantly by the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx. Rather than treating appearances as revelatory, suspicion regards them as deceptive masks hiding power and repression. Beauty no longer reveals truth, instead, it becomes something to distrust. Yet this suspicious framework contains an internal paradox. To declare appearances deceptive presupposes that there exists some “real” against which deception is measured. In this sense, suspicion secretly depends upon an older conception of reality as something that can be disclosed. Beauty, therefore, cannot be entirely dismissed because truth still requires some form of manifestation.
Modernity further intensified the crisis through reductionist explanations of beauty. Darwinian perspectives often interpret beauty as a byproduct of biological attraction or reproductive advantage. While evolutionary explanations illuminate certain dimensions of attraction, they fail to explain why human beings encounter beauty in music, art, landscapes, or moral actions. The experience of beauty exceeds mere survival.
The Aesthetics of Smoothness
Contemporary culture exemplifies the decline of beauty through what may be called the “aesthetics of smoothness.” Smoothness privileges surfaces that are flawless, easily consumable, and devoid of resistance. Modern devices, media, and digital experiences emphasize immediacy and effortless consumption. Such beauty lacks mystery because it removes obstacles that provoke contemplation. Pornography serves as an extreme example of this aesthetic logic. It transforms persons into consumable objects stripped of depth and relational mystery. Here, beauty becomes possession rather than encounter.
This critique resonates strongly with the existential thought of Erich Fromm, who distinguished between the “having mode” and the “being mode” in human existence (To Have or To Be?). The having mode treats reality as something to own and consume, while the being mode emphasizes growth, contemplation, and relational depth. Modern society often commits what may be called modal confusion: attempting to satisfy existential and relational needs through consumption. Beauty, however, belongs to the being mode because it cannot be fully possessed. It remains inexhaustible and mysterious.
Recovery of Beauty
Interestingly, contemporary cognitive science has reopened philosophical questions concerning beauty. Research on the “fluency effect” demonstrates that people often judge what is easier to process cognitively as both more beautiful and more truthful (Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, 2004). Beauty and truth appear cognitively linked rather than radically separate. Neuroscientific models of predictive processing likewise suggest that human perception involves anticipatory engagement with reality rather than passive reception. More so, Henry Corbin distinguishes between the imaginary and the imaginal. The imaginary detaches from reality through fantasy, whereas the imaginal deepens participation in reality through symbolic engagement. Authentic beauty belongs to the imaginal because it fosters maturity and wonder.
The crisis of beauty in modernity stems largely from suspicion and consumerist modes of existence that flatten reality into surfaces for possession. Against this decline, classical philosophy and theology remind us that beauty is fundamentally a disclosure of truth and being. From Aquinas’ metaphysics of divine simplicity to contemporary cognitive science, beauty emerges not as subjective preference but as a meaningful encounter with reality. To recover beauty requires a return to mystery, and relational depth that awakens the soul to contemplate. As we live marked by nihilism and fragmentation, beauty may once again become a path toward meaningful encounter with God which is beauty itself.
References:
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947.
Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Corbin, Henry. “Mundus Imaginalis: The Imaginary and the Imaginal.” In Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, edited by Leonard Fox. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Fromm, Erich. To Have or To Be? New York: Harper & Row, 1976.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The Divine Names. Translated by John D. Jones. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980.
Reber, Rolf, Norbert Schwarz, and Piotr Winkielman. “Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 8, no. 4 (2004): 364–382.
Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.
