Then there’s an idea of integrity as beauty. Job is described as having this quality of integrity. It’s the same word that’s used to describe acceptable sacrifices in the temple. They must be without blemish. In other words, and this is really interesting to me, beauty in that context doesn’t mean something idealized and removed from the ordinary. In the Old Testament terms, this kind of beauty is precisely being what you’re meant to be. So, a lamb without blemish is just a really lamby lamb; not some kind of exceptional lamb, different from all the other lambs, but a lamb with all the right bits in all the right places. And that’s, I think, a nice reminder to our own twenty-first-century culture to question its obsession with standing out, and its search for a beauty that somehow sets you apart from others.

A theologian tells the story of beauty, from Absalom’s hair to English country gardens.