There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light.

—William Wordsworth

On early mornings in autumn, when I take my dog into the sugar maple wood behind our house, I can easily see the world through young Wordsworth’s eyes. A crimson glow has started spreading over the Hudson Highlands when Ajax rousts the eight-pointer who likes to bed down in the hollow. This happens most mornings, and the unworried buck sails away over the undergrowth, white flag flying. Ajax leaps in pursuit, until a misgiving – Don’t chase deer – checks him mid-stride, and he glances back guiltily. We head to the lake, whose surface is steaming and flecked with yellow leaves. As usual, the great blue heron is frog-hunting in the rushes. Sensing us, he breaks off and flaps without hurry to the far bank. We wait side by side, watching the largemouth bass rising.

Then the sun swings up. Linguists say the word for dawn is among the oldest in the Indo-European languages; she’s a goddess, whose reconstructed original name, Ausōs, gives us Easter. Ancient humans must have felt what we can feel now: dawn is so beautiful, she must be holy. The animals are so beautiful too, so akin to us and so unlike, that their beauty must mean something. What?

Christianity has a ready answer: beauty is an emblem of the divine. From the New Testament on, Christians have seen in the beauty of creation a sign of the beauty of the Creator – an Artist who, in turn, gazes on his work with delight: “And, behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). For patristic writers, the Psalms furnished warrant for this theology of beauty: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork” (Ps. 19:1). By this way of thinking, the world’s beauty, which calls for our love, is ordered so as to draw us to love its Maker; beauty becomes an invitation to faith. That’s why, according to the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Christianity is the aesthetic religion par excellence.”

Church fathers such as Cyril of Alexandria especially turned to the Book of Wisdom, an anonymous scripture that originated in the Jewish community in Alexandria, likely around the time of Christ. Nature-worshiping pagans are fools, Wisdom teaches, because “they were unable from the good things that are seen to know the one who exists, nor did they recognize the artisan while paying heed to his works.” The wise, by contrast, love the natural world because it teaches them to know the “author of beauty” by way of analogy: “For from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator” (Wis. 13:6).

The Book of Wisdom urges us to see the world as freighted with meaning. This dawn, this forest, this deer, this dog, this heron: each is a poem about God. As the twelfth-century Byzantine monk Peter of Damascus elaborates:

By contemplating the beauty and use of each thing, [a man] is filled with love for the Creator. He surveys all visible things: the sky, the sun, moon, stars and clouds, rain, snow and hail … the four-legged animals, the wild beasts and animals and reptiles, all the birds, the springs and rivers, the many varieties of plants and herbs, both wild and cultivated. He sees in all things the order, the equilibrium, the proportion, the beauty, the rhythm, the union, the harmony, the usefulness, the variety, the motion, the colors, the shapes, the reversion of things to their source, permanence in the midst of corruption. Contemplating thus all created realities, he is filled with wonder.

As Wordsworth put it in the title of his poem, our experiences of beauty come to us as “intimations of immortality.”

But even the beautiful natural landscape is not all peace and light. Where Peter of Damascus looked at the world and saw “order,” “proportion,” and “harmony,” the modern mind wonders how to reckon with the underlying violence: Darwinian competition for survival, Tennyson’s “nature red in tooth and claw.” The maple woods may seem lovely, but any given tree may be in competition against the rest for access to nutrients and sunlight. The noble-looking deer likely harbors hideous parasites and, come winter, faces a one in three chance of death by disease, starvation, or coyote. When the largemouth bass breed next spring, 99.8 percent of their hatchlings will perish before adulthood, many cannibalized by their own siblings.

With these disconcerting facts as backdrop, evolutionary psychology dampens our attempts to find transcendent meaning in even our lovelier experiences. The pleasure of viewing a pristine landscape, for example, results from genes inherited from our hunter-and-gatherer ancestors, according to a much-cited hypothesis by the biologist Gordon Orians. He posits that prehistoric humans evolved to prefer verdant grasslands dotted with trees and offering water sources because such habitats promised ample food and made predators easy to spot. Thus, a landscape will please us to the extent that it resembles the fertile areas in the East African savannahs where our species originated. Beauty, by this theory, doesn’t exist except as a genetically coded subjective response.

As for beauty’s potential as a source of moral or spiritual meaning, doubt has been cast well beyond the bounds of evolutionary psychology. As the theologian David Bentley Hart writes, there is “an undeniable ethical offense in beauty.” Partly, that’s because the devotees of beauty – connoisseurs, patrons of art and music, practitioners of l’art de vivre – have generally belonged to rapacious elites. But, Hart continues, the problem may lie with beauty itself:

There is an unsettling prodigality about the beautiful, something wanton about the way it lavishes itself upon even the most atrocious of settings, its anodyne sweetness often seeming to make the most intolerable of circumstances bearable: a village ravaged by pestilence may lie in the shadow of a magnificent mountain’s ridge; the marmorean repose of a child lately dead of meningitis might present a strikingly piquant tableau; Cambodian killing fields were often lushly flowered; Nazi commandants occasionally fell asleep to the strains of Bach, performed by ensembles of Jewish inmates; and no doubt the death camps were routinely suffused by the delicate hues of a twilit sky.

Fascist works of art offer a radical illustration of beauty’s moral ambiguities. Take the films of the acclaimed cinematographer Leni Riefenstahl, who created propaganda for the Third Reich. Her Olympia, a visually magnificent documentary of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, celebrates the beauty of athletic bodies in motion. Its technical innovations continue to influence the imagery of sports and fashion – as does its peculiar quality, diagnosed by Susan Sontag, of being “both prurient and idealizing.” This is a beauty that reduces human beings to gorgeous, vaguely pornographic specimens, interchangeable and soulless. Such beauty defines itself by what it leaves out, and who: a year after the film’s release, the regime with which Riefenstahl was collaborating began its campaign of “mercy killing” of people with disabilities. In the 1960s, a former Nazi sympathizer would thank the cinematographer for making films showing “the most beautiful human beings, and not the cripples.”

While this is an extreme example, it illuminates why distrust of beauty is warranted, even in more innocuous settings. Any beauty that excludes humankind’s imperfection and vulnerability is prone to becoming subhuman. And even the wholesome beauty of nature is only a partial truth in a world where children starve in war zones or are trafficked to abusers.

Yet stubbornly, beauty remains. It’s there in the snowy egret I saw this morning, a white gleam circling over the lake where the heron usually stands. It’s there in the exquisitely poignant modulations of a Bach chaconne. It’s there in acts of moral greatness that have the power to shock us with a glimpse of splendor. I’m thinking, for example, of the moment on September 21 of this year when the US activist Erika Kirk spoke at the memorial service for her murdered husband, Charlie Kirk, before an audience of millions. She said this about his killer:

I forgive him. I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and it’s what Charlie would do. The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the gospel is love and always love. Love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.

Only an extraordinary feat of faith could have given her the strength to do that – a feat much like that of Felecia Sanders who, in the 2017 sentencing hearing for the perpetrator of the mass shooting at Mother Emanuel church in Charleston, South Carolina, said “I forgive you” to the murderer of her son, Tywanza Sanders. Such actions, which transcend their time and context, bear witness to divine beauty. To quote Hart again: “Nothing else impresses itself upon our attention with at once so wonderful a power and so evocative an immediacy. Beauty is there, abroad in the order of things, given again and again in a way that defies description and denial with equal impertinence.” We can’t help perceiving it, and it will not leave us alone.

For Christians, the solution to the problem of beauty is a Person, the one on whom Felecia Sanders and Erika Kirk relied. “Late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new!” Augustine exclaims of Christ in his Confessions. As the Logos who was with the Creator in the beginning, he is the Book of Wisdom’s “author of beauty,” the origin of all that is lovely in the world. And as the incarnate Son of Man, his beauty was that of a particular Jewish baby, born in obscurity and laid in a manger, who would go on to willingly suffer an ugly death to redeem creation from its sins and horrors.

Few have written as eloquently of this beauty as Mother Maria Skobtsova. Born a Russian aristocrat in 1891, she settled in Paris, took monastic vows, and spend the last thirteen years of her life serving the city’s poor, dying in 1945 in the gas chambers of Ravensbrück. In one of her writings, she imagines Christ slipping out of a splendid church to walk the streets and “mingle with the crowd: the poor, the lepers, the desperate, the embittered, the holy fools.” Wandering in the midst of degraded humanity, he seeks out “the poor and the maimed, prostitutes and sinners,” and sees even in their spiritual and physical deformity the spark of his own beauty:

Does He not see in our ugliness, in our impoverished lives, in our festering sores, in our crippled souls – does He not see there His own divine image and a reflection of his eternal glory and eternal beauty? And so He will return to the churches and bring with Him all those whom He has summoned to the wedding feast.

For Skobtsova, Christ’s is a beauty that summons us with infinite love. Understood this way, Stendhal’s famous definition of beauty as la promesse du bonheur, the promise of joy, points to a fundamental truth about reality: because beauty is Christ, all manifestations of beauty exist to bear witness, whether dimly or gloriously, to his promise that love will have the last word.