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Transcript

Joy Marie Clarkson: Welcome to Another Life, a podcast of Plough magazine. This show explores the idea that another life is possible through conversation with guests about how to live more thoughtfully, hopefully and faithfully. I’m your host, Joy Clarkson.

And today I am delighted to be welcoming to the show Professor Ben Quash. Ben is professor of Christianity and the Arts at King’s College London. And we’ve had many conversations over lunches and seminars in my time at King’s College London, but I’m delighted to be having this conversation today, especially as we dive into our issue on the topic of beauty. So, welcome to the show, Ben.

Ben Quash: Thank you very much, Joy.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I like to ask people where you’re having this conversation from. I am, to give a bit of a perspective at the moment, in my living room, which is in a state of great disorder because we are having new radiators put in – which is a wonderful thing, and it’s going to make our life much more livable, but I must admit that it adds an element of chaos to my mental furniture to be in a disordered space.

Ben Quash: Maybe it’s intensifying your longing for beauty.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I think it is. It’s making me long for cosmos out of this chaos. But that is where I am speaking to you from in London. Where are you speaking to us from?

Ben Quash: I’m in my home study, so at the end of our garden. And like you, but for different reasons, it’s extremely cluttered and chaotic at the moment. And that’s because our department moved buildings during the summer, and we had to clear out all of the stuff, as you know. We’re in a wonderful new building, but I had to bring a lot of boxes of random papers and files home, and they’re all still sitting around here in my home study, and I have to weave my way between them to get to my desk. So, I’m looking forward to restoring order here as well.

But yes, it’s a peaceful spot at the end of the garden, and I can look out and see we still have roses out. We’re not far enough into autumn yet to have lost the flowers, so they’re still blooming outside my window, which is lovely.

Joy Marie Clarkson: That is lovely. I actually quite enjoy this part of autumn where you still have some of the remnants of summer. From my view just over the tops of the houses near me, I can see kind of the tips of the leaves beginning to change into red. And that’s an exciting thing.

So, this is exciting, Ben, because I’m actually going to ask you questions that I realized that I’ve had in the back of my mind, but I’ve never actually asked you. Why don’t we start by giving a bit of an introduction to what you do at King’s College London?

Ben Quash: I’m director of something called the Centre for Arts and the Sacred at King’s. The acronym we use for that is ASK, A-S-K. And that is a host for a whole range of people – visiting fellows, post-docs and so on – who pursue their own projects under the umbrella of ASK. And then we have some big projects within it including something called the Visual Commentary on Scripture, which is an open access online resource curating small exhibitions around passages of Scripture. There are now over 1,200 high resolution works of art, and that’s an ongoing project. We have another big project on theology and the visual arts, which is exploring the way that those two disciplines talk to each other and trying to garner an understanding of best practice in this emerging area from the scholars who do it really well. We meet each summer for a symposium, and there will be publications that come out of that. The Centre is a big part of what I run at King’s, and we have many international partners, and it’s a wonderful way to connect with this really lively area of scholarship.

And more particularly in London, I coordinate something called – well it’s an MA program which is called Theology, Bible, and the Arts. It used to be called Christianity in the Arts. And that’s run in partnership with the National Gallery in London. So, we teach every Monday in the gallery, which is a great treat for our students to be right there in front of works of art, engaging with them. And then there are a whole range of other modules around that, one of which, especially relevant to today, is called The Idea of Beauty in Western Theology. So that’s been a centerpiece for the MA program for the something like fifteen years that it’s been running. And I think it’s the only one of its kind in the world in that it’s a partnership between a theology department and a major international art collection.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Now I should say that that was not the question that I had wanted to ask you that I hadn’t asked you – because obviously I do know that you lead the Center for Arts and the Sacred. But the question I did want to ask was how did the course The Idea of Beauty in Western Theology come about? This year we’re co-teaching. I’m teaching the first half, and you are teaching the second half. It’s not inevitable to have a course on theology and the arts center around beauty, because of course beauty doesn’t necessarily have to do with art. Art sometimes doesn’t have to do with beauty, although we could have conversations about that. So, the question I wanted to ask was how did it come about, and were you the initiator of The Idea of Beauty class module?

Ben Quash: I suppose what I was looking for was a major theological, thematic spine for the MA program, which would have theological heft as an idea. It would also, as well as giving students… In some cases, these kinds of courses got a bit of bad press for a while. It’s a great books or big ideas course, which gives students permission to range widely over 2,000 years of intellectual history or more. And I actually love that big ideas course. The experience I’ve had teaching it is that students love that too. You have to sometimes paint with a broad brush, and you risk sometimes creating a meta-narrative that may leave out some of the complexities and nuances of individual thinkers’ positions at different points in history. But I think there are ways to keep students alert to those questions, and at any point on the journey they’ll be given ample resources to go deeper into the complexities of any of the thinkers we look at. So, it’s possible to stop the train and get off and spend some time intellectually probing further what we’ve looked at in the classroom.

So, I think it’s a price worth paying because we want to ask big questions. And in a sense you’re right: beauty isn’t the same thing as art, and in particular in modern and contemporary art, beauty is often a word that artists will avoid because it has connotations of consolation or pleasure or of easiness, and contemporary art likes to justify its existence often on the grounds that it makes things more difficult; it complexifies. So many – not all – artists avoid the language of beauty. But if you look at the big sweep of 2,000 years, that is not the case. We’re now in interesting territory when we reflect on that in the course. We don’t just think about beauty; we think about objections to beauty as well. But for many centuries, both in pre-Christian contexts and certainly in many centuries of church life and tradition, beauty has been considered a fundamental part of what artists seek to serve when they make things. So, it takes us into the arts. But the thing I’ve discovered in teaching it – and in a way wherever the idea initially came from, it has been justified, I think, by this fact – it’s a lens on to nearly every major doctrine. And to my surprise, I found that in the classroom, we were touching on all of the major doctrinal topics. Creation and providence: you’re thinking about how the world is ordered, whether it’s ordered well, whether it’s ordered for human flourishing. Those are already questions touching on beauty. When you start talking about order and good order, you’re also invoking aesthetic categories and ideas. Atonement: what is the horror of this torn body on a cross; almost the opposite of beauty. Why is it that this has spawned so much language that speaks of the cross as a beautiful thing? The language of glory gets used around it. And what’s the relationship of glory to beauty? Well, I could go on, but it’s very surprising how all of the major doctrines seem to be in some way opened on to by the question of beauty. And for that full range, come and do the course, anyone who’s thinking about it.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Indeed! I fairly often get emails from people asking about theology and the arts courses, since that was what I did my PhD in, and now I work at King’s. And that is similar to what I say to them. Often when I talk about the MA at King’s, I talk about the idea of beauty – just because I think that a danger that can sometimes come with theology and the arts is that you end up doing these piecework things where you’re not fully in the arts and not fully in theology. And it can be hard to get a sense of a theological foundation. And if you don’t come into a master’s with that – because often people coming into a master’s in theology and the arts come in from literature or from a fine arts background – what I love about the idea of beauty is exactly what you said, which is that it is this way to get a solid foundation in an introduction to the breadth of the Christian tradition. And it is amazing having these conversations, and reading these texts together, and seeing, as you said, there are some themes that – and I’ll ask you about these in moment – come up over the whole course of the 2000 years. But there’s also these moments of breaking. And it’s exciting to see students be able to get a sense of these ideas not coming out of a vacuum, but that there’s this legacy and history of how to think about and talk about these ideas. And that doesn’t mean that we have to just get on board because the older it is, the better it is. But it’s an exciting way to receive this foundation or at least introduction into the Christian tradition with, as you said, all the doctrines, whether it’s creation or questions of theodicy or even… I’m always surprised how often, especially in the Church Fathers, you get into conversations about Christology because Christ is identified as beauty, and how do we make sense of that. And even into doctrine of God when you think about things like: is beauty transcendental? Is it not? How do we understand that relationship to creation? It’s just such a wonderful way in. And in some ways, it almost creates the necessary narrowing to be able to have a way into this vast, and as you said, big brushstrokes view.

And – one last thing, sorry – I’m just effusing about the idea of beauty. I’ve taught it one time and teaching the first half again – the pre-modern half. And the thing that struck me last time I taught it – and I hope this is the case this time – is that students don’t tend to narrow in on one text or writer or era. At least when I taught it last time, I was amazed at how when you get the essays in at the end – which is the thing showing off their knowledge and digging more deeply into something they’re interested in in the particular module – there was a real gamut. I struggled the most teaching Plotinus, which I think is reasonable because Plotinus is very difficult. But one of the students just really took to Plotinus and wrote what I thought was an excellent paper. And someone else explored what these different visual representations of the cross meant for how we understood atonement. It’s very exciting to see the fecundity of this kind of approach. I really rate the idea of beauty.

Ben Quash: Yeah, that’s great! And certainly, that description fits with my experience of teaching it and the huge range of things that students get drawn to write about as a result.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So, I thought that it would be helpful for this issue to – obviously we can’t capture two semesters of the idea of beauty in one conversation – but to maybe have a few of those ways into how we think about beauty in the Christian tradition. So, I want to ask you about that. Perhaps a starting point would be how does Scripture talk about beauty?

Ben Quash: It’s a story with two dimensions. The Old and New Testament are very different in that, perhaps surprisingly, the language of beauty occurs quite rarely in the New Testament. Whereas in the Old Testament, there’s a huge lexicon of beauty words, with variable applications throughout. And so, you have to do two different sorts of things when you deal with those two parts of the Bible. In the Greek of the New Testament, the language of beauty and the language of goodness are often pretty much interchangeable. Kalon (καλον) is a word that can actually mean either. And this is an anticipation of what later medieval theologians will talk about as the convertibility of the transcendental. These qualities of being, of God, are reciprocally related, so that when you talk about one you do inevitably talk about the others; beauty truth and goodness being perhaps the most famous. But when Jesus says for example in Mark 14 of the woman who anoints his feet that “she has done a beautiful thing to me,” it’s translated in English as a beautiful thing for me. The word is kalos in Greek which means literally a good work, kalos ergon (καλον εργον). So that’s interesting, and that elision of the language of moral or spiritual goodness without beauty is characteristic of the few references in the New Testament. There is one other word in Paul’s writing in the letter to the Philippians where he invites his hearers to contemplate “whatever is lovely,” and the word there is prosphilḗs (προσφιλῆ) which means lovable, something that attracts our devotion or our love, alongside what is whatever is honorable, just, pure, and gracious.

In the Old Testament, by contrast, there’s this profusion of words; and part of learning how to manage them is to realize that some are applied to creatures, particularly humans, and describe appearance, and those are not used of God. There are particular characters who are especially notable in Old Testament terms for their physical beauty, including the young David, Abigail, Absalom – although it did him no good because his long hair is what caught in a tree, causing his death. So, there’s definitely already an awareness in the Old Testament that the beauty of appearances can be also perilous thing, morally. There is nothing automatically morally good about superficial beauty. Absalom’s sister Tamar is called beautiful; Job’s second set of daughters are called beautiful; the lovers in the Song of Songs, Bathsheba, and so on. So, there’s that kind of language. Then there’s the language of integrity, which is interesting. Job is described in the opening of book of Job 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. Sometimes we think about beauty as something that is absolutely out of the ordinary. But actually, in Old Testament terms, this kind of beauty is precisely being what you’re meant to be well. So, a lamb without blemish is just a really lamb-y 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 and its obsession with standing out and seeking a beauty that somehow sets you apart from others. I think it’s a useful reminder that there’s a completely different way of thinking about it in the Old Testament. And then there’s the sort of language of splendor. In Psalm 29: “Oh worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.” The word there is a different word from that used to describe the beauty of human appearances. It’s splendor language. And then, as I hinted earlier, there’s the unique language of glory, kabod in Hebrew, which is only used of God. So, these are many subtle differences – and there are more – but those are some of the key ones that give us an important sense of what work the language of beauty is doing theologically in the Hebrew Bible. It really is rewarding to look into those differences, even though often they don’t show up immediately in English translation – because they’re how God and creatures are different from each other; how some kinds of beauty language is appropriate for goodness, something that’s fit for purpose, whereas other kinds acknowledge the fact that beauty can be misleading, deceptive, potentially morally corrupting. All of those things are there, encoded in the language.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I find the idea of beauty as integrity or wholeness really compelling because I think – as you said – we think of beauty as something that’s exceptional rather than something that is about wholeness, and completeness, and integrity. And I also find compelling the idea of beauty as goodness, or as there being a moral beauty, or a spiritual beauty of someone who is good. And that’s something that is also played out in different terms, I suppose, in some classical thinkers who also influence the course, perhaps in a more systematic way, because I think part of what you just described in Scripture is the sense that there are… there’s maybe a greater array of words we might choose to use when we’re talking about beauty, which shows us that maybe when we talk about beauty, we’re actually talking about several different things. But classical sources also have a very big influence on the Christian tradition when it comes to beauty. And I’m thinking particularly of Plato and Aristotle and the inheritors of that, whether it is Plotinus and Augustine through the Neoplatonic, or Aquinas who also picks up on some of this. So, could you give us a little bit of a snapshot into how classical thinkers tend to think about or define beauty?

Ben Quash: Yes, that’s an evolving debate, especially when it touches on the arts. But yes, for Plato, his philosophy of the ideal forms – which are the realest things there are, such that what we experience in the world of phenomena, the material things we encounter in this world are, for Plato, famously, shadows of the real (which is ideal – the most real). So, the ideal forms are mediated in a second order way – as a declension of being, I suppose, from the ideal forms into the world of the manifold, with all its phenomenal appearances, the appearances to the senses. And that means that when he’s discussing beauty, he recognizes it as part of the created world, or at least the world of phenomena. But he sees the encounters we have with it as less than ideal. They’re mediating in different respects and to different degrees of the ideal beauty of the one, of being. And we can begin a journey towards that through our attention to and our right relationship with the beauty that we encounter around us, phenomenally. And there’s a great deal of that that Christianity will take up and use. The idea of ascent from attention to the created order around us, towards the source of that which in Christian terms is the creator God, the giver of all that is, and the one who graces all things with their beauty. So, there’s a great deal in common. I think where there’s a crucial difference with Plato is that the sense of a radical otherness, such a radical transcendence of the ideal form plays too easily into a dualism. There is a mediation going on, and you can make that journey. But there’s also a sense that the real world of material things is denigrated. The Christian gospel of the incarnation, on the contrary, has this powerful affirmation of the material order as God’s chosen language for disclosing his beauty to the world. And the glorification and the exultation of the made world, and of human bodies as part of that made world, are absolutely at the center of the gospel. There’s no sense in which you have to leave them behind once you climb the ladder, as it were. They’re taken up; the ladder is taken up too. And I think that that’s a very important difference.

But that’s just Plato. And then there are interesting differences with Aristotle, the other great heavy hitter in terms of ancient Greek philosophy, who is more interested in becoming and in the processes by which things actualize their potential. And for him, a lot of what beauty is about is the coming together of, or the realization of potential in actuality. And that gives him a much more positive approach to the arts. Plato, perhaps unfairly, is often regarded as an uncompromising enemy of the arts because of the last book of the Republic in which he says there’s no place for artists in the ideal city because they deceive us – that imitations are always deceptions because they’re lesser than the true object that they’re mimicking. He’s actually attacking the theatre partly, but he uses examples from painting as well to bolster his argument. The later Plato doesn’t quite pursue that line, and it’s probable that he was particularly objecting to the art of mere amusement or pleasure, but there’s a complicated set of debates about that. Nevertheless, Aristotle is much more clearly positive about the arts. And I think it’s partly because he sees that one of the functions of artists is actually bringing the potential of things into realization, unlocking the potential of a block of stone to be a sculpture. He also sees a moral value in artistic representation, again to take a literary example, in watching Greek tragedy. We’re presented with imitations of situations that might be real in human life – they are just imitations – but through them we are able to reflect on questions about right action in the world, and they perform an educative function, a pedagogical function, which serves the good. So, he has a much more positive account, and that too is part of our own actualization of our own potentiality as human creatures towards the good. So, there’s a more positive account of the arts. And you can see I’ve already slipped from a discussion of beauty into a discussion of the arts, because even then, they’re constantly weaving in and out.

Joy Marie Clarkson: If you had to pick one or two of your favorite thinkers on beauty, who would you pick in your current mood at this exact moment?

Ben Quash: Right now, I immediately go to the twentieth century, actually, and… no, I don’t. I’m going to go immediately to the seventeenth-century, but there’s a legacy into the twentieth. So, Thomas Traherne… it brings me to tears when I read Traherne. He’s a seventeenth-century poet and also the most exquisite writer of prose; a sort of Anglican mystic really, writing remotely in the west of England. Not a great deal is known about him; many of his works probably are lost; some have been found actually quite recently. So, he’s in the spirit of the metaphysical poets such as John Donne and George Herbert. And beauty runs as a constant thread through his writings, and he’s intoxicated by it. It colors the way he sees everything around him in the world. It’s almost platonic, but it’s so affirming of the world that there’s that important, deeply Christian, world-affirming dynamic to it, where he talks about the creation as the frontispiece of eternity. It’s that front page of a book which is charged with the promise of what lies within. And when we look at the world, we’re seeing only the frontispiece, but it’s not obscuring, it’s promising. It’s promising what’s to come. And everywhere he looks, he sees eternity announcing itself – in the tiniest thing, even a fly. He can meditate ecstatically on a humble fly and see the respect and glory of its iridescence as already a foretaste of glory. It’s amazing. So Traherne, I think, is absolutely wonderful. I think Traherne’s influence runs through the romantics to some degree. I feel there’s a Trahernean spirit in Coleridge, who I love as well. And then it runs into the twentieth century in people like Gerard Manley Hopkins, I suspect. I don’t know if you’ve read Traherne directly, but that tradition I call mystical empiricism. The empiricism bit is you’re looking at the world and its objects, its creatures, with intense attention. That’s the empirical bit: not trying to idealize them but really looking at them as they are. And it’s mystical because precisely in that close attention to the very particularities of things, you find yourself suddenly feeling in touch with ultimacy, with grace, with divine self-communication. These are conduits of God’s presence and purpose, precisely in their unique particularities. So that becomes a mystical, transporting form of encounter. And that’s what Hopkins is doing when he looks at the Windhover flying or kingfisher catching fire; that’s all still going on there. And David Jones, the poet and painter, is another one who I would point to as one of the great appreciators of beauty in that tradition in the twentieth century.

Joy Marie Clarkson: And so much of that is caught up with the natural world, that it’s attention. It’s not this intellectual idea of beauty that you might find in a more platonic mood, but as you said, this contemplation of particular things in the world – the roses outside your window, the changing leaves outside of mine – and that somehow opens itself into understanding something. Or not even understanding something, opens you into a reality that points beyond itself.

Ben Quash: Yes, absolutely. In an odd way, Traherne is writing at the time of the birth of modern science. This is where the very first steps towards organized natural science are taking place as a distinct discipline with its own methods. But he’s at that brief moment, that cusp, where there is no distinction between the natural scientific method and praise. So, it’s doxological science. It’s praise. It’s science that gives glory. And it won’t be long – it will be within the next fifty to one hundred years that it doesn’t seem to be a possibility anymore; it’s a door that gets closed. But for Traherne, an encyclopedia can be punctuated with exclamations of praise at every point. You’re mapping the world, learning about the world, and constantly referring it to God in praise. Along with mystical empiricism, I long for a doxological science. And, in a way, that can be the recognition of beauty. And scientists do recognize beauty often in what they study. But the referring of that recognition to its source is the theological bit that I would love to see.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Reading Traherne reminds me a little bit of… I can’t remember if we’ve had a conversation about this, but the novel Piranesi by Susanna Clark. Have you read it? I think you would really love it. The main character who narrates the book is almost exactly what you’re describing: he lives in this immense house where there seem to be no other human beings, and he writes about the tides and about the birds, and he’s almost clinically aware of the workings of his natural world, but he’s still what we might call enchanted. So, he sees every bit of the tide, and the pebbles, and the way something disintegrates. He sees it as this provision of the house where he lives. And Clark is writing about the idea that I think you’re gesturing at: that it’s not an inevitability that science must mean a lack of praise, or openness, or awe, or wonder. And it does seem to be the case that it is the course that things took. But we needn’t think that it’s impossible that we approach science and learning about the world in a systematic way. It needn’t be inevitable that it leads to a shutting down of praise. I really like the phrase scientific doxology. That’s very good. Or doxological science.

This reminds me of something else I wanted to ask you, which is that I think in my memory and even just hearing the thinkers you described just then, it seems like some of how you think about beauty is formed by thinkers who are – it’s perhaps a uniquely British account of beauty – but there’s a sense in which dwelling in a particular place and paying attention in a particular way gives you a unique account of beauty. So, I was wondering whether that was just me reading into that or whether you think there is something to that – that place develops our sense of what is beautiful and draws us closer to beauty.

Ben Quash: No, I think you’re right. I gain a lot – I draw deeply – on the layeredness of long inhabited place. To go right back to Hopkins almost immediately, that sense of a landscape plotted and pieced, which he talks about in “Pied Beauty” – fold, fallow, and plough – that sense of the layering of long habitation, collective habitation, and the relationships that therefore evolve between human and non-human creatures – the soil, the fauna, and the flora – play very much into my own instincts, I suppose, about what I find beautiful – and from which I draw theological conclusions about the bounty of God and what constitutes a wise life. So, we’re very fortunate, I think. The English landscape has been very poorly treated in recent decades. Modern farming techniques are very damaging to it, and the biodiversity of England is actually far less than it was one hundred years ago. So, there are real issues that we face, and one can all too easily just get overly romantic about it. But nevertheless, in dialogue with the literary tradition as well as the theological tradition that loves the English landscape, I find that complex mutuality of human and non-human built up over centuries; I find that a model of beauty.

I remember one of the theologians from whom I learnt a great deal was Dan Hardy, originally an American theologian who then spent most of his academic career in the United Kingdom. Dan used to contrast the English Garden with the campus at the University of Virginia, which is very classical; its original architecture was very classical; it still is at core. And he said that it was an architecture that spoke of the exclusion of wild nature under the impress of reason. So human reason, as it were, puts wild nature outside, keeps it at a safe distance. So, you would look down the lawn of the University of Virginia campus, and nature would be in the distance, and everything would be under rational human control inside the perimeter. And eventually even that view was blocked off by more buildings. And he said, this is a metaphor for a way of relating to nature as wild, dangerous, other, irrational. And beauty was all of those nice pediments and columns with their correct spacing. Whereas the English Garden – I like this, of course, because I feel flattered by it – but the English Garden is much more reciprocal and a bit messier. And its beauty lies in the fact that there’s endless negotiations going on between the plants themselves as they find the right space to get some light and water, but also the human inhabitants who work with the plants to help them to be their best. So, the spillage and entanglements of the English garden suggest a very different relationship with the natural world. And it’s that relationship where the beauty sits; it’s not just objective, a measurable thing that you look at and say, “This is a ratio of three to five, or this is a beautiful ratio.” It’s much more of an intuitive, instinctive sense of how things are hanging together well, or not. And those sorts of judgments appeal to me as more organic and properly expressive of a love of the world as it is, rather than wanting to make it something it isn’t.

So that’s a long way of affirming what you’ve detected in me, which is that I like this organic, messy, interactive, reciprocal beauty. And I see that in a historic English landscape and in particular forms of English beauty. David Jones actually has a lovely little essay in the second volume of his writings which was published after his death called “The Dying Gaul,” which is his reflections on the English Garden. He thinks there’s something distinctively English about that sort of garden, and he sees precursors of it in certain English painting and tapestry from medieval times, but he thinks there’s a continuous tradition that’s still alive.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I love that, and it ties back to a question that I was going to ask you as we draw to the conclusion, which is: How does the idea of beauty affect how we live and relate to others and pray? And because one could think of beauty again as something that occurs in art museums or maybe doesn’t occur… I was thinking earlier when you said that modern artists tend to shy away from word beauty, we have a section of the issue with three working artists, and one of them talked about the embarrassment that she has about beauty that she’s gotten over as she’s practiced her own artistic work. So that was interesting. But it can sound like something that is either very intellectual or very “cultural” and far away from me. But I think there are these practical ways in which beauty – our sense of what is beautiful, our attention to beauty – does affect our everyday life. It does affect our ability to care for the people in front of us, to pay attention to natural beauty as part of preserving it, and caring for it, and husbanding it, or stewarding it. So, I’m answering my own question, but do you think that beauty and our idea of beauty affect how we live?

Ben Quash: Absolutely I do. This takes us back into the language of relationship. To believe in beauty – which will be a belief that may be awoken in us by what we experience around us and sustained by ongoing ways of relating to what’s around us. But as with faith, it can be something that often feels very vulnerable to evidence, that the world is often as Hopkins would have admitted: he talks about the encroachment of toxic, destructive, wilderness-destroying forces. And Jones similarly laments the uniform nozzles of factory-made bottles. He seeks for the logos in these things, and in the pylons strutting across the landscape, and he cannot find him.

So, they’re aware of this, and there’s plenty we can say. It’s just wishful thinking that beauty is some ultimate thing that the world tells us about. But I think often as with faith, to live in it and to live into it is to find confirmations of it. And it changes the way you live. The anticipation that beauty is seeking to speak – even though we can be quite good at creating the din that makes it impossible for us to hear – the belief that beauty seeks to speak to us should make us more gently attentive, more patiently attentive, and more optimistically attentive, more hopefully attentive. Hope is more than optimism; it’s a disposition which sometimes we need to hold ourselves to rather than just a feeling. But I think that a determination to look for it or listen for it – the attention that Simone Weil so wonderfully talks about – will reward us. And it will take the form of better relationships, not just with things we look at, whether artworks or natural objects – the things we might categorize as aesthetic objects – but it will actually affect the way we relate to each other and the kinds of communities we make, because there’s beauty in all relationships. Relationship in a sense is beauty. Good relationship is beauty. And that will include the relationship between two or three notes in a composition, the relationship between two colors in a painting, the proportions of an architectural space. But it extends to other forms of relationship, other kinds of good proportion in the hierarchies of our social organizations, in the forms of mutual and reciprocal care, and the distribution of responsibilities that any human family or society needs, where we seek to play our part in relation to others. When those things work, they are beautiful. That is beauty. And that’s what each thing we do and say should seek to serve.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I always ask people at the end of these conversations… the theme of this podcast is “another life is possible.” And so, I wondered if there’s anything in your life, whether it’s a work of art or a habit or a practice that you have that reminds you of – you were just speaking about hope – something that helps awaken that hope and that orientation towards other ways of living and being in the world being possible.

Ben Quash: I shot my bolt already by talking about the English landscape. It’s an odd thing, I suppose, to say that history gives me hope. But it does. And I think that it’s that sense of history as it’s embedded in landscape and in literary landscapes – the way in which literature mediates visual art; it mediates that history saturated landscape – it gives me hope for the future. But to look backwards in order to gather resources to look forwards – because what has endured, carries with it the wisdom of long settlement – is a sense that there’s so much that has been wise, that has been beautiful. It’s still there to be discerned, and it’s endured through many attempts to destroy it, or many catastrophes that threaten to obliterate it. So that sense of a deep wisdom and a deep beauty in the landscape gives me hope and helps me think whatever particular horrors might fill our news channels and our mental horizons right now, they are not all-defining. So, I’m very much a lover of what’s bequeathed to us from the past in order then for us to imaginatively rework it towards the future. There’s deep wisdom to be had.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I’m not sure if this is exactly the same thing, but it makes me think of Hopkins again, after he’s described the onslaught of the Industrial Revolution and then says, “But for all this, nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” For all this, nature is never spent, and looking to what has been given to us in history, and the beautiful things that have endured give us that sense of there being a freshness, something to look to the future with.

Ben Quash: Yes, that’s perfect. Absolutely. That gets it.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Thank you so much for joining us today, Ben. It’s been so wonderful to have a conversation with you. And I hope everyone will go and look at the Visual Commentary on Scripture.

Ben Quash: That’s right. Please do. There is much beauty there.

Joy Marie Clarkson: There is much beauty there. And if this has piqued your interest in the MA in Theology, Bible and the Arts, you could email myself or Ben. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Ben Quash: Thank you, Joy. It’s been wonderful.