Sergei Bulgakov

“God saw everything that he had made: and, behold, it was most beautiful” (Gen. 1:31). God is good; he is goodness itself. God is true; he is truth itself. God is glorious, and his glory is beauty itself. Beauty is an objective principle in the world, revealing to us the divine glory. The divine source of objective beauty is also the source of the human creation of beauty, that is, of art. God created man in his image, granting to this image three gifts: a will directed toward the good, the gift of reason and wisdom, and the gift of aesthetic appreciation. Man is meant to be the wisdom of the world, just because he participates in the Logos; he is also meant to be the artist of the world, because he can imbue it with beauty.

Man must become not only a good and faithful worker in the world; he must not only “dress and keep it” (Gen. 2:15), as he was commanded in paradise, but he must also become its artist; he must render it beautiful. Because he has been created in the image of God, he is called to create. Things are transfigured and made luminous by beauty; they become the revelation of their own abstract meaning. And this revelation through beauty of the things of earth is the work of art. The world, as it has been given to us, has remained as it were covered by an outward shell through which art penetrates, as if foreseeing the coming transfiguration of the world. Man has been called to be a demiurge, not only to contemplate the beauty of the world, but also to express it. Does this not speak of a new service of the church, one that has not yet been fully revealed in the heart of man and in his history: the service of realizing the work of human participation in the transfiguration of the world?

Sergei Bulgakov, in The Time of the Spirit: Readings Through the Christian Year (St Vladimir Seminary Press, 1984), 11. Used by permission.

Iris Murdoch

Great art teaches us how real things can be looked at and loved without being seized and used, without being appropriated into the greedy organism of the self. This exercise of detachment is difficult and valuable whether the thing contemplated is a human being or the root of a tree or the vibration of a color or a sound. Unsentimental contemplation of nature exhibits the same quality of detachment: selfish concerns vanish, nothing exists except the things which are seen.

Beauty is that which attracts this particular sort of unselfish attention.

Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of the Good (Routledge, 2014), 62–63. Used by permission.

Photograph by David Zumpe. Used by permission.