Thinking About What Truly Makes Life Worth Living

Last week, I had the blessing of escaping with my wife to the giant redwoods of northern California. We stayed right in the middle of the park and I was able to ride my bicycle through the Avenue of the Giants. It was an incredible experience, being dwarfed mile after mile by some of the oldest and tallest living things on earth.

These redwoods are a testament both to God’s creative power and to the beauty he weaves into his creation. Being there is breathtaking and humbling. I marveled at his good gift to us in the experience. It is one of those things that makes life worth living. Such a statement shouldn’t be shocking, as God’s grace has that effect.

One of the great things about such a getaway is it allows one to think about the important things of life and even life itself. For example, I began to ponder “just what is it that makes life meaningful?” What does it mean to say life has meaning? We may have a natural drive to survive, but so do most animals. Seeking meaning beyond our survival is something different. It’s seeking something higher.

The Human Drive for Meaning in Life

Such questions are nothing new. Humans have always desired to find meaning both individually and within their broader existence collectively. One way we do this is to seek out meaningful experiences. By that I don’t mean experiences that make one happy or feel good. Watching a funny television show, taking a ride on a roller coaster, or getting a new hairstyle can do that but it doesn’t mean these are meaningful. Alcohol and narcotics can also make you feel good.

No, meaningful experiences are those experiences that elevate an individual. They make him or her more in touch with unique qualities that in nature only humans hold. Experiencing the truly beautiful, like the beauty of the redwoods, is one example.

All people appreciate beauty. As I’ve written before, beauty is objective. By that I mean there is a standard of beauty that sits outside of ourselves. That’s because beauty finds its ultimate fulfillment in God Himself. It is what is known as one of the transcendentals. (The two other recognized transcendentals are truth and goodness—in the sense of justice and morality). Transcendentals, as the name implies, are fundamental to being human. They transcend subcategories and are foundational to understanding value as human beings. In other words, these are the core of living a meaningful life.

Transcendentals and Elevating Humanity

The transcendentals are fundamental because they represent the highest virtues for human experience. Just having a feel-good experience, as I noted above, doesn’t make an experience meaningful. Unfortunately, today there are an awful lot of people who confuse feeling good with living a good life. They think satisfying an appetite or urge is going to make them happy. But appetites and urges are simply base instincts. They are things we share with animals.  Dogs like belly rubs; snakes bask in the sunlight. All creatures want to have full stomachs and seek sex whenever and wherever they may find it. Animals are motivated by instinct, but for humans to behave this way cultivates a form of selfishness. Being human is to differentiate ourselves from animals and act in a way that is distinct, to emphasize aspects of who we are that separates us from animals.

Seeking out experiences that are grounded in truth, goodness, and beauty help us make that distinction because recognizing these things is unique to humans. Animals don’t care about beauty at all. While a female peacock might be attracted to a male with the more spectacular display of tail feathers, she is operating on an instinctual attraction, not seeing the display for its own sake. Neither of the birds would stop to ponder a richly hued sunset or the towering redwoods. We, on the other hand, see beauty for what it is in itself.

Recognizing transcendentals may be understood as something we share with God. They are part of what it means to be made in His image. God is not simply the source of all that is good; goodness finds its perfection in him as God is love. God is truth and God is beautiful.

Modern Culture’s Missing Piece

As I thought about all this, one thing I’ve realized is our culture no longer seeks to cultivate and develop truth, goodness, and beauty. We assume them then seek out the more base pleasures instead. That’s what the eruption over the U.S. abortion laws are all about. People want to feed their base nature for casual sex, but don’t want to be dealing with the natural outcome of such encounters. Yet, isn’t this animalistic? Doesn’t such a drive for immediate physical gratification rob us of expressing our uniquely human understanding that sex is good and beautiful because it bonds two people together who have committed to safeguarding the well-being of each other and any progeny that may result from that act?

What do people believe in today’s society are the things that truly makes life worth living? I’m seeing more and more people seeking an answer to that question and they cannot seem to find it. I’m beginning a project where I explore the transcendentals as not only an answer to that question, but as a way of evangelism. God is attractive because in him we can find all beauty, goodness, and truth. If people are longing for these things, I want to bring them to the source.

I will explore this topic in more detail in upcoming posts. For now, I hope that you seek out experiences in life that strengthen the Good, the True, or the Beautiful. You may just find your life has become more meaningful as a result.

Arguing for the Beauty of God in an Ugly World

Beauty matters. Along with the Good and the True, the Beautiful was understood to be one of the fundamental aspects of ideal human existence. From the earliest societies, people sought to surround themselves with what is beautiful. It is a part of how people shape their culture and how they interact with one another. Greek columns and Roman mosaics are iconic representations of the heights of their cultural achievements. We seek to adorn ourselves with the beautiful.

Yet we live in a time where function has overtaken form and pragmatism overrides aesthetics. Cold concrete boxes and black asphalt has replaced the Greek column and the Roman mosaic. The West emphasizes the laboratory over the Louvre, rapidness over reflection, and efficiency over elegance. Philosopher Roger Scruton presented some clarifying remarks on the relation of beauty to culture. He writes:

Unlike science, culture is not a repository of factual information or theoretical truth, nor is it a kind of training in skills, whether rhetorical or practical. Yet it is a source of knowledge: emotional knowledge, concerning what to do and what to feel. We transmit this knowledge through ideals and examples, through images, narratives, and symbols. We transmit it through the forms and rhythms of music, and through the orders and patterns of our built environment. Such cultural expressions come about as a response to the perceived fragility of human life, and embody a collective recognition that we depend on things outside our control. Every culture therefore has its root in religion, and from this root the sap of moral knowledge spreads through all the branches of speculation and art. Our civilization has been uprooted. But when a tree is uprooted it does not always die. Sap may find its way to the branches, which break into leaf each spring with the perennial hope of living things. Such is our condition, and it is for this reason that culture has become not just precious to us, but a genuine political cause, the primary way of conserving our moral heritage and of standing firm in the face of a clouded future. 1

Beauty matters a lot, perhaps a lot more than the place we give it in modern Western culture. Yet, there is still a longing for beauty in the human soul, perhaps even more so now that beauty isn't integrated into our everyday experiences. As I speak to young people today, they long to find the beautiful in life.

Because Christians live in the milieu of Western pragmatism, we can lose sight of the power of appealing to the Beautiful as an argument for God. Apologists tend to argue about facts of science, as being for or against “X,” or tackling objection it thrown at them. These are all worthwhile pursuits, but I think there's a huge untapped potential in appealing to the Christian God and the Christian story as ways of finding the beautiful isn't considered enough. Scruton continues:

At the same time, the decline in religious faith means that many people, both skeptics and vacillators, begin to repudiate their cultural inheritance. The burden of this inheritance, without the consolations on offer to the believer, becomes intolerable, and creates the motive to scoff at those who seek to hand it on.2

We live in a world where nothing seems concrete. The beautiful has been obfuscated, but every human being still longs for it. I think the attractiveness of God is harder for atheists to argue against than some of the traditional proofs for His existence—or at least harder to misinterpret.

In upcoming posts, I'll be presenting ways how you may integrate arguments for beauty into your discussions about God. For we don't worship a God who is merely practical. We worship the God of Beauty.

References

1.  Roger Scruton. Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged. New York: Encounter, 2007. Print. V.
2. Ibid.