The author develops his argument in four parts. First, having followed the ancient classical authors (Plato and Aristotle, for example) in equating beauty with harmony and therefore with justice, he sets out the scriptural basis for this concept in “four biblical visions of the beautiful and righteous community.” Two of those visions use the creation accounts of Genesis to demonstrate the beauty and harmony of God’s creation—thus, harmony and justice are integral to the very fabric of creation, God’s work of art. Humanity is woven into the very web of this creation, and not, as some would prefer to interpret it, given the right to a dominion that justifies unlimited exploitation and even destruction of other species. Humans are called to be cocreators with God, a call that demands the maintenance of God’s original harmony and justice.
The third biblical vision uses “the beauty of the Promised Land” to describe what beauty, harmony, and justice should look like in human society. The Egyptian captivity of the Hebrews was ugly because human beings were enslaved to produce for their captors wealth and prosperity that they themselves were never allowed to enjoy. Can we see such a situation as a prototype of our world today? I think McCormick wants us to: his use of illustrations from classical and popular art is compelling, and when one reads his description of the scene in Pottersville from Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life, one wonders whether, in this nightmare vision of a society in which the majority of the people suffer the oppression of the greedy few, Capra was prescient.
The second part of the book’s argument develops the idea that people have a right to beauty—not just those who can afford fancy homes with stunning views, but all people, including and especially the poor, who are least likely to live where they have access to beauty. This is not McCormick’s original idea—indeed, he cites a number of sources, including the Vatican Pontifical Council for Culture and liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, who make this claim. The nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution produced appalling conditions and thus also a number of commentators, including D.H. Lawrence and Friedrich Engels, who deplored the ugliness in which the working classes were forced to live. It’s interesting to think of Christian clergymen siding with the likes of Lawrence and Engels, but this is what happened. The Anglican Ritualist priests, such as John Mason Neale (the translator of Latin Breviary hymns) and Alexander Heriot Mackonochie, made a point of putting on especially beautiful church services with music, “smells and bells,” and their best vestments, as a way of relieving the ugliness chronic in the lives of the London slum dwellers. The Catholic poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, assigned to a desperately poor parish in Glasgow, deplored the ugliness of the slums and regretted that the people hadn’t a bit of beauty in their surroundings which, he postulated, might have helped to mitigate the tendency toward vice.
The author also comments on the irony of women being objectified and mistreated because of their beauty—its power held in suspicion—and yet, on the other hand, constantly subject to what is known as “the male gaze,” told that they’re not beautiful enough and thus made to spend an inordinate amount of time and money on products and treatments to “beautify” themselves still further. (He does not address the very real marginalization of women who are not merely “not beautiful enough” but are actually physically ill-favored and unattractive; but then it could be argued that this does not fall strictly within the scope of the book.)
In the third part of his argument, McCormick discusses “the beautiful stranger,” anyone we regard as “the other,” anyone different from us, making the point that Jesus himself took on the role of alien, outcast, and exile. Indeed, he suggests provocatively, “We might better appreciate the scandal and sting of the stable and manger if we replaced our Renaissance and baroque images of the nativity with pictures of real homeless women clutching their crying and colicky babies, trying to protect them from the cold, hunger, and disease that stalk them so.” What if one of the many gifted documentary photographers operating today were to photograph such a woman and feature the photo on a Christmas card? What does it say about our society that very few people would purchase and send such a card?
Fourth, and finally, McCormick uses the thought of conservationist Aldo Leopold, author of A Sand County Almanac, to argue for the importance of “tending Eden’s beauty” and caring for creation. His contention that appealing to beauty may be the most effective way to bring about ecological conversion is right on the mark; what is particularly interesting here is his following of Leopold to widen the concept of beauty. Leopold sought to establish awareness that beauty in nature isn’t to be found only in the obvious places—“the prettiness of isolated mountain scenes, waterfalls, or ocean sunsets”—but also “in all the simple, small, ordinary creatures of nature.”
Leopold was prophetic here and McCormick does right to use this as the basis of his argument; but McCormick weakens his argument somewhat by a tendency, first, to reduce earlier conservation efforts to instilling a love of “pretty scenery,” and then to construct an opposition between such “traditional” thought and Leopold’s thought. McCormick appears to be basing his equation of the earlier conservation movement with love of pretty scenery on the work of Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, both epigones of the Hudson River School. Undeniably, Bierstadt (1830-1902) catered to popular taste by creating awe-inspiring, at times exaggerated paintings of the “lofty mountain grandeur” to be found in the American West. And it is a matter of historical record that paintings by Moran (1837-1926) were responsible for the establishment of America’s first National Parks. But go back to the earliest generation of the Hudson River School, particularly to its founder, Thomas Cole (1801-1848), whose paintings are recognized as early statements of a conservation ethic, not because they are “pretty scenery”—they are not—but because they incorporate such elements as the blasted tree, or the railroad violating the once pristine landscape, to draw attention to the insidious destruction of the environment by those whom Cole famously termed “dollar-godded barbarians.” Not for nothing is New York’s Hudson Valley considered the cradle of the American conservation movement. Nor, in more recent times, can we disregard the important role of photographers—one thinks especially but not only of Robert Glenn Ketchum—in raising awareness about conservation by documenting environmental degradation. A reading of the essay by photographer Robert Adams on “Photographing Evil” is helpful here.
But where McCormick is quite correct is in his casting doubt on the appropriateness of relying on the power of pretty scenery to move people to want to “tend Eden’s garden.” It may have worked in the nineteenth and part of the twentieth century, but no more. Coincidentally, as I was reading God’s Beauty I was also leafing through Yosemite: The Promise of Wilderness with a two-part essay by Tim Palmer about the constant struggle to keep our first National Park as what it was meant to be—a wild place—and the stunning photography of William Neill, a former student of Ansel Adams who has lived in Yosemite for much of his life. Each in his own way, Palmer and Neill make clear that beautiful scenery, as such, is not guaranteed to inspire respect for the environment, not when ongoing efforts are needed to prevent commercial interests from pandering to today’s consumer entertainment mentality and turning Yosemite into just another resort where people can do the same things they would have done at home but in a different setting. The several thousand cars that snake their polluting way through this beautiful park, or Neill’s photograph of a swimming pool such as one can see at many a cheap motel along almost any major American highway, are proof that the future of Yosemite, and of the conservation movement as a whole, is in the hands of those who take Leopold’s land aesthetic seriously.
McCormick calls for a holistic reading of Scripture by which texts are read in relation to other texts and not in a vacuum. In this way a fundamentalistic focus on and interpretation of Genesis 1 that would give human beings an unlimited claim on space (“be fruitful and multiply”) and goods (“have dominion”) is avoided. Although subtle and implicit rather than overt, McCormick challenges the assumption, so dear to the so-called “pro-life” movement, that humans have an unlimited right to “multiply and fill the earth.”
God’s Beauty is an important first step toward developing the idea of beauty as a way into justice. Those already interested in ethics should read it, and those who have resisted thinking about the challenges of justice will also find this a most palatable way to start.
