Beauty Is Your Destiny E-Book

Philip Graham Ryken

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

An Examination of Beauty in the Christian Life from Philip Ryken  The world is full of beautiful things—the vibrancy of trees in fall, the joy of sitting around a table with family—but in our fallen world, many beautiful things have been turned into ugly distortions. How should Christians think about beauty in a world that is often ugly?  In Beauty Is Your Destiny, Philip Ryken provides readers with an introduction to the theology and practice of beauty, striving to awaken a longing for beauty that he explains "can only be satisfied in the face of Jesus Christ." Adapted from chapel messages given at Wheaton College, Ryken considers key topics on Christian thought—including the Trinity, the incarnation, sexuality, and racial diversity—through the lens of beauty, showing how beauty illuminates each of these biblical principles in our world today.  - Introduction to the Theology of Beauty: Great for college students, pastors, and small groups - Biblically Based: Examines how beauty is seen in Christian doctrines such as eternity, the church, and the crucifixion  - Written by Philip Ryken: President of Wheaton College and author of Grace Transforming; Is Jesus the Only Way?; and Loving the Way Jesus Loves

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“It is clear to me as an artist that God has built beauty into our world as a testimony to his own loveliness and creativity. We are better people when we allow beauty to elevate us to more exalted things, and in Beauty Is Your Destiny, Philip Ryken explores this wonderful theme. It couldn’t be timelier. Our culture has embraced a fascination with ugliness. It’s evident in our museums, movies, popular music, and books. I applaud Ryken’s desire to help us see how beauty reminds us that there is more—far more—to life than a colorless, mundane ‘functioning.’ If your heart is hungry for vibrancy and joy, color and meaning, then I heartily recommend this volume.”

Joni Eareckson Tada, Founder and CEO, Joni and Friends International Disability Center; author, Joni: An Unforgettable Story and Songs of Suffering

“I have been studying beauty and teaching my students about it for years. Finally, Beauty Is Your Destiny is here, a lovely and compelling book that gathers up a treasure trove of insights on one of the most essential qualities of our Christian faith and our very humanity. I will return to these pages again and again and will encourage others to do the same.”

Karen Swallow Prior, author, The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis

“Philip Ryken has made a career out of studying complex truths and delivering them to readers in accessible ways. This book about beauty stands apart from others on the subject by way of its theological heft, biblical precision, and topical range. Beauty Is Your Destiny is a gift to Christians everywhere, and I’m so glad it is in the world.”

Russ Ramsey, Pastor, Christ Presbyterian Church, Nashville, Tennessee; author, Rembrandt Is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art through the Eyes of Faith

“In a skeptical world of scarcity that doubts the necessity and value of biblical beauty, Philip Ryken’s work shines to illuminate ‘the substance of things hoped for’ and to help us ponder the extravagance of God. As an artist, I am grateful for this book, which affirms my path and calling to create the beautiful.”

Makoto Fujimura, artist; author, Silence and Beauty and Art and Faith: A Theology of Making

“The encouragement to ‘behold’ runs powerfully throughout Scripture, with some translations using the word over 1,200 times. It’s a clear exhortation to live with our eyes wide open, and this brilliant new book from Philip Ryken is more of the same. Every page reads like an invitation to recognize and respond to what is beautiful. We learn that beauty may be found everywhere, from a starry night sky to a science lab to an act of kindness—even an ancient crucifixion scene in the form of God’s self-giving love. Beauty Is Your Destiny is a wonderfully written book that ushers us before the glories of our God and his world—it will no doubt lead many into worship.”

Matt Redman, songwriter; worship leader

“We are made for beauty by our beautiful triune God. Therefore, we are compelled to look for beauty everywhere, even in a broken world with so much ugliness. Philip Ryken has given us a gift in Beauty Is Your Destiny. With masterful clarity and simplicity, he displays the variegated manifestations of beauty in this world and the sure triumph of eternal beauty through the cross of Jesus Christ.”

Irwyn Ince, Coordinator, Mission to North America; author, The Beautiful Community: Unity, Diversity, and the Church at Its Best

“We are painfully and achingly aware of the decay and fractures to the beauty that God designed. In Beauty Is Your Destiny, Philip Ryken stirs the longings for beauty not simply as a keen aesthetic but as an impetus for deeper connection to God and holiness in life. Ryken reminds us that in Christ and his ‘old, ugly cross,’ there is a transfixing beauty—a glory worth gazing on with fresh eyes of faith and wonder—and a transforming beauty that seeks to reconcile a broken world and a broken people. This book is an ode to redemptive beauty worth relishing.”

Walter Kim, President, National Association of Evangelicals

“In Beauty Is Your Destiny, Philip Ryken reminds us that beauty is found in God himself. Our glorious God created a world and a people to reflect his beauty. But the reality is that we live in a fallen world in which beauty is often redefined, distorted, and idolized. So God sent his beloved Son into the world as the incarnation of divine beauty. And he is transforming us into the image of his Son. One day, we will behold the Son and be like him—truly beautiful. Until then, we can make sense of the brokenness of our world and appreciate the Creator’s beauty as reflected in his creation. If you want to grow in your delight of the beautiful, beginning with our beautiful God, Ryken is a trusted guide.”

Juan R. Sanchez, Senior Pastor, High Pointe Baptist Church, Austin, Texas; author, Seven Dangers Facing Your Church and The Leadership Formula

“Some books on beauty are more bookish than beautiful—they engage the mind but not the heart. Ryken’s Beauty Is Your Destiny doesn’t fall into that trap. This is a book that simultaneously stimulates our minds and stirs our affections. It’s informative but also pleasurable to read, leading us not only to grasp a full-orbed theology of beauty but also to worship the source from which all beauty flows.”

Brett McCracken, Senior Editor, The Gospel Coalition; author, The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World

“Philip Ryken has written a masterpiece on the subject of beauty. He has immeasurably helped us see it. Beauty is something we know, but we often fail in our attempts to describe it. Ryken depicts beauty in all its contours, showing that beauty emerges even from ugly things, such as the cross of Christ. This book combines deep and extensive knowledge with a writing style that is, well, beautiful.”

William Edgar, Professor Emeritus of Apologetics, Westminster Theological Seminary

Beauty Is Your Destiny

Other Crossway Books by Philip Ryken

Christian Worldview: A Student’s Guide

Courage to Stand: Jeremiah’s Battle Plan for Pagan Times

Discovering God in Stories from the Bible

The Doctrines of Grace: Rediscovering the Evangelical Gospel (with James Montgomery Boice)

Ecclesiastes: Why Everything Matters

Exodus: Saved for God’s Glory

Grace Transforming

The Heart of the Cross (with James Montgomery Boice)

Is Jesus the Only Way?

Jeremiah and Lamentations: From Sorrow to Hope

Jesus on Trial (with James Montgomery Boice)

Kingdom, Come!

King Solomon: The Temptations of Money, Sex, and Power

Liberal Arts for the Christian Life (ed. with Jeffry C. Davis)

The Love of Loves in the Song of Songs

Loving Jesus More

Loving the Way Jesus Loves

Our Triune God: Living in the Love of the Three-in-One (with Michael LeFebvre)

The Prayer of Our Lord

When Trouble Comes

Written in Stone: The Ten Commandments and Today’s Moral Crisis

Beauty Is Your Destiny

How the Promise of Splendor Changes Everything

Philip Ryken

Beauty Is Your Destiny: How the Promise of Splendor Changes Everything

Copyright © 2023 by Philip Graham Ryken

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Chapter 7 includes an excerpt from Jack Gilbert’s poem “A Brief for the Defense,” in Refusing Heaven: Poems, by Jack Gilbert, copyright © 2005 by Jack Gilbert. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Chapter 9 includes an excerpt from Brandon Chasteen’s poem “Christmas Sonnet,” First Things, January 2021. Used by permission of the author.

Cover design: Faceout Studio, Tim Green

Cover image: © Look and Learn / Bridgeman Images

First printing 2023

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated into any other language.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible. Public domain.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Scripture quotations marked NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-8772-6 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-8775-7 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-8773-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ryken, Philip Graham, 1966– author.

Title: Beauty is your destiny : how the promise of splendor changes everything / Philip Ryken.

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022046449 (print) | LCCN 2022046450 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433587726 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781433587733 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433587757 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Christian life. | Aesthetics—Religious aspects—Christianity.

Classification: LCC BV4501.3 .R948 2023 (print) | LCC BV4501.3 (ebook) | DDC 248.4—dc23/eng/20230313

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022046449

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022046450

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2023-07-21 03:28:15 PM

To Elisabeth Martha Ryken,

a child of the covenant,

with gratitude to God

for the new beauty she brings into the world

Contents

  Preface

1  In the Eye of the Beholder

The Beauty of Eternity

2  The King in His Beauty

The Beauty of the Trinity

3  For the Beauty of the Earth

The Beauty of Creation

4  You Are So Beautiful

The Beauty of God’s Image

5  When Sex Is Beautiful

The Beauty of Purity

6  Beautiful Savior

The Beauty of God Incarnate

7  That Old, Ugly Cross

The Beauty of the Crucifixion

8  Beautiful Community

The Beauty of Christ’s Bride

9  It’s a Beautiful Life

The Beauty of Generous Living

  General Index

  Scripture Index

Preface

There is beauty all around us. Our eyes see it in the flash of blue as a belted kingfisher dives for prey in a secluded forest pool. Our ears hear it when a soprano soars to reach the climactic notes of a love song. Our fingers feel it as we softly caress a baby’s cheek. Our hearts feel it too when sworn enemies fall into a forgiving embrace. Every day we have fresh opportunities to witness the beauty of God.

The purpose of this book is to help readers both inside and outside the church become more alive to divine beauty and more aware of its place in God’s plan for our lives. I hope to awaken a deeper desire for beauty that will lead to lives that are more holy, more joyful, more hopeful, and more just.

This simple yet hopefully substantive book began with a series of chapel messages at Wheaton College. That series was also titled “Beauty Is Your Destiny.” It was the fall of 2021, and we were coming out of COVID (or at least we thought we were). During the pandemic I had spent more time at home and in certain respects had become more aware of God’s beauty. Looking out my window every day, I saw how my garden grew. I took more long walks, which made me more attentive to the world around me. Through a season of forced isolation, I sensed a greater need for beauty—and found it.

As our students returned to campus, I wanted my chapel talks to bear witness to the beauty I had experienced. I believed that our campus community needed more beauty too. It had been a difficult time for everyone. Social distancing, mask mandates, virtual classrooms, sickness, even death—COVID-19 had taken its toll. In the United States, we had also experienced ongoing social turmoil, political polarization, and personal distress over racial injustice. Sensing our need for healing, I wanted to point our students back to God’s beauty in all its dimensions.

The evangelical community has not always considered beauty a serious topic for theology or an important aspect of the Christian life. I am saddened by the story of John Muir, the Scottish American naturalist who is often regarded as the father of America’s national parks. Muir was raised in a devoutly Christian home. His parents, unfortunately, did not regard his explorations in the wilderness an appropriate vocation for Christians. In fact, Muir’s father pleaded with his son to abandon his “cold, icy-topped mountains” and come home “to our lovely Jesus.” Not surprisingly, perhaps, Muir eventually left behind his childhood faith. Or did he? At the very same time that his father was telling him to come back to Jesus, one of his editors was telling him to stop using the word “glorious” so often to describe the American West.1 John Muir was caught in a false dichotomy between his love for natural beauty and his impulse to praise the God of creation.

Appreciating beauty—in all its splendid forms—can and should be an avenue for worship and a call to faithful Christian discipleship. Focusing on beauty also affords us an opportunity to consider a wide range of practical doctrines in fresh perspective. Over the course of this book, we consider creation and the incarnation, the Trinity and the attributes of God, the crucifixion and the resurrection, sexuality, race, justice, ecclesiology, and eschatology—all from the vantage point of sacred beauty. Indeed, one of my aims for my annual series of chapel talks is to provide a lens for Christian doctrine. Each year I try to address some of the most important topics in the Christian faith and relevant issues in contemporary life in a new and hopefully compelling way. Beauty is a worthy subject in its own right, but theological aesthetics also shows the interconnectedness of Christian doctrine.

Maybe it is important for me to say as well that this book is not just about what is beautiful; it is also about what is ugly and why. In a fallen world, any responsible discussion of the subject requires wrestling with all the ways that beauty is broken. But there is still hope. I mostly agree with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who claimed,

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.2

Beautiful people do not just happen, that is true, but I want to say more. What makes us beautiful—after all our wounds and scars—is God the Holy Spirit.

Like most of my books, this one was written more out of a sense of need than out of any sense of confidence in my own expertise. Some people write what they know; I tend to write about what I want to know better. Writing about beauty makes me especially aware of my own limitations (although, admittedly, writing about topics such as the life of prayer and loving people better has been humbling too). A book about beauty should be, well, beautiful. All I can say is that I tried to write this book as beautifully as I could. You may notice that I have done a lot of quoting in its pages. Think of this book partly as a sourcebook for other Christian authors—who have written more splendidly—on the vital subject of beauty.

Thankfully, this book is much better written than it would have been without the loving labors of Andy Abernethy, Karen Lee, Dyanne Martin, Marjorie Mead, Matt Milliner, and Betsy Rockey. Each of them made invaluable improvements, both large and small. So did the editorial team at Crossway. You will have to judge whether the results are beautiful. What I know for certain is that the people who helped me write this book are beautiful, as we all should be. Beauty is our birthright and also—through Jesus Christ—our destiny.

1  The story of John Muir’s relationship with his parents is briefly related in Belden C. Lane, Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 45.

2  Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Death: The Final Stage of Growth (New York: Scribner, 2009), 96.

One thing have I asked of the Lord,

that will I seek after:

that I may dwell in the house of the Lord

all the days of my life,

to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord.

Psalm 27:4

Lord, may we be so transformed in Your beauty that we may be alike in beauty, and behold ourselves in Your beauty, possessing Your very beauty.

John of the Cross

1

In the Eye of the Beholder

The Beauty of Eternity

Where have you seen the beauty that God is bringing into the world?

I have glimpsed it in a flaming meteor streaking across the August sky and disappearing with a flash over a darkly shimmering lake. I have heard it in the laughter of a baby girl climbing up into a chair for the first time and chortling over her unexpected little triumph. I have seen it in the face of a radiant bride on her wedding day and the irrepressible tear on the cheek of her beloved groom.

I have also seen beauty rising from the ashes of a burning world. Pastor Steve Wood bore witness to such beauty as he surveyed the ruins of St. Andrew’s Anglican Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in April 2018. After a long legal battle, the congregation finally had secured possession of its church building. Then disaster struck. A few hours before worship services were scheduled to begin one fine Sunday morning, fire ravaged the church. Although rescue workers salvaged the cross, the baptismal font, and the Communion table, the building was a total loss. Yet as Pastor Wood stood in the smoking ruins, he said to a reporter, “The Lord promises to bring beauty out of ashes. And we’re taking Him at his word.”1

Beauty out of ashes. The promise that Pastor Wood had in mind comes from Isaiah the prophet, who foretold a suffering Savior, anointed by the Spirit to

provide for those who grieve in Zion—

to bestow on them a crown of beauty

instead of ashes,

the oil of joy

instead of mourning,

and a garment of praise

instead of a spirit of despair. (Isa. 61:3 NIV)

Even when his culture was crumbling, Isaiah had the faith to see beauty rising. He knew that one day God would restore his people to their forgotten splendor.

There is beauty all around us in this grace-filled, sometimes smoldering world, if only we have the eyes to see it. There is a basis for it in the beauty of our triune God and in what he calls beautiful. There is a purpose for it too. Beauty is our destiny. We were born to be beautiful—to behold the beauty of our God and to be so transfixed and transformed by it that we become beautiful ourselves.

What Is Beauty?

My simple goal in writing this book is to awaken a longing for beauty and the eternal love of God that can be fully satisfied only in the face of Jesus Christ. My hope and prayer is that its readers will be able to look toward eternity and say, in all sincerity, what David said:

One thing have I asked of the Lord,

that will I seek after:

that I may dwell in the house of the Lord

all the days of my life,

to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord

and to inquire in his temple. (Ps. 27:4)

Whether we know it or not, David’s one desire is also our deepest longing and enduring destiny: to behold the beauty of the Lord. But as soon as we start talking about “beauty,” we have difficult problems to address, starting with the conundrum of definition. What is beauty?

Great thinkers have wrestled with this question at least since the dawn of philosophy in ancient Greece. Today we do not seem to be much closer to an answer than we were two thousand years ago. In his book The Beauty of the Infinite, David Bentley Hart reluctantly concedes that it is “impossible” for anyone “to offer a definition of beauty, either in the abstract or in Christian thought.”2 Traditional definitions include concepts of beauty such as order, proportion, symmetry, simplicity, harmony, and the pleasure they produce. Yet by themselves, these qualities do not guarantee that something is beautiful. We can all think of beautiful things that contradict the classical ideals. In fact, some of the world’s most famous works of art creatively violate certain aesthetic principles. According to philosopher Roger Scruton, “Rules and precepts are there to be transcended, and because originality and the challenging of orthodoxies are fundamental to the aesthetic enterprise, an element of freedom is built into the pursuit of beauty.”3

Even if we have trouble defining it, however, we know there is such a thing as beauty. We know this biblically. If we scan the pages of Scripture, we can derive a long list of things that God calls beautiful: people (Judg. 15:2; Isa. 33:17) and their melodious voices (Ezek. 33:32), animals (Jer. 13:20; 46:20), plants and trees (Dan. 4:12; Hos. 14:6), clothing (Josh. 7:21; Isa. 61:3), cities (Pss. 48:2; 50:2) and their fine buildings (Isa. 5:9), ships at sea (Isa. 2:16), and royal crowns and other treasures (Ps. 16:6; Prov. 4:9; Isa. 28:1; Ezek. 23:42).

If the Bible stipulates certain things as beautiful, then there really is beauty in the eye of the Beholder, with a capital B. Almighty God is inexpressibly beautiful in his own being. One early theologian thus described him as “the all-beautiful,” “the superabundant source in itself of the beauty of every beautiful thing.”4 Beautiful in himself, God has also promised to “set beauty in the land of the living” (Ezek. 26:20). Whatever God sees and says is beautiful is beautiful! The Bible tells us so.

We also know beauty experientially. In a talk titled “Why Beauty Matters,” the poet Dana Gioia mentions four stages of engaging with something beautiful.5 First, it arrests our attention; the world stops while we look or listen. Second, we have a sudden thrill of pleasure in the presence of what is truly beautiful. As the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar testified, “Within the beautiful the whole person quivers.”6 Third, we have a sense that we are in touch with ultimate reality. Beauty is transcendent, reminding us of God. Fourth, the moment passes, and all we have left is the happy memory, which never quite matches the experience.

To Gioia’s list we can add the instant desire that beauty brings to share the joy of our experience with someone else. The point is that we all experience beauty, and in that sense it is universal. What we see as beautiful may vary across cultures (which is yet another reason to value diversity—it helps us behold more beauty, as we see with new eyes). We also have different capacities for recognizing beauty (an aesthetic appreciation that we can develop). But beauty is more than merely a personal preference or a social construct. If God is beautiful and his creation is beautiful, then beauty is objectively there! Jonathan King summarizes by saying, “The beauty expressed in God’s outward works is objectively real and subjectively experienced.”7 God has put his beauty into the world, and we are witnesses.

Our struggle to define beauty is an important signal in and of itself. Rather than giving up on beauty because it is hard for us to agree on how to explain it, we should accept the fact that the beautiful is ineffable. In other words, beauty always goes beyond what we can describe or define, and this is an unmistakable sign of its transcendence. The overabundance of beauty in our present existence is intended to point us beyond this world to an eternal reality, “in which our immortal longings and our desire for perfection are finally answered.”8

Beauty, Broken

We will return to beauty and eternity in a moment, but first we need to address another problem: the many ways that beauty has become broken.

In a fallen world—a world in bondage to decay (Rom. 8:21)—even the best things can become the worst. Human beings take what God made to be beautiful and turn it into something ugly. So we plunder the earth, making unsustainable demands on natural resources and devastating the visual landscape in our relentless pursuit of more. We exchange the beauty of our sexuality for the degradation of pornography. We take the ethnic diversity that ought to be one of the most beautiful things in the world—a signpost of divine creativity—and turn it into a source of damage and division. Sadly, even God’s holy, beautiful church can become a place where people experience ugly abuse.

We see some of this brokenness in the world of art, where we expect instead to see rare beauty. While ugliness has its place in art that responds to a fallen world, beauty ought to have its proper place there too. Unfortunately—and although there are many notable and delightful exceptions—we continue to suffer tragic loss in the visual arts, where beauty too often is dismissed, diminished, or even derided. Roger Scruton observes that

recent art cultivates a posture of transgression, matching the ugliness of the things it portrays with an ugliness of its own. Beauty is downgraded as something too sweet, too escapist, and too far from realities to deserve our undeceived attention.9

One result of this contemporary attitude, writes Marilynne Robinson, is that beauty “as a conscious element of experience, as a thing to be valued and explored, has gone into abeyance among us.”10 Even if these complaints are overstated and the tide is beginning to turn,11 surely we can agree with Scruton and Robinson that there is not as much beauty in the contemporary art world as there could be or ought to be.

We also struggle with our own desire for beauty. This too is broken. Not that wanting to be beautiful is wrong in itself. If beauty is our destiny, then our desire to be beautiful is divinely ordained. Yet our perceptions are problematic—both of our own beauty and of the beauty of others. We focus on what is merely external rather than on what is truly and intrinsically beautiful. Too often we see ourselves as a distorted image. Then we find ourselves asking the haunting question that Bono asks in “City of Blinding Lights”: “What happened to the beauty I had inside of me?”12

Consider, as one example of broken beauty, the anxiety many people experienced when the world moved online at the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Students and workers had to look at themselves on the screen all day long. Under their own critical gaze, many struggled with the reality gap between the way they looked and the way they wanted people to see them.

The constant barrage of images of so-called beauty on social and visual media only makes matters worse. So do beauty products, beauty salons, beauty pageants, and almost anything else that begins with “beauty.” It is unsettling to know that many film stars dread being recognized in public because they do not look as good in person as they do in the movies. If celebrities struggle with body shame, then what hope is there for the rest of us? In her widely read essay on the damaging effects of cultural attitudes about physical beauty, especially for women of color, sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom closes with this haunting line: “Ugly is everything done to you in the name of beauty.”13

Sadly, someday whatever beauty we do have will be lost—this too is a problem! As the aging process accelerates, our bodies become less beautiful, and with our inevitable demise will come the loss of our ability to witness the world’s beauty. Nothing seemed more futile to the French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir than the end of beauty that death would bring. She wrote, “I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing.”14 The melancholy chorus in Johannes Brahms’s setting of Nänie—a poem by Friedrich Schiller—puts us in a similar mood. “Even beauty must perish,” the choir sings, “and all the perfect must die.”15