Three Ways to Teach Beauty to Yourself and the Young
Or, how we can all fight the disenchantment of the world with beauty
“For every one pupil who needs to be guarded against a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.
The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.”
—C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
“Daddy, do you hear that?”
“What?”
“That sound. It sounds like the noise from the road down below, but it’s the wind.”’
“Oh, yeah, I hear that.”
“I think the wind comes from the Garden of Eden, from the Angel who stands guard with the family sword.”
“You’re probably right, Bri. That’s a good explanation of the origin of the wind.”
We walked the Tanawha Trail that switchbacks up Rough Ridge in the Grandfather Mountain Wildern Area of Pisgah National Forest. You’ve likely seen pictures of the views from Tanawha Trail and not known it. The large granite outcroppings on the exposed areas of Rough Ridge offer the most stunning views along the 469 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway.
With the trailhead being right off the parkway, the trail sees high volumes of traffic in season. And there were plenty of people hiking up to soak in the views. The higher you hike, the less you hear the road and the more you hear the wind.
The terrain changes as well. Large conifers stand like soldiers guarding the ridge, casting their deep greens against the conflagration of the autumn hardwoods. Rare wildflowers and shrubs greet you at every turn. They look more storybook than real, with other dainty leaves and miniature blossoms.
The rugged beauty of the hike for the observant captivates and awes. So, I wasn’t surprised at Bri’s description of the wind. In that place, anything was possible. And all your imaginings of beauty were more like insights into the reality of how things actually are than daydream musings.
Whenever I hear my daughters catch reality like that, I listen. Because they are probably grasping the weight of the moment more than my adult sensitivities.
Thoughts for Reflection:
Do you have a voice in your life that reminds you to always return to a place of innocence and beauty—that reminds you to stop and listen to the wind? If not, what steps are you taking to keep that voice alive in your life?
Do you think we, as a culture, undervalue being outside in God’s creation? Has or modern world made the outdoors a kind of branding experience which is good for some and not others?
You know you want to go hiking with us. Just drop me a line, and we’ll pick you up next time. :)
Are you stoked you found this newsletter? I sure am. I’m assembling a band or rabble-rousers who are tired of the status quo in this world. They want to break free and explore beauty, God, and Narnia if they can. When you go to Paid Subscriber, you’re saying, “Hey Y'all, I’m here for the revolution—the beauty revolution and all that other stuff too.”
Something cool is stirring for the Paid crew—something extra, and it’s coming soon. I’d love for you to join us. I’m forever grateful for your support, your heart, and your stoke. Keep it going. We’re in this together.
P.S. You can also give gift subscriptions to rabble-rousers you know and you can get group subscriptions, for your church as an example. Email me for more info.
Why Young and Old Alike Need Beauty in their Spiritual Formation
Did you know that a child’s aesthetic judgement and taste becomes fixed in adolescence?
Why does that matter?
Becuse when screens, gaming, television programming, and movies operate as the primary aesthetic influence of a child they grow up estranged from the created order. This alienation and isolation lies behind the idea of "disenchantment” in the modern world.
If you’ve not heard of this concept, allow me a quick dive into the idea.
The idea that our modern world struggles of a veil of disenchantment is not a new idea. It was introduced in the Enlightenment by Fredrich Schiller in his poem, “The Gods of Greece,”1 (1788) and appropriated by Max Weber.
More recently Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher, wrote extensively on disenchantment in A Secular Age. Wessley Kort, of Duke University, summarizes the disenchanted worldview of the twenty-first century and gives three modern assumptions that conspire to disenchant that are worth noting.
The first assumption is the alienation of humanity from its nonhuman context. Next is the severance of value and meaning from both the non-human world and, perhaps more importantly, the human world thus relegating value and meaning to mere conscious construction. The final element of cultural disenchantment is the belief that knowledge and understanding primarily rise from the reduction of things, events, humans, and human behavior to their “simplest components.”
This reductionism is accompanied by a cynical perspective of human behavior that views humans as disingenuous in the way they present themselves—i.e., in other words, people tend to hide their true selves.
{Here I’ve included the three assumptions of the Disenchanted World for you so reference for your small group or discussion with your friends.}
Three Modern Assumptions of the Disenchanted World
1. Alienation of humanity from the non-human world. One aspect is our alienation from nature.
2. The severance of meaning and value from both the human world and non-human world. One way to look at this is meaning and value are now created by individuals for individuals signaling a loss of a universal meaning and value.
3. Our knowledge and understanding comes from reducing things to simple components.
The culture’s disenchantment stems from a person’s readiness to define themselves by the above assumptions.2 Such a disenchantment leads to a lack of relational understanding—person to person but more importantly, person to God.
But interestingly, Weber framed disenchantment (‘Entzauberung der Welt’ or disenchantment of the world) in his now famous lecture, “Science as a Vocation,” (1918) as a good thing. He was grateful for losing religious superstition and celebrated the victory of the rational mind.
This worldview is killing beauty.
Whenever I think of this kind of cultural disenchantment, I’m reminded of the writings of C.S. Lewis. He talked about how modernity blankets us with an evil enchantment. He’s talking about enchantment that we’d find in one of his fantasies.
In his essay “The Weight of Glory,” he referred to “the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years.”3 He then suggested that the Christian needs to wield a stronger enchantment with which to break the current spell.
Lewis dives further into the modern spell of disenchantment in his short book The Abolition of Man. In that book, he looks at what happens when modern education strips young people of thinking critically about beauty.
When we make the world one giant material substance devoid of the supernatural, we end up removing the very value of beauty, goodness, and truth and place our experience in life on a pschological plain. And this, accroding to Lewis, is ruinous.
Thoughts for Reflection:
Do you think the disenchantment worldview has crept into the Church? If so, how?
What can we do as individuals and families to make the outside world part of our whole experience of living in this great big wonderful world?
What time will you be heading out on the trail this weekend? :)
Three Ideas to Teach Beauty to the Young
Get Experiential - Go for a hike, a bike ride, a walk on a green way. But don’t stop with the walk. Learn about the trail you’re on. What do I mean?
Grab a tree book and learn the different varieties of trees in your neck of the woods (see what I did there?). If you’re traveling to a trailhead, learn about the forest your hiking in. What’s it known for? Is it primarily deciduous or confierous? Why does that matter? Is it old growth or new growth? What are those designations and why does it matter? What kind of colors come from the different deciduous trees?
Are you spending the afternoon near a river? Where does that river begin? What’s the location of its terminous? Does it originate from a mountain top or a glacier in Canada? Wait, Canada has glaciers?
The idea is that you learn about your surroundings. Doing so expands your imaginations. Is also ignites more curiosity. The key is to talk about the beauty of the outdoors and always ask, “Why?” questions.
Go Psalm Diving - Explore the Psalms by yourself or with a group of young people. But don’t look for “morals” or “takeaways.” There’s a time and place for that but give yourselves permission to explore the beautiful imagery. It’s there for a reason.
Too often our modern isolated sensitivities push us to find a “nugget” —we’re too accustomed to the transactional self-help mentality of trying to mine for something useful. Beauty is not useful in the way we think it is.
For example, theophanies in the Bible are sensational instances when God shows himself in our dimension, our world. Every time this happens, his presence disrupts nature. But we almost never dig in to that. But it matters. As one of my professors said, those natural disruptions have their own story to tell. And they do. It’s up to us to dig in and discover the wonderful riches.
Read The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis - “Eh, but Tim,” you say, “isn’t that a lofty lecture Lewis gave at the University of Durham. These are kids we’re talking about.”
“Ah yes,” I reply, “it was a lecture he gave, but the beauty of it is that its approachable. And it has some great thoughts about the value of aesthetic education and teaching the young the appropriate things to love.
Create a book club and by my friend Michael Ward’s new guidebook for it. It’s excellent and will be a wonderful resource for your venture into beauty.
Thoughts for Reflection
How can you and your friends create a space for young hearts to explore the beautiful in our world?
Do you feel estranged from the beaut of nature? If so, why do you think this alienation crept upon you as it did? How can you fight against?
In order for our young to value beauty, we need to be adults who value and pursue beauty. Take some time and evaluate how often you get outside and really dive into the wonder and beauty of all that God created. What new rythms can you establish in your household for yourself to revive the inheritance of wonder God entrusted to us all at creation?
Notes
Sara Lyons, “THE DISENCHANTMENT/RE-ENCHANTMENT OF THE WORLD: AESTHETICS, SECULARIZATION, AND THE GODS OF GREECE FROM FRIEDRICH SCHILLER TO WALTER PATER,” The Modern Language Review 109, no. 4 (2014): 873–895, accessed May 13, 2021, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/modelangrevi.109.4.0873.
Kort asserts the Great War (WWI), though an obvious prominent emotional marker within Lewis’s culture, was not at the root formation of people’s disenchantment. Rather, it was the loss of personal meaning disseminated in the philosophical thought in the likes of Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, Giambattista Vico, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. (33-36)
The Weight of Glory, 31.