I found myself, not too long ago pondering the question of beauty, namely what is beauty and can it be classified or quantified. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is a common phrase often thrown about when discussing a third party’s new love interest or new wallpaper but is it true? Is beauty purely subjective or is there some more objective way to describe beauty?

I realize these are age-old questions yet I have never conducted any formal study of aesthetics or read any book or even article by those who have, so the conclusions I have drawn are entirely my own. I make this disclaimer partially because I believe it very likely that others have reached same or similar conclusions as myself and if that be the case you will know that that two people conducting their own research arrived at the same conclusion. This of course should lend considerable credibility to the theory.

To answer this we must first answer the question of what beauty is. What are we talking about here anyway? If beauty is only in the eye of the beholder then it has no subjectivity and as such cannot be described. So we would be talking about nothing. (I hope that’s not it because then I would be writing an article on nothing. The publisher is sure to love that. What is love anyway?…Oh sorry) So for the sake of discussion let’s dismiss the idea that beauty is only in the eye of the beholder.

The first attribute that I see in beauty is that it does not stand-alone. It is not self-sufficient. Beauty is not beauty for beauty’s sake. If it was then it would be purely subjective and we dismissed that theory in the last paragraph. Beauty points us to something else. Things of beauty act as mirrors that bend the path of something good towards us. Think about a smile. Most people would agree that smiles generally are things of beauty. Would smiles still be beautiful if instead of happiness and joy they meant sadness and sorrow? Would not frowns be beautiful if they meant happiness and joy? So you see that the object of beauty is beautiful because of what it reminds us of.

Good is a rather ambiguous term and not all beautiful things represent happiness and joy, so is there some other blanket idea that incorporates all of these? I believe there is. Beauty points us in the direction of perfection. A child may smile when gets a card from his grandmother because the card made him happy but a card can only deliver temporary happiness. Just like the smile is a reflection of temporary happiness, temporary happiness is a reflection of perfect happiness.

Think about the last time, you experienced perfect happiness. If you ever experienced perfect happiness then you would still be experiencing it now because; it would not be perfect if it were temporary. So perfection is something none have experienced yet all have an idea of because we all enjoy things of beauty. How can this be? How can we have a functional understanding of something that we have never experienced? We did not get it from it being described to us because there is no one qualified to describe it. The idea of perfection cannot have come from men. There is no empirical or rational way to conceive of man inventing perfection. Perfection can only have come from God. God is by definition the most perfect being. Flaws can be found in everything around us. Nothing on Earth is perfect, only God is perfect.

So beauty points us to or reminds us of God. It is that simple. This is the only rational way I can think of to objectively define beauty. An object takes on beauty when it reminds of God. The better it reminds us of God the more beauty it possesses.

That is the objective part, the rest is open to interpretation. This is where the eye of the beholder comes in to play. Things that remind me of God do not necessarily have to remind you of God.

So what about people who do not believe in God? Certainly they can still experience beauty, right? Yes, they can experience beauty but they cannot understand it. Box turtles experience rain, and are probably conscience of it but they do not understand the water cycle. To those that do not believe in God, beauty must be superficial because they cannot see or experience what it is pointing them to.