In C.S. Lewis’s book The Screwtape Letters, a senior demon is writing to his junior to educate him in the methodologies of temptation. In a particularly poignant passage, the senior demon Screwtape writes about how beauty and pleasure works:
“Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. Hence, we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable. An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula. It is more certain; and it’s better style.”
There is no beauty or pleasure that the devil has produced. All things beautiful and pleasing have come from God. But what has happened is that humans use the good gifts of God in the ways that go against God’s good design. Distorted, in isolation, and removed from its relationship to the divine, humans take and seize and discover that the pleasures that God has made can be enjoyable apart from God for a short time.
The same is true with beauty. Whether it is in the physical beauty of a person, the natural beauty of creation, or the artistic beauty formed by humans, we have a way of destroying or distorting beauty. Abuse, pornography, violence, littering, pollution, theft, vandalism – these are all just a few ways that we distort and destroy the good things of God.
God has made this world and given us the gift of beauty not for our selfish enjoyment as an end, but so that we might praise and glorify him. We don’t find beauty’s terminus to be in us, but in the expression of adoration and praise to God. So when we fail to use the gifts of beauty that God has given in order to praise him, this may be our first clue that something is being distorted.
Part of our task as creatures made in God’s image is to notice, adore, and protect beauty. The objectification of people, the loss of bird and animal species, the degradation of this world is a failure to celebrate what God has made and ultimately diminishes our capacity to showcase the glory of the beauty of God.
Our calling as Christians is to see the beauty of God all around us, to adore and preserve it, and to call others into the enjoyment of it for the sake of God’s name. But until Christ returns, the evil one will use every tactic and power to desecrate and destroy the goodness of God’s beauty.
Let’s not give up enjoying what God has made. Let’s celebrate all that is true, lovely, pure, excellent, and praiseworthy (Phil. 4:8)! And let’s call others into the enjoyment of the King in all of his beauty!
For the beauty of his glory,
~Andrew
