The Dangers of Beauty: The Conflict Between Mimesis and Concupiscence in the Fine Arts by E. Michael Jones (Coming Soon!)

Desert Island Discs is 80 years old this year. The BBC Radio 4 favorite owes a great deal of its enduring popularity to the simple perfection of its interview form. To make desert island existence more endurable, each guest is permitted eight pieces of music, one book and one luxury. The same two books are given to every guest — the Bible and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Each guest gets to choose a third. When you, dear reader, get your D.I.D. 45 minutes of fame, may I suggest that you choose E. Michael Jones’ latest book. If you insist, as the ideal complement to the Bible and the Bard, to go for one of Jones’ other tomes — any one of which will double very nicely as a desert island coffee table – then I suggest this simple solution: take, let’s say Logos Rising as your book, and take The Dangers of Beauty as your luxury. It is a thing of beauty and will be a comfort and joy for as long as you’re away from home. It will remind you that you once belonged to a high civilization — it is that civilization captured in book form. During your long years of isolation, between the psalms and the soliloquys, you’ll have time to digest the contents of Logos Rising and The Dangers of Beauty. However, when the time comes to leave your island retreat and you set to sea on your home-bound raft, you’ll be quite happy to leave Logos Rising behind – you want to give yourself some chance of staying afloat – but you’ll decide finally to leave the island if and only if you can take your beauty book home with you. Artifacts like this are to be cherished, and will continue to be a blessing long after you return to civilization (or what’s left of it). The sheer beauty of the book must prohibit even one copy from being lost.

Speaking of coffee tables, Jones’ latest work is that remarkable, perhaps unique creation: a truly great book that can also serve as the ideal adornment for your coffee table. So, at last the good doctor has written a coffee-table book? Well, yes, in a certain way that’s exactly what we have here. The richness and depth and interconnectivity of the thing is breath-taking and yet at the same time it’s perfect for browsing: it’s an illustrated reference book which doubles as an historical drama, interwoven with a theologically infused philosophical treatise. It’s a symphony – that also happens to be a school. Leave it on your coffee table long enough and you’ll find soured relationships with neighbours made good, and your popularity restored. Though in Jonesian terms it’s a short work – a mere 459 pages including Jones-scale endnotes – this book on aesthetics is another monumental tome, which is at the same time eminently, delightfully browsable. While the coffee is being prepared, your guest can just dip in. Open any page and he’s sure to find a captivating portrait or well-chosen photograph of a literary luminary like TS Eliot, a musical master like Beethoven, or a titan like Titian; or perhaps a painting of the most beautiful woman in the world; or if he’s really lucky and happens to open to page 365 where he gets to see the ugliest house in the world. To recover from the shock, your guest hastily flicks back to the previous page where he’ll find a photograph of the man who designed and lived in the ugliest house in the world, giving – to the world – the one-fingered salute. Maintaining careful custody of the eyes, your guest averts his gaze to the text, where the author provides a classic Jonesian, chuckle-inducing summary:

What followed after the renovation was complete was an orgy of interpretation, most of it viewing what Gehry had done to his house as some form of sexual assault1

Scanning the rest of the page and finding it hard to choose between the variety of reactions to the house from the “hard shell-soft core” or the even more pithy “perversity,” your guest will begin to appreciate that Jones is a master of the well-chosen quote, offering up in this instance my own particular favourite: “It is a dirty thing to do in someone else’s front yard.”2

As browsing turns into more sustained reading of the same page, your guest will come to understand the thesis of the book in its negative terms: immorality gives birth to ugliness. Sexual deviance destroys a culture from within: “All that the architecture did was embody that ruptured culture.”3

At this point, you may be thinking, “Hasn’t E. Michael Jones made all that very clear in Degenerate Moderns or Living Machines or Libido Dominandi?” Yes he has, and he has written extensively about the other major art forms treated in the book – music, painting and poetry – but all four are united and re-presented in this current volume, in relation to specific works interpreted and explicated in the context of beauty; beauty as considered as a transcendental, as an attribute of being itself, so as to demonstrate that… “beauty emerges from the good and the true every bit as inexorably as immorality goes hand in hand with uglines.”4

In that sense, this is the perfect synthesis of the author’s work to date. To use a very crude analogy, it’s his greatest hits re-presented as a concept album. Why beauty? Because beauty is irresistible. Beauty is the Divine fragrance by which the soul is overwhelmed. Beauty makes us cry with joy before we’ve figured out why we’re crying. Beauty is heartbreaking. Beauty, as the author explains, is the most immediately accessible of the transcendentals. Apart from the arrival of Beauty Himself in the Incarnation, beauty is the most direct infusion by God into nature of His own ineffable nature. We know that something is beautiful before we understand if or how or why it’s true or good, while at the same time knowing intuitively that it must be true and it must be good. The artist in creating a work of art manifests this apprehension in a way that is much more difficult for the philosopher or the theologian to express:

The artist, in other words, produced what the philosopher could not explain. If one of its manifestations was beauty, the Trinity was “everywhere” in nature or waiting to be released from the stone by the sculptor. Even if no one could explain it, the Trinity was visible to the human eye whenever it perceived maximal complexity combined with maximal unity under the manifestation of beauty5

Jones reminds us that God will not leave us orphans and so in every age and in every place, people of good will can come to know their Father in Heaven by experiencing the beauty here below in nature, and by imitation – mimesis – of nature in their art:

The soul achieves beauty not by ascending to the realm of forms but by descending through art into the realm of nature to imitate that aspect of nature which reflects the ultimate beauty of its Creator6

Again and again, we are reminded that creation is God’s love poem to his children, and because love always involves two words – you and forever – love is by definition nuptial. Divorce is always harmful, whether we’re talking about Plato’s divorce of form and matter, or Piet Mondrian’s divorce of essence from existence, or indeed Frank Gehry’s divorce from his wife. The marriage of soul and body is captured most perfectly in the human face. It took the sacrifice of the God-man to demonstrate the infinite value of the human person. Cultures that practice human sacrifice are not going to devote much attention to the human face “if that human being could be used as fodder in some obscene sacrifice a day later[.]”7 Being made in the image and likeness of God, the representation in painting of the human person, and in particular the representation of the face, constitutes one of the triumphs of Christian art.

The author reminds us of St John’s call to the pagans in the prologue to his Gospel. Thereafter, the Christian understanding of God illuminated our souls’ natural affinity with beauty:

After a few centuries of meditation on that [John 1:1] and similar passages in Scripture like “Logos is with God,” the Church Fathers came to understand that the One was made up of three persons united in love to each other. Their love for each other was so intense that it overflowed into love of the universe, where it became apparent as beauty, leading Augustine to conclude that “beauty originates from God Himself.”8

The Trinitarian Mystery – God’s innermost secret as the catechism renders it – was revealed as the ultimate source of beauty. As the author explains, given that we cannot directly apprehend spiritual realities, our apprehension of beauty is necessarily corporeal. Nonetheless, the “unity in relationship” of God Himself was now revealed as the heavenly template, the Divine guarantee of our affinity with beauty, as expressed by one of the heroes of the book:

Beauty, which Coleridge defined as “unity in multeity” is the closest simulacrum of that divine concatenation of existence and essence which mortals can experience in this life.9

After the Incarnation, the human person was exalted to the heretofore unimaginable dignity of an adopted child of God, and the representation of the human person moved onto a higher plane, an elevation that distinguished Western i.e. Christian art, and propelled its astonishing development, most especially in the painting of the human face…“because the face is the crowning achievement of God’s creation because it is the most visible sign of man’s immortal soul.”10

The individuality and the vulnerability of the human face are reminders that each one of us is chosen by God from all eternity to be His personal favorite.

As with his other major works, it’s worth the money just for the introduction alone, which sets out and summarizes the main thesis of the book, setting up the reader with the kind of orientation that makes the rest of the book – despite a good deal of highly challenging content (what are those German Idealists on about?) – not only readable but always a joy to read. Even where the philosophical content was way above my pay grade, the clarity and consistency of the explanations gave me enough purchase to persist. The clarity and contextualization means that you – depending on your pay grade – may well feel challenged, but you’ll never feel alienated. The good doctor is a very good teacher, reassuringly ready to rely on that high pedagogical maxim: repetition is the mother of learning. The ideas are scrutinized by way of illuminating examples, which are in turn related not only to the work of the originating artists and thinkers but to their lives and times. This is vintage Jones, who has, among so many other weapons of cultural penetration, given us the profoundly insightful understanding that the state of a man’s soul will reveal itself consciously – or more often unconsciously – in his work. We need no longer feel mystified or intimidated by a Picasso or a Pollock, pledging instead to pray harder for their souls: “In the end, the only thing that Picasso portrayed realistically was the woman’s crotch. Modern art had returned to its roots”11

In the section on poetry in England, Oxford English professor Terry Eagleton is summoned to Professor Jones office, or as I began to envisage it, he becomes the recipient of repeated visits by one Lieutenant Mike “Columbo” Jones. We learn that disillusionment with the constraints imposed by Catholic sexual morality accounts for Terry Eagleton’s embrace of Marxism which, as the man himself explains…

provided a kind of cross-class dating service, by which weedy Glaswegian workers who couldn’t believe their luck could hook up with frisky young women from Cheltenham Ladies’ College with meticulously roughened-up accents. Paunchy, balding shop stewards found themselves to their astonishment as glamorous as rock stars in the eyes of young women fresh from convent school and anxious to compensate for their class crimes12

Excuse me Professor Eagleston, I’m sorry to bother you but there are just a few loose ends I’d like to clear up so that we can close the case. Oh, my wife is a big fan of your work, but I was just wondering if you ever considered – I’m just asking for the record, you understand – if you ever thought that maybe Marxist materialism is the problem in this case… because my wife told me that you said that “The founding principle of materialism was that there was a real world out there, of which we could have knowledge”? You did say that, didn’t you? The only problem is that when we first spoke you told me that – let’s see I have it here in my notes, oh yeah here it is – you said that “transcendental meaning is a fiction.” Well, which is it Professor? I’m a little confused. And, if transcendental meaning is a fiction, doesn’t that make your statement a fiction? You see my problem here? Oh, one more thing, you also said that “there is no concept which is not embroiled in an open-ended play of signification.” Are you telling me that there is no “transcendental signifier” – down at the station the boys call that “the Logos” – because without a transcendental signifier you get stuck in an infinite regress of signifiers, and Captain Aristotle tells us day in and day out that infinite regress is impossible, impossible? I’ve seen a lot of murders in my time, and believe me Professor, you always need a transcendental signifier to close the case. Thank you for your time, Professor. (Enters 30 seconds later.) I’m sorry Professor Eagleton, but something else has been bothering me. I just can’t figure it out, maybe you can help me. My wife told me that in your book on Literary Theory – you know the one published in 1996 by the Minnesota University Press – well, in that book didn’t you write that “Unless they are thrown a few novels, students might throw up a few barricades”? Well, you’re an English professor, you teach novels, right? It sounds like you think novels are being used to distract students from the oppression of the masses? But I figured, Professor Eagleton is a Marxist, so he’s supposed to care about the masses. So, I was just wondering, why are you teaching about novels? I sure am confused Professor. Thank you for your time. I’ll be in touch.

A recurrent theme in the book is that form or essence needs life or existence. The marriage of essence and existence brings forth beauty:

Form and life correspond to the Scholastic terms of essence and existence, which find their ultimate expression in the self-subsistent being of God. Our perception of that reality in heaven is known as the beatific vision. Or apprehension of any skilled approximation of that coincidence of essence and existence in this life is known as beauty. The human mind has that capability because it can apprehend logos in creation, and it has that power because Logos is God, and one of God’s most significant acts was creation. God the Creator shares that Logos in particular when man acts as the creator of a work of art13

As we have come to expect from E. Michael Jones, he acknowledges the Ancient Greeks’ foundational understanding of logos, and their identification of truth, goodness and beauty as the trancendentals i.e. as attributes of being itself. Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus are identified as the three major thinkers who recognized that… “The fate of the social order… depended on the soul’s ability to apprehend beauty”14

The limitation placed on art by Platonism – the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between “sublunary realm of becoming, which was characterized by constant change, and the superlunary realm of forms, which never changed”15 – was subsequently removed, thanks in large part to the genius of St. Augustine:

Once the philosophical mind digested the aesthetic implications of creation and the Incarnation, Platonism was washed up as a philosophy because as Augustine learned from his own failed experiment with otium liberale, the soul attained beauty not by transcending the world of appearances but by immersing itself in a world that was no longer the meaningless realm of flux and becoming, but was now recognized as suffused with the beauty of Logos because it was created by the God who is Logos and redeemed by him as well16

Having laid this foundation, the book takes off on an exploration of the history of beauty, specifically as it emerged in painting, music and poetry. The fourth section of the book examines the war on beauty as manifested most brutally and tragically in the Jewish commodification of art as a form of aesthetic usury, and in the Jewish attack on Logos through music, literature, art and architecture.

This is a book that not only talks the talk but also walks the walk. It’s a beautiful object, and as far as the content is concerned, it’s the perfect manifestation of “maximal unity in maximal diversity.”17 There is a further very pleasing correspondence between the trinitarian nature of art and the trinitarian form of the book. By way of a quote from Stratford Caldecott, we learn that…

Unity and Diversity are reconciled in Harmony. The triangle that is the geometrical translation of the fundamental musical chord with its three notes is called a Triad. It presents a graphic image of how the number three returns polarity to unity18

The triad of painting, art and poetry, which constitute the form of the book, is a perfect reflection of this same reality. The three strings, as it were, vibrate in harmony as the book unfolds, revealing its essential unity in diversity. I think that deserves three cheers. The reality of that harmony is brought home by delicious reminders that “melody is to music what plot is to drama”19 or that music and drama take place in time “unlike painting and sculpture, which take place in space”20 or that “music is floating architecture.”21 The triad is also present in the harmonizing in each section of the three “strings” of art, history and philosophy: one example being Beethoven, Napoleon and the German Idealists from Section 3. I think that too deserves three cheers. We have the complementary and/or competing influence of Catholics, Protestants and Jews, of which the Protestants often emerge with most merit, with the following acting as a truly powerful…

[…] This is just an excerpt from the June 2022 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

(Endnotes Available by Request)