“This is not a desk” my freshman English professor explained while pointing directly to her large oak desk.  We all sat silently in our 8am class, some of us still in our pajamas, thinking that our professor probably said something that made sense; we were just too tired to know for sure.  She elaborated, “That tree out the window,” we all turned to look, “that is not a tree.”  She is old enough, I thought, she may have fallen off her rocker.  “‘Tree’ and ‘Desk’ are metaphors for what is actually there” she clarified.  So this is what college is like, I thought.  Despite my professor’s best efforts, I was still pretty sure that her desk was actually a desk.

Today, however, I am not the skeptic that I used to be.  It is clear that there is so much more to an object than the abstract English name we have decided to call it.  When I was in second grade I rode my bike over to a friend’s house for the first time only to be greeted by a charging dog.  Teeth bared and growl out, the dog’s quick advance made me instinctively turn to run—the last thing I should have done.  My run would soon be cut short, not by the dog, but by my imagination and a rather old tree.  Like the cartoons I had watched that very morning, I assumed I could just scale the tree all the way to the top in a matter of a millisecond.  Instead, I didn’t go up at all; I ended my run hugging a tree with my nose scrapped up from my first tree climbing and bark kissing experience.  While I can use many different words and adjectives to describe that encounter with a tree, I can never capture completely all that that tree was to me at that moment.  Even if I could, someone else’s experience with the same tree is likely going to be very different.

The words humans use are limited in their ability to describe what all of our sensory receptors actually encounter.  John Milbank would go further to say that not only does a ‘tree’ loom larger than our aptitude to describe what is knowable about the tree, but that the tree actually possesses qualities that are invisible to all of our sensory experience.   These invisible qualities give life to the visible (what we ‘see’ by embracing all sensory experience) and the visible does the same vis-à-vis the invisible.  While the philosophical importance of this assertion escapes most of us, Milbank opens up intriguing ways to speak of how an object’s possessed beauty, visible and invisible together, draws those who would embrace the object’s beauty:

Beauty arises where the attraction exercised by a formed reality is ineffable and escapes analysis.  We speak of “beauty” just because we cannot capture this attraction in a formula that would allow us to produce other instances of the beautiful.  For the same reason, we cannot substitute an abstraction of essence for the concrete aesthetic experience.

Neither, on the other hand, does an exhaustive description of the object and the way it appears precisely convey our sense of its specific instance, though it may present a beauty of its own, and “bring out” aspects of the object’s beauty…

So it seems that there is an excess in the experience of the beautiful…Since we never entirely bring away from the object all its beauty, this implies that even when we stand before the beautiful object, we are “held” by something that binds us only in its not-quite arriving.  To experience the beautiful is not only to be satisfied, but also to be frustrated satisfyingly; a desire to see more of what arrives is always involved. (from Theological Perspectives on God and Beauty, pg. 1, 2)

In this sense, each tree, painting, landscape, or building is not just ascribed beauty by our words, but beauty actually resides within it, acting as a sort of gravity or destiny towards that object’s truth or goodness.  In all of our encounters then, as subjects held by an object’s beauty, we are on an unfinished (never ceasing?) journey towards that which is good and true.  This is what Milbank describes as “frustrated satisfyingly.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 10:00 am and is filed under Beauty, Deep Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.