False Beauties

“I’m not all that surprised when I hear of 18-year-olds who expected to hold a man with their bodies, and yet find themselves objectified and rejected. But a 59-year-old should know more about beauty and love,” writes Aimee Byrd, a Calvinist blogger writing at the usually interesting and sometimes fascinating Reformation21. (I say “usually interesting” because some of the theological discussions of the fine points of Reformation theology will leave most Catholic readers in a coma.)

She’s writing of an older woman saddened because a new boyfriend said she was too “wrinkly” to have sex with, and who eventually realized that she liked her body just the way it is. Which was better, but still not quite right. Byrd continues:

I think we all, men and women, fall for this lie: that beauty is something to be consumed. We see something beautiful and we think that we must have it exclusively. And we want to be that something beautiful that others will want. And so we lower our standards. We reduce beauty to smooth skin and measurements, or as we age, to a certain level of maintenance and pride.

The thing is, we all want to be more than beautiful. We want to be in the beauty. C. S. Lewis puts it this way in his essay, “The Weight of Glory:”

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.

It’s something I think about, having daughters growing up in a world that wants them to be a person who consumes beauty, and therefore buys things to secure it. The world’s alternatives tend simply to negate, like the kind of feminism that makes a virtue of being a “crone” or the forms of western Buddhism that teach you that the world just doesn’t matter. Only Christianity provides a way to live in true beauty in which one can have some shrewd idea of the mixture of beauty and ugliness of which we all consist and some idea of how to increase the first.