The beauty which creation is meant to possess, the splendor which God has rendered to creation, making it attractive and desirable, often remains unseen. This is because sin has marred the very face of creation, and hides the created glory given to it. Instead of beauty, we often encounter horror and dread, as we see what transpires before us. What monstrous actions are done in and by nature; where is the beauty in the way which species use each other, such as when a caterpillar has its very being taken over by wasps who leave their eggs within it, consuming it from the inside-out? What a dreadful place the world that is possible. Whence the beauty?
Beauty is the exterior pull of the good, the attraction which fascinates us and motivates us to act. Beauty is sustained by the good, and beauty makes that which is good a joy. Ugliness as the corruption of the beautiful must make use of beauty, and represent it, even as evil takes and corrupts what is good. There is beauty in ugliness, for ugliness only has its form because it is the corrupted form of that which was one beautiful, the same way evil can only exist as the corruption of the good. We can be fascinated with that which is ugly, because it still contains that which is fascinating within it: the beautiful, however obscured it has become. That means it is once again possible to bring out this beauty, to restore it; the process is one of healing, even as one is made good by healing the corruption of sin and repairing the harm done to the person by their evil. The initial splendor and radiance of creation, its internal beauty, must be once again released; the internal potentiality of this beauty must itself be seen, and through humanity, this is possible, because we have been given the task to mediate God’s grace over creation. Just as we are refashioned through Christ, and made even greater than what we once were before sin, so too God has given us the ability not only to restore nature to her pristine beauty – but to transfigure it, to creatively add to it, through the mediation of grace. This, of course, means allowing nature to find its fulfillment, just as in our restoration, God allows us the ability to work out our own salvation; we must not think we determine how nature is to manifest its beauty, but rather, we are to help direct and lead it so it can.
We do not, therefore, bring out what is news, as if we are creating ex nihilo; nor are we expected to mold the world in our image, as if we were God over nature. We are to restore and refresh nature through grace; this means, of course, we do this as co-workers with God, and without God, we will find this is impossible. Human endeavor set about to recreate the world in our own image will only corrupt and destroy the world even more; the beauty we establish might at first, be quite beautiful, but the ugliness inherent in our warped subcreation will reveal the true ugliness of what we have wrought, and it will show the ugliness of humanity when it seeks independence from God.
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