Beauty is Truth?

Once an English major, always an English major… and that’s the only excuse I can give for the following essay about why I chose the tagline, “Beauty is Truth” for my business.

In the summer of 1998, I wrote my master’s dissertation (in Scotland) on the obscure subject of Joy. Even if you’re willing to read this page, I don’t want to make you read that dissertation… so I’ll try to put it in a nutshell: Joy is a soul-sensation, a feeling of longing for something unknowable, or a memory of something you just can’t put a name to. It can be sparked by many things – for me, most often by a glimpse of something in the natural world: a brilliant sunset or silent, cold moonrise, a shiver of wind through autumn-clad tree branches, the sudden warmth and light of an early spring day. But I find it also in poetry and prose, in the faces of the people I love, in certain strains of music or even in memories: things of acute beauty.
As explained by C.S. Lewis, who was one subject of my dissertation, it is ultimately a reminder of something beyond this world. To me, as it was to Lewis, Joy is the proof your senses give you of the existence of God.
There is a saying of the Prophet Muhammad, too, that God is beautiful and loves beauty. Because things of beauty remind me that beyond/behind the “reality” we live every day there is an immutable, exquisite power – the ultimate Truth – beauty is truth.

So if you read about it a bit – the Keats quote is comprised, after all, of two of the most discussed lines of poetry in the English language – you’ll find that not everybody, perhaps not even Keats, thinks/thought of the phrase that way. Keats’ own idea was less religious; he wrote in a letter to a friend in 1817, “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination – What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not…”
A little later, the great poet T.S. Eliot called the lines “meaningless.” And according to Wikipedia, the current interpretation indicates more scorn than reverence for the idea of beauty being truth… but to me that sounds a bit like postmodernist bitterness. (I’m more of a Romantic, myself…)
But you’ll also find a plethora of mathematical paperwork on the idea of beauty and truth – there is Why Beauty is Truth: The History of Symmetry and The Universe and the Teacup: The Mathematics of Truth and Beauty, among other books and articles. I’m not a math person by any stretch of the imagination, but I can certainly appreciate the application of this resonant idea in the beautiful precision of actualities.

To me, that mathematical truth is the same as I explained above: an order where there would otherwise be chaos. Truth. Beautiful. And I became a journalist because of the reverence I have for the power of telling the truth, and I read and write fiction because I believe that the best literature contains more truth about humankind than much nonfiction, and those stories ultimately radiate the kind of beauty that reminds… It all fits in so many ways I couldn’t help but choose this name for my photography business!

Here are some more thoughts on beauty and truth from wiser minds:

“The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Love is beauty and beauty is truth, and that is why in the beauty of a flower we can see the truth of the universe.” – Gautama Buddha

“That which you create in beauty and goodness and truth lives on for all time to come.” – Denis Waitley

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever; its loveliness increases, it will never/Pass into nothingness.” – John Keats

“Truth is the beginning of every good thing, both in heaven and on earth.” – Plato

“Of life’s two chief prizes, beauty and truth, I found the first in a lover’s heart, and the second in a laborer’s hand.” – Kahlil Gibran

“The closer we are to God, to divine attributes such as absolute truth, goodness and beauty, the more we wonder. When we separate ourselves from truth, goodness and beauty, we lose wonder and become cynical.” – Peter Kreeft