Today I had a thought, and my thought was about how we're wired to be attracted to physical beauty. People always make it out to seem like a bad thing, like if you're a Christian, and you notice and remark that a girl is hot, you need to check yourself because you're falling into an entrapment in a superficial and meaningless value system. You'll miss the deeper aspects of her character because you're too fixated on the outward appearances. "Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised." I have a friend who on occasion wears a t-shirt that reads "Modest is Hottest" and ironically, it's small print right across the breast area of the shirt. Should we then aim to be blind to physical beauty, concerned wholly with the inward?
I have this notion that maybe we're wired to be attracted to and desire physical beauty for the positive reason of learning to be attracted to and desire God. If you would grant: that one reason we were made to be physically hungry (and a reason we fast) is so we would know what it means to depend absolutely on God for sustenance and provision, to hunger and to be sated; that one reason we were made to need sleep is so we would know what it is to be refreshed, which also translates to the renewal that our relationship with God brings about. The physical experiences of our corporeal bodies help us better learn and understand spiritual realities about us, our world, and God. Could it not be the same way with our attraction to beauty? If we know what it is to be electrified at first sight of a beautiful woman, could we not better know what it is to react inexorably to true beauty? Otherwise, how would we understand what it means to call the Lord "Beautiful One"?
I realize there's a lot of room to misstep in taking this line of thought to an extreme, and we're both probably very familiar with those arguments. But you can also be gluttonous if you become too enraptured with physically eating, and you can also be lazy if you become too obsessed with the experience of sleep. We weren't meant to shut our eyes and feel bad about ourselves every time a hot girl walks by. That's not the freedom that Christ promised us.
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Some people keep prayer journals, to archive their thoughts and experiences with God and with life. I think I'd lose an actual journal if I kept one, but it's a lot harder to misplace the Internet. So here are my thoughts about God and about life. I am not always right, but I am always honest. I put them online because I think real community begins when we open doors that we normally keep shut.
4 comments:
you should try to expound on this more. i have been having the similar thoughts lately.
There's another parallel between food and beauty, too. Foods that are most satisfying are often also quite unhealthy. Likewise, there's little correlation between physical beauty and character. What I wonder about is what purpose the mismatch could serve. With food, perhaps it's to give us a reason to refrain from indulging our hunger thoughtlessly (doing so carries real harms), and one could take this as a lesson about the importance of reflecting on our 'spiritual hunger' and not merely biting on the first religion dangled in front of us – the idea being that, while a random cult might provide spiritual fulfillment, we should seek spiritual fulfillment without losing sight of the larger purpose of spiritual hunger. Here nutritional value is analogous to truth.
But I have a harder time constructing a story like that for physical beauty. One can of course take a lesson about not judging books by their covers from the mismatch, and you can extend that in the same way as for food, but it's a bit troubling to me to suppose that other people are being used as object lessons in this way (with no regard for them as people). Would it be so bad if what we perceived as physical beauty was perfectly correlated with virtue (especially seeing as how that's presumably what God's beauty is like)? It's perhaps no less lewd, but “dude, check out the integrity on her” is at least an appreciation of a positive quality, and is the sort of thing that we could appreciate and make decisions on the basis of without feeling dirty.
Because, in the end, it does seem to us that we're not being perfectly virtuous when we let a person's attractiveness determine our behavior towards them. Eying a stranger on the street is one thing, but the effects of physical beauty on behavior are unconscious and pervasive, and so the distribution of physical beauty in the population is prima facie unjust (if it's intentional) and requires some kind of explanation. I have a hard time finding the analogy to the tastiness of unhealthy food persuasive, but what other purpose might there be?
Also, when Emily catches you ogling some girl on the street, are you seriously going to defend yourself with “that's not the freedom that Christ promised us”?
I'm just going to point something out to see what other people think about it. (I don't know what I think.)
I believe that Isaiah chapter 52 verse 14 is generally accepted as being about Jesus. Here it is:
"Just as there were many who were appalled at him [c]—
his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any man and his form marred beyond human likeness" but He sure doesn't sound like the "Beautiful One" there. I'm not sure if that's supposed to refer just to the crucifixion or to Jesus's human form generally, but I feel like it may have relevance to this discussion.
Maybe if you have similar thoughts on the subject or a possibly relevant Scriptural reference, YOU should expound on this more. I can't do all the work.
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