Jonathan Edward's View on Beauty in Creation

Jonathan Edwards comments on divine beauty in creation. God uses nature to communicate his beauty to His creatures.

Now we have shown that the Son of God created the world for this very end, to communicate himself in an image of his own excellency.

He communicates himself, properly, only to spirits, and they only are capable of being proper images of his excellency, for they only are properly beings, as we have shown. Yet he communicates a sort of a shadow, or glimpse, of his excellencies to bodies, which, as we have shown, are but the shadows of beings, and not real beings. He who by his immediate influence, gives being every moment, and by his Spirit, actuates the world, because he inclines to communicate himself and his excellencies, does doubtless communicate his excellency to bodies, as far as there is any consent or analogy. And the beauty of face and sweet airs in men are not always the effect of the corresponding excellencies of mind, yet the beauties of nature are really emanations or shadows of the excellencies of the Son of God. So that when we are delighted with flowery meadows, and gentle breezes of wind, we may consider that we see only the emanations of the sweet benevolence of Jesus Christ. When we behold the fragrant rose and lily, we see his love and purity. So the green trees, and fields, and singing of birds are the emanations of his infinite joy and benignity. The easiness and naturalness of trees and vines are shadows of his beauty and loveliness. The crystal rivers and murmuring streams are the footsteps of his favor, grace, and beauty. When we behold the light and brightness of the sun, the golden edges of an evening cloud or the beauteous bow, we behold the adumbrations of his glory and goodness, and in the blue sky, of his mildness and gentleness. There are also many things wherein we may behold his awful majesty, in the sun in his strength, in comets, in thunder, in the hovering thunderclouds, in ragged rocks, and the brows of mountains. That beauteous light with which the world is filled in a clear day, is a lively shadow of his spotless holiness, and happiness and delight in communicating himself; and doubtless this is a reason that Christ is compared so often to those things, and called by their names, as the Sun of Righteousness, the morning star, the rose of Sharon, and lily of the valley, the apple tree amongst the trees of the wood, a bundle of myrrh, a roe, or a young hart. By this we may discover the beauty of many of those metaphors and similes, which to an unphilosophical person do seem so uncouth.

Michael A. G. Haykin comments on Jonathan's Edwards view of divine Beauty and its enjoyment of it by us is necessary in our walk with God.

Edwards' approach could also be helpful in that it explains why aesthetic experience is for many people also a religious experience. Moreover, by emphasizing that the beauty we perceive in the created realm is a mode of God's presence, he avoids the seeming nebulousness of much of the discussion about divine beauty.

If follows, of course, for Edwards, that those who ignore the beauty of God in creation are committing a religious fault. For Edwards, 'the beatific was basic' to God and the universe. Moreover, Edwards is convinced that men and women uniformly fail in this regard, for the have lost the faculty to see the visible beauty of God in his creation. They perceive the secondary beauty, but fail to see the divine beauty that saturates nature. This faculty can only be restored through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the 'agent of conversion and of all our good'.