Down With Ugly: Thomas Kincaid, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the Source of Beauty

I was browsing around Barnes and Noble last night with my wife when I spotted the title "The Beauty of Holiness" on the cover of a periodical entitled "Chronicles". It caught my attention because I am increasingly convinced of the vital connection between truth and beauty, between theology and aesthetics, between the glory of God and the glory of created order. These are connections we seem to have all but lost track of as the Church over the last few centuries.

Those of you who know me well, know I am prone to give Thomas Kincade crap from time to time. It's nothing against Thomas personally, I guess, it's just that his art is so darn bad. And not bad as in good. Bad as in ugly. Normally I wouldn't go out of my way to draw attention to bad art. There is afterall a lot of it out there. But TK goes out of his way to connect his syrupy, treacle to the Christian faith. And I can not let this slide without comment. Bad art is bad religion. (I think Rookmaker said that). Kincaid's paintings are so self consciously untrue in what they communicate, I'll stop just short of labeling what he does "sin". I have taken a lot of heat for comparing his paintings to pornography. Yes, I'm serious. It's nothing against Kincaid personally, and his work is not worse that much of what is out there under the guise "Christian art". It just happens to be the most popular. But I will continue to insist that aesthetics is a moral issue. Or perhaps aesthetics and morality are subsets of the same over arching category: Shalome. Either way, bad art disrupts Shalome. (Shalome, according to theologian Cornelius Plantinga, can be understood as "the way things ought to be").

Unfortuantely, the Church (especially the Evangelical church in the West) has contributed to this vandalism of aesthetic Shalome in a number of ways, (and we simply don't have room in this post to address the train wreck called "Christian Contemporary Music") but one way we continue to offend is with poor architectural design of our places of worship. Churches should not be ugly. They should be beautiful.

Thomas Fleming agrees. Check out these excerpts from his article then go buy the magazine:

During the Renaissance and Enlightenment, magnificent churches were constructed, and even if I sometimes deplore the taste and spiritual formation of the builders, I have to admire the splendor. Even in the spiritually bankrupt 19th century, people demanded something more than mere utility in church architecture... these poor souls wanted to adore their Creator in a building that no one could confuse with a factory or grain silo. Then what the Hell has happened?

Obviously Christians can worship in a barn or in a sewer, but , given the choice and resources, any normal person would prefer to worship in "the beauty of holiness".
-That's just your opinion. Haven't you ever heard that beauty is in the eye of the beholder?
I'd rather to find it in the eye of the storm. "There's beauty in the bellow of the blast- and grandeur in the growling of a gale." Terror is apart of grandeur... "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," but what sort of fear or awe is inspired by light woods, soft carpet, and the reassuring comercial ambiance of the contemporary mall-church, wether Protestant or Catholic?


Then Fleming goes on to argue that the 19th century witenssed the rise and fall of aestheticism as an alternative to Christianity. he says we walked away from "the beauty of holiness" and pursued the "holiness of beauty" instead. When Richard Wagner composed Parsifal, a Christian themed opera, it was too much to handle for his Christophobic friend, Friedrich Nietzsche who hated the work "because he admired and feared it". Nietzsche said "It was as if someone were speaking to me again, after many years, about the problems that disturb me- naturally not supplying the answers I would give, but the Christian answer, which afterall has been the answer of stronger souls than the last two centuries of our era have produced".

Fleming writes,

This then is the reason why Tel Aviv is so ugly, and why Moscow and Detroit are (for the most part) ugly... We of the Modern Age have not accidentally stumbled into ugliness; we have embraced it the way a married man embraces an ugly prostitute. We hate beauty because we hate the Source of beauty, and in deliberately building ugly churches, we are betraying our true allegience, which is not to God or even to Mammon. But, sursum corda: There is nothing wrong with modern churches that a fleet of FEMA bulldozers cannot fix.


A couple of years ago a friend and I were having coffee at a local coffee house that just happens to be down the street from an abortion clinic where Christians were picketing and across the street from the ugliest, electric blue office building with some sort of odd, decorative silver scaffolding pasted all over the facade. My friend (who is not a part of any church) and I were discussing the merits and follies of Christian picketing when he (a graphic designer by trade) suggested that perhaps my church should get some signs and picket the ugly office building across the street. Our signs would say "DOWN WITH UGLY!" We had a good laugh. But you know... I think we were on to something. Unfortunately, the place our protest should begin is with our own churches that disregard aesthetics as a sign of our own disregard for the Source of beauty.

Down with ugly, indeed.