The Subversive Necessity of Beauty
A Review of
Beauty is Oxygen: Finding a Faith that Breathes
Wesley Vander Lugt
Hardcover: Eerdmans, 2024
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Reviewed by Abigail Carroll
Is beauty merely gratuitous, or is it in fact foundational to existence? What actually is beauty, and how can beauty help heal trauma? Does beauty have a role to play in justice, helping sustain the work, for instance, of anti-racism and environmental advocacy? Can reveling in beauty draw us closer to the Creator?
These are some of the questions Wesley Vander Lugt addresses in his rich and fertile exploration of a great mystery. If you have ever taken moments not simply to be moved by the elegance of a forest, a heroic story, or an exquisite work of art, but to ponder why you were moved, you may find a kinship with Vander Lugt, whose book offers a well-marked path for such ponderings.
While he proposes ways to think about beauty, defining beauty as “traces of divine glory in the natural world and human culture marked by an alluring wholeness of entangled forms, experiences, and ideas,” the author is less interested in feeding his reader answers than welcoming the reader along on a journey. “Beauty is not a thing to be grasped, possessed, or controlled; we receive it as a gift,” he insists. And so this book is less a telling than an exploring. Its quest is not so much to delineate beauty in technical terms as to sound out the experience of beauty and its role in human formation and flourishing.
With Vander Lugt, we travel a variety of thematic terrain, searching out beauty in nature, theology, art, literature, philosophy, psychology, contemporary life, and cultural diversity. He also engages with candid honesty the ugly realities by which much of our world is organized and the false promises of counterfeit beauty, such as the “distorted aesthetic” of racism. Vander Lugt’s treatment of beauty and its opposite in light of 21st-century events is timely and particularly cogent.
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Reading Beauty is Oxygen feels in some ways like more of a community experience than a literary one. The variety of voices contributing insights into beauty can perhaps best be described as a chorus of many singers producing a dynamic and satisfying harmony. The author draws on philosophers such as Charles Taylor, Elaine Scarry; theologians such as Karl Barth, N.T. Wright, Hans Urs von Balthasar; poets such as Mary Oliver, Christian Wiman, Gerard Manley Hopkins; and authors of fiction such as Flannery O’Connor, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Add to that the voices of filmmaker Terrance Malick, painter Makoto Fujimura, and activist Ta-Nehisi Coates, plus helpings from the psalms of David, the prophetic writings of Isaiah, the love poetry of Solomon, the laments of Job, and the gospel teachings of Jesus. The chorus rings out with strength and a complex resonance.
While Vander Lugt quotes liberally from a wide variety of authors and thinkers, his voice, like that of a seasoned, quietly passionate tour guide not afraid to let us in on his own story, lends the work a warm coherence. This is no memoir, but it does draw on the author’s personal experience from time to time, adding interest to the rich diversity of ideas presented and marking an inviting, accessible path through those ideas.
Beauty is Oxygen offers not just an inviting and accessible read, but a calming one if read as directed. The text consists of segments typically a paragraph or two in length, each segment separated by an italicized capital O, indicating to the reader to pause and take a breath. Like the space between stanzas in a poem, this break between segments makes for a more contemplative read and asks the reader to engage the content at an intentionally slow pace. This is an opportunity not just to exercise one’s diaphragm, but also to exercise the muscle of wonder. The temptation will be to skip this central element of the book, moving directly from one segment to the next without bothering to take an intentional breath, but the reader who embraces this practice will enjoy the benefit of slowing down, luxuriating in the goodness of oxygen, and more effectively entering into the poetic mode by which we are invited to journey through these pages.
As we read, we encounter a subtle but pervasive invitation—indeed, the invitation of beauty itself—to transcend the suffocating boredom, the “meh,” of the buffered life. We are invited to breathe again in ways that were more common to our ancestors, whose lives were continuously in touch with realities both harsh and magnificent, and whose days were marked by a variety of spiritual practices that interpreted and responded to those realities, sustaining them in the midst of it all. The modern privilege of endless distraction has become equally a buffer from what is harsh and from what is magnificent, alienating us from reality and leading to an existence of isolated inwardness and perpetual, soul-deadening malaise. In this context, beauty becomes not only a hopeful way forward, but a subversive tool in the dismantling of our stuffy, airless cabins.
What if what we need is to be un-bent from the hunched posture of self-centeredness, and what if beauty has a unique capacity to un-bend us? What if subjecting ourselves to beauty’s decentering effect is a way we can be awakened to both the harsh and magnificent realities we are immersed in and, in the process, lose ourselves in order that we might be found? And what if the foolishness of the incarnation, the crucifixion, and the resurrection is at the very heart of beauty—a transformative expression of beauty pointing to its ultimate source?
Whether one comes to this book with a Christian worldview or not, the content holds deep relevance to all in search of meaning. It will appeal to artists and writers, thinkers, social workers, healers and caregivers, ministers, justice workers, and all who suffer the gnawing ache of beauty. Beauty, Vander Lugt argues, has the capacity to help us “risk more love.” When we learn to breathe in beauty, our faith will be transformed, and so, perhaps, will the world.
Abigail Carroll
Abigail Carroll is author of three poetry collections: Cup My Days like Water, Habitation of Wonder, and A Gathering of Larks: Letters to Saint Francis from a Modern-Day Pilgrim. Her poems have been anthologized in How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope as well as in Between Midnight and Dawn: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Lent, Holy Week, and Eastertide. Her work of nonfiction, Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal, was a finalist for the Zócolo Public Square Prize. She lives and writes in Vermont. Find her at www.abigail-carroll.com.
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