This sermon, on beauty, was preached by Christopher Herbert on 25 May 2014 as part of St Paul’s Cathedral’s sermon series ‘What I Want to Say Now: Retired Bishops Speak Out’. Listening to it via YouTube more than eight years after it was preached, I was struck by its commitment to the appreciation of beauty as a means of apprehending as best human beings can something of the true mystery of God. Herbert criticises trenchantly the Church of England’s neglect of the patrimony of buildings, prayers, poetry, and hymnody it has been bequeathed. If anything, this has become more entrenched since 2014.
More optimistically, on the other hand, I think there are possibilities of the image-oriented Instagram generation rediscovering the joys in ‘reading’ a Church and its contents in a way that probably hasn’t been true since the Reformation, which Herbert inevitably misses and few in the Church have yet noticed.
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A couple of months ago, a book was published by Edinburgh University Press. It’s entitled A Companion to the Bible and the Arts, and in it is an essay by Nicholas Bielby, and that essay has not left me alone. It’s actually about the subtleties and difficulties of biblical translation, and in it almost as a throwaway line he writes this:
If beauty is an attribute of God and His Word, then we should hope for intimations of it in the translation of His Word. This beauty is in the story the Bible tells us and we would hope to find it in the way it is told.
His essay is a delight, and thought it focuses on biblical translation, it ranges more widely into the whole field of aesthetics, and I want to quote him again:
An aesthetic experience has this sense of rediscovery of something unknown, but entirely familiar, because it feels right, and true, and beautiful.
You won’t be surprised to know that he doesn’t overload the word ‘feeling’. Because something feels right, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is.
Well, I’ve read and reread that essay with great enjoyment, partly because it is so carefully written, but also because it raises an issue to which I believe we need to give serious attention, and that is the whole question of beauty.