One of the enduring mysteries of human experience for me is the link between beauty and melancholy or yearning. My paradigm example is a slow movement from Mozart’s piano concertos: simple, lovely yet often gut-wrenching. Many people will have a similar story from other music.
Psychologists and philosophers have attempted various explanations – for example, philosopher Immanuel Kant’s notion of the sublime, which links the pleasure of beauty with potentially terrifying vastness and awe.
I tend to think beauty can bring this sort of ache partly because such experiences are fleeting – we cannot stay in that heightened emotional state for long. They offer a glimpse of something beyond, something eternal.
As the author of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes – traditionally said to be King Solomon – wrote three millennia ago, God “has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart.”
That yearning for something we only dimly grasp but understand to be infinitely valuable is something all humans have, even if they suppress it.
As C. S. Lewis observed, experiences of beauty do not ultimately satisfy: “They are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” Rather, beauty is a messenger from beyond. Yet eternity is a slippery concept. In English, it has come to mean of infinite duration – eternal life, which the Bible speaks of, is unending life – and that is true.
But it is more, too. In the Greek of the New Testament, what we call eternal life is literally “the life of the age [to come]”. Its primary reference is to the quality of life believers are promised in the presence of God after the resurrection, when all tears are wiped away, all suffering forgotten, and perfect peace and joy reign.
A further reason we can struggle with the concept is that nothing in the realm of nature is eternal. Yet the eternal is accessible in the natural world, for the prophet Isaiah tells us that “the grass withers and flower fades, but the word of our God will stand for ever”. God’s word is eternal, and so is his love, while Christians also believe the eternal invaded the temporal in the form of Jesus.
This means, as the Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth in one of the most precious promises in the Bible, “for now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”
Barney Zwartz is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Public Christianity
Barney Zwartz, a senior fellow of the Centre for Public Christianity, was religion editor of The Age from 2002 to 2013.
