In the past 15 years or so, the general turn among Christians of all stripes (even, perhaps counterintuitively, Christians on the very far right) has been away from a rationalistic approach to the Faith and toward an affirmation of the mystery behind its doctrines. In the 1980s and ’90s, an emphasis on fact-based apologetics left American Christians, especially Protestants, with plenty of intellectual arguments but little of the awe that undergirded Christian practice for centuries. The decades since have seen a widespread recalibration, which includes a newfound appreciation for beauty.
Wesley Vander Lugt’s new book Beauty Is Oxygen: Finding a Faith That Breathes is emblematic of this new apologetics. His argument (which he probably would not call an argument) is deceptively simple: Beauty is an essential element of human existence, and without it our souls will die. Experiencing beauty, he claims, brings us closer to God; it also makes us more just, charitable, and gracious. Beauty is a theological necessity, but also a political one and social one.
In this, Vander Lugt is exactly in step with the current longings of many Western Christians. From Alan Noble’s You Are Not Your Own to Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder, Christian thought leaders are busy excoriating modernity for its rampant individualism and the claim that everything of value is consumable. Noble, Dreher, and Vander Lugt (among many others) argue, with varying rhetorical techniques, that the modern project is spent. The proposed antidotes to our common ailment are legion; Vander Lugt’s is simply beauty.
Beauty Is Oxygen is an ambitious little book. Rather than offering a coherent theology of aesthetics, Vander Lugt seeks to curate an experience of aesthetics—not, notably, an experience of beauty itself, but an experience of what it feels like to think about beauty. Beauty is all around us, he writes, and every instance of beauty is a little doorway out of our stodgy modern life into the reality where God is constantly at work.
In the introduction, titled “Why Beauty Matters,” Vander Lugt writes that “beauty is an invitation into an enchanted, breathable life.” He takes Christian Wiman’s (marvelous) poem “Every Riven Thing” as his standard, returning frequently to Wiman’s insistence that “God goes, belonging to every riven thing he’s made.”
In terms of structure, the book consists of short segments loosely connected thematically (each separated by a stylized “O” section break, which Vander Lugt explains in the introduction serves as a reminder to take a deep breath). He says, “What you’ll find in this book is not a seamless argument but a series of provocations”—a stylistic choice that crops up frequently these days. Cultural and philosophical commentators are increasingly chary of these so-called seamless arguments and avoid treatises like the plague. Throughout Beauty Is Oxygen, excerpts from famous writers are interlaced with one- or two-paragraph meditations on beauty, snippets from pop culture (The Simpsons appear a few times), and chains of rhetorical questions (occasionally thought-provoking but more often performative).
Few books of this genre reference quite so wide a range as Vander Lugt’s. In a single page, he mentions John of Patmos, Wes Anderson, Aretha Franklin, Romare Bearden, Wendell Berry, Beck, Post Malone, Kate Bush, and Zara Larsson (on the facing page we find Elaine Scarry, C.S. Lewis, and John O’Donohue). Sometimes this swirl of references works to help the reader connect the dots between various thinkers and Vander Lugt’s insistent non-argument. (I don’t say this snarkily; I simply don’t know how else to describe the claims put forward by writers who are so emphatic that they are not making an argument.) Sometimes, however, it is like a handful of dust thrown into the air: sparkly but ultimately ephemeral.
Vander Lugt starts out by critiquing modern society for creating what he calls “buffered souls,” souls shielded by comfort, constant entertainment, and an illusion of independence from the radical and lifegiving interdependence that is essential to human nature. It’s a good critique. It’s been made many times in the past 50 years, but not a lot has improved, frankly, so I don’t mind seeing it made again. “Beauty in all its forms,” he claims, “has the potential to liberate us into a more expansive, porous, breathable life.”
I’m instinctively in agreement here. Vander Lugt’s call for closer attention to beauty, a necessarily gratuitous thing, goes along with the broader cultural desire for “re-enchantment.” The most tenacious challengers of Christianity are no longer hard-nosed atheists trying to dismantle the Faith’s historicity, but pop occultists who see Christianity as drab and overly institutionalized. At least in the West, attacks on the Christian story of humanity come from a melange of quasi-animist eco-warriors, far-right Nietzschean Odin worshippers, world-government corporate mobsters, Tarot- and palm-reading pansexual It girls, and transhumanist technologists. Focusing on beauty, both the beauty of nature and the beauty of human-made art, pulls us into God’s story, says Vander Lugt. It calls us to repentance, not by overtly confronting us with sin, but by reminding us that we’re “not the center of the story.”
This is a helpful reminder of what repentance really means. It’s more than merely feeling guilty. A right relationship with God is first and foremost a dependent relationship on God—something I certainly don’t think about often enough. I also relished Vander Lugt’s insight that “paradoxically, beauty is both necessary and gratuitous.”
At the end of the book, he writes, “When we articulate what sort of beauty will save the world, the answer should be specific or else it easily becomes vacuous.” He then quotes Dr. Timothy Patitsas: “The actual beauty that will save the world will be nothing less than the ultimate revelation of Christ and of him crucified.” This is a clear stand, a line of demarcation that our culture in thrall to relative truth desperately needs.
Beauty Is Oxygen has many little insights like this that made me pause. But those insights are interspersed with off-putting passages that dither with the reader’s attention, indicating a strange lack of discernment on the author’s part. For example, two multiparagraph passages (long for this book) explore in depth the words (sounds?) meh and wow. Vander Lugt moves from a beautiful but truncated reflection on Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “God’s Grandeur” to an awkward reference to Ross from Friends, which he then refers back to several pages later. His reflection on the etymology of the word/sound “meh” is interesting, but pages later I came across the line “Repent of meh and open your life to wonder.” I physically shuddered at the attempt to give this floppy sound-thing some kind of significance. Phrases like “an opportunity to experience a radical unselfing” and “justice-loving entanglements” clog the prose and obscure Vander Lugt’s meaning.
These lapses might seem inconsequential, but they mar the ethos of what is an interesting and delicate project. I am as big a fan as anyone of blending high and low culture, but giving equal attention to Ross’s line “I’m fine” and Hopkins’s “the dearest freshness deep down things” is not fitting for a book about beauty. Proportion is a key element of beauty, and more than occasionally Vander Lugt’s sense of proportion is flawed. For example, he closes the chapter on “Learning to Breathe” with the sentence
by participating in the beauty of worship, we learn and embrace our role in the drama of God within the mundane, where the story of each day is caught up in the cosmic drama of loss and renewal.
This seeming afterthought is the only reference to the liturgy in the whole chapter. Chapter 3 begins with an anecdote about a Good Friday liturgy in an Orthodox church, but after just a paragraph we move along to think about nature and worship, social media, and various other “spaces” of beauty but do not return to the sanctuary for several chapters, and then it is to a Protestant church. I read Beauty is Oxygen twice and studied the index; the word liturgy itself appears nowhere in the book, though the phrase “liturgical arts” does appear once.
In pre-Renaissance artwork, size takes the place of proportion; the larger, more central the figure, the more important it is. Since Vander Lugt is explicitly eschewing a more rationalistic approach in favor of a grab-bag collection of tiny reflections, we can expect him to establish a similar kind of symbolic “proportion” to indicate the relative importance of these reflections. Unfortunately, he does not do this (at least I hope he does not); in Beauty Is Oxygen, the word wow and a Kehinde Wiley painting both receive more paragraphs than the Orthodox Good Friday liturgy (three for wow, two for Wiley).
A more obvious quibble with Beauty Is Oxygen is that Vander Lugt is much quicker to give space to typically progressive critiques of modern society. He repeatedly mentions the ugliness that comes from environmental neglect, spends quite a few paragraphs on the ugliness inherent in racism, and devotes a whole section to a discussion of the relationship between beauty and justice (understood in the book as social justice). I don’t disagree with his implications here; obviously a beach full of trash, a rainforest denuded of trees, and humanity’s heinous record of race-based violence and oppression are all frightful testimony to our failure to steward what God has trusted to us. But in his catalog of social and moral horrors, Vander Lugt avoids mentioning the ugliness inherent in women seeking death for their unborn children or the ugliness of healthy bodies mutilated to achieve an artificial “gender identity.” The choice to mention environmental disorder but to ignore these equally egregious disorders damages Vander Lugt’s credibility.
The book contains a number of claims that are suspect or at least subject to long theological disagreement, something the author completely ignores. For example, at one point Vander Lugt says with absolute confidence that “there is vulnerability and death at the heart of divine beauty.” This ignores the centuries-long discussion of whether God suffers in his nature as the Father or whether God is untouched by suffering and evil (the theological term is “impassible”).
Elsewhere, writing of the five solas embraced by the Protestant Reformers (sola fide, sola gratia, sola scriptura, sola Christus, soli Deo gloria), Vander Lugt says with absolute confidence, “These slogans were never intended to jettison everything else, like the importance of obedience, tradition, and a revelatory creation.” This is simply not true; the Anabaptists, to name just one example, explicitly rejected the traditional interpretation of the Church concerning the sacraments. Vander Lugt is within his rights to defend the solas of the Reformers, but to claim that they were merely “slogans” intended to clarify, not revolutionize, is so easily disproved as to cast doubt on his other claims.
Like many of his ilk, Vander Lugt focuses on the way the Gospel can enhance our lives but is often silent about the Gospel’s more ethically straightforward messages about sin and repentance. He shares the Good News that because of Christ’s sacrifice, we can be in relationship with God, but skirts the reality that this relationship makes moral demands on us, as when Christ commands the woman caught in adultery to “go and sin no more.” I understand the reasoning here—Vander Lugt is clearly desperate to be winsome—but repressing any part of the Gospel is risky business.
Let me be clear: As an artist, I am sympathetic to Vander Lugt’s plea and intrigued by his method. Christianity in America has sidelined considerations of beauty in its theology, worship, and practice for a long time, and in doing so has robbed itself of some of the richest elements of Christian tradition. And yes, beauty, if it is indeed oxygen, is essential to our salvation, and I am thankful to Vander Lugt for his careful attention to this reality. He offers a defense of beauty’s role in faith so heartfelt, so hungry for mystery, so wary of didacticism, that it may be the last word of its kind; there is little left to say in this vein.
After reading Beauty Is Oxygen, though, I found myself longing not for more apophatic meditations on beauty, but for more doctrine, for more moral clarity, for more—dare I say it—dogma. Vander Lugt’s book comes as part of a cultural movement, and that movement frisks on the edge of a chasm as dangerous as the one it seeks to avoid. In trying so hard to counterbalance the rationalistic excesses of decades past, we run the risk of forgetting the deeply rational—and humane—doctrinal, moral, and liturgical structures that make it possible for us fully to appreciate beauty. Vander Lugt has convinced me that beauty is oxygen. But no human can live on oxygen alone.
