"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know".
John Keats was in good company when he penned these immortal lines in his Ode on a Grecian Urn. The wisest man to have ever lived save God Himself, King Solomon of the Old Testament, came to a remarkably similar conclusion. After spending two solemn chapters expatiating on the futility of life - the way in which progress seems to undo itself, in which in nothing is truly new and in which everything comes full circle - Solomon reaches an epiphany: "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under Heaven...He has made everything beautiful in its time." (Ecclesiastes 3:1,11).
Like Solomon, I have spent much of my life struggling against its inexorable seasonality. When I was successful, productive, happy, comfortable, energetic, peaceful, healthy, confident, hopeful, and otherwise a-ok, I felt as if my life had meaning. But when the winter came, as it always did, I would wonder, like Solomon, why I was even alive.
In no small part thanks to Solomon's teachings, I've come to realise that our conventional dualisms - life and death, dark and light, even good and evil - need to be accompanied by the all-embracing holism of beauty if we are to attribute meaning to the otherwise meaningless aspects of our lives. According to Solomon, meaning can be found even in the midst of grief, hate, war, and death if we are willing to embrace the beauty of the seasons.
Seasons and Spirals
At its core, this beauty derives from the intrinsic circularity of the seasons, whereby the dark is always followed by the light. In fact, in light of the overarching story of the Bible - from Eden, to sin, to the New Jerusalem, from being with God, to separating from God, to becoming one with God - the trajectory is more accurately conceived as a spiral, so that the light which shines tomorrow is always brighter than the light which shines today. To quote the ever-hopeful Samwise Gamgee as he confronted the depths of hopelessness:
“I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why."
Jesus alluded to this idea in His own teachings. Consider, for example, the beatitude: "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted" (Matthew 5:4). What's striking about this statement is that those who mourn, and are then comforted, are somehow more "blessed" (alternatively translated as "happy") than those who did not mourn at all - those, perhaps, who were merely 'comfortable'. Indeed, Jesus's own life is the ultimate illustration of the spiral principle, since His death and resurrection brought about eternal life.
Such a perspective raises questions, however. Why, if we have been saved, do we still sin? Why, if death has been defeated, do we still die? This is where we need to augment our analysis to recognise that, not only do seasons form spirals, but there are seasons within seasons. That is, in order to appreciate the beauty of every season, we must view our present season within the broader sweep of seasonality.
Seasons within Seasons
Broadly speaking, the story of Christianity can be divided into four seasons: the first summer, in which everything is good; the fall, in which evil arises; the winter, in which evil prevails; the spring, in which goodness starts to return; and the second summer, in which everything is even better than it was at first. As I see it, Jesus' death marked the winter solstice - the pivotal point at which the spread of darkness was complete, but also the point from which darkness began to recede.
By this logic, we are living in the early spring, when the first fruits of new life are just beginning to emerge. It should be no surprise, then, that good and evil are intermingled in our day-to-day experiences (see Romans 7-8). By contrast, the Bible deliberately emphasises that the 'second summer' - the age of the New Jerusalem - will mark the end of duality, since darkness will be banished forever (Revelation 21:22-22:5). Thus, in the broadest possible sense, we are living in the season of seasonality, which will one day come to an end. There is indeed a season for everything, including the seasons.
I think we know this intuitively, which is why find the seasons to be natural on one level but unnatural on another. Solomon himself discerned this paradox: "He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end" (Ecclesiastes 3:11). John Keats seemed to arrive at the same revelation when he mused on the equivalence of truth and beauty and their sufficiency for mortal man, who nevertheless perceives that eternity is in his midst, and who is thus tormented by its riddle:
"O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
Everything is Beautiful
Western Christianity, influenced as it is by Western culture, is inclined to 'skip to the good bit'. We often struggle to celebrate Good Friday, for example, qualifying our sentences with 'but' clauses that really belong on Easter Sunday. I think this is a problem, because it doesn't tally with our lived reality, seasonal as it is. Even before His death, Christ embraced this seasonality: practicing what He preached, He mourned for His friend Lazarus, even though He was about to resurrect him (John 11). Some who witnessed the event questioned why Jesus did not simply heal the man; others, struck by overwhelming beauty, marveled at His love.
As Samwise recognised, evil is a corruption, a deviation from what was originally intended; after all, there was no death in the Garden of Eden. Yet God, in His ultimate sovereignty, has worked even evil together for good by weaving it into a beautiful story of redemption (Romans 8:28). Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more (Romans 5:20); though death persists, it has been "swallowed up" in an unstoppable spiral (1 Corinthians 15:55). In this way, He has made everything beautiful.
