Beauty in a self-conscious age

Finding authenticity

In one of my favorite religious reads, Simon Tugwell O.P. reflects on the strangeness of the beatitudes, suggesting that among our greatest temptations in the spiritual life is an excessive attachment to our thoughts and feelings about ourselves. We want to feel holy, acceptable, self-satisfied because this makes our tenuous condition a bit more palatable, so we build up for ourselves pleasing identities we can present to God.

“Two young ladies admiring themselves in a mirror,” Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot, circa 1820-1845

This impulse is one to be cautious of, Tugwell warns, and in fact, to avoid, lest we succumb further into self-absorption and the idea that we can do anything without God. The bare truth, he writes, is that we are quite unacceptable, no matter what we have done—good or ill—and part of authentic humble abandonment before God’s mercy is to accept that. Also, we have few to no solid ways of establishing our position before God because He is the one who establishes it.

As I read the book again, I realized anew the extent to which our contemporary culture reinforces a similar temptation. For better or worse, ours is a profoundly self-conscious generation. At every turn are opportunities to gaze back upon ourselves—our photos, our posts, our likes, our followers, our lives, our so-called accomplishments.  

With our homes, our clothes, the books we read, the things we do, we everywhere may face the temptation to do things—to have things—because of how we believe they will make us feel or make us look. We might spend our time and money and energy crafting self-images for the kind of positions we want in the world. 

Grim's story of Little Snow White, which captivates my children’s attention at present, presents a similar warning. Although certainly evil and envious, Snow White’s stepmother the queen is also undeniably vain, returning again and again to the looking glass. The results of her reflection are her main source of knowledge and strength.  

The mirror’s one salvific quality is that it can tell her only the truth, whereas, I fear, and Tugwell suggests, our self-reflective attitude cannot necessarily. We might be always shaping and reshaping our appearances to fulfill some inner desire or inner weakness, some sense of achievement that we can relish without ever facing or even knowing ourselves. 

I don’t mean to suggest that we are in the same camp (castle?) as the wicked queen. Like Snow White’s character, whose central flaw is a lack of vigilance, the queen’s is a warning against the lower possibilities in every human person.  

After all, it is not difficult, when envisioning and planning a room, to over-consider how any given design will appear to others or advance my career, or how I will feel when I have some work of art or piece of furniture. These thoughts can get in the way of making a space that authentically meets the needs of my family, our season in life, even my clients, or the simple fact of what I find beautiful. 

The perils of such self-consciousness are many: We might grow even more self-concerned than we already are, creating a miniature world in which the only other interlocutors are imagined projections of ourselves and the critiques of a crowd. We will likely diminish our capacity for creativity, our crafts hampered by vision and revision. And in the broader schema, we will bypass a creative dialogue with the Creator himself, the dialogue that is an inspired movement out from ourselves. 

But such self-admonition requires explanation. How are we to invest in our homes, to make them beautiful and pleasing to ourselves and our guests, as we ought, without dropping into the kind of self-satisfied pride (not to mention materialism) Tugwell warns against? Similarly, how can we faithfully adhere to the principles of beauty while expressing our personalities without self-consciousness? 

For if, instead of attempting to answer these questions and in rebellion against a crippling self-consciousness, we neglect our homes, our appearances, our efforts at faithfulness, we have forfeited again that creative movement outward, which is actually an invitation and a calling upward. 

Ironically, maybe, in this more serious piece, I think we’ve got to take things a bit less seriously, and the tone of Tugwell’s book is helpful here. A kind of lightheartedness pervades his text, however much the profundity of its subject matter seems to shake one awake.  

We approach our projects—the whole project—more simply, answering basic questions: What must, in this moment, be done? What are the boundaries that guide such work? What would be its noblest expression? If only my family ever sees my house, what kind of decor is still fitting? If no one at all sees my clothes, what do I wear anyways? We get back to doing things because doing them is proper to the moment or the space or the community and doing them without the thought of being looked at.

Or, as Tugwell writes, “Eternal life is knowing God, not in knowing that we know God. It is not that we are unconscious of our own knowledge of God or of our bliss; but the consciousness of ourselves is not the actual object of our bliss, it is not that that actually makes us happy.”