God's pleasure--the beauty creation possesses in his regard--underlies the distinct being of creation, and so beauty is the first and truest word concerning all that appears within being; beauty is the showing of what is; God looked upon what he had wrought and saw that it was good.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that beauty reflects the divine nature of creation and serves as a measure of goodness in the world.
David Bentley Hart's quote conveys the idea that beauty is intrinsic to creation and is perceived as a reflection of God's pleasure. It emphasizes that beauty is not only a characteristic of things but is also a fundamental aspect of their existence; it signifies the goodness with which God views creation. The notion that 'God saw that it was good' highlights the connection between beauty, existence, and divine approval, suggesting that recognition of beauty can lead to a deeper understanding of the world and our place within it.
In practice
Sharing this quote during a discussion on the philosophy of aesthetics.
For, after all, if it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity; sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God.
But, in fact, materialism is among the most problematic of philosophical standpoints, the most impoverished in its explanatory range, and among the most willful and (for want of a better word) magical in its logic, even if it has been in fashion for a couple of centuries or more.
Christians, indeed, have a special obligation not to forget how great and how inextinguishable the human proclivity for violence is, or how many victims it has claimed, for they worship a God who does not merely take the part of those victims, but who was himself one of them, murdered by the combined authority and moral prudence of the political, religious, and legal powers of human society.
Lest we forget, the birth of modern physics and cosmology was achieved by Galileo, Kepler and Newton breaking free not from the close confining prison of faith (all three were believing Christians, of one sort or another) but from the enormous burden of the millennial authority of Aristotelian science. The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not a revival of Hellenistic science but its final defeat.
If minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.
Had not almost every man suffered by the Press, or were not the tyranny thereof become universal, I had not wanted reason for complaint.
Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall.
Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire.
Rules are mostly made to be broken and are too often for the lazy to hide behind.
Nothing burns like the cold. But only for a while. Then it gets inside you and starts to fill you up, and after a while you don't have the strength to fight it.
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