The picture attached to this post is of a sunset taken through a frozen waterfall in Michigan by Jake Trost (www.jaketrostphoto.com). It is as beautiful a work of abstract art as I have ever seen, and if Jake hadn’t been there, no one would ever have seen it.

And that raises the question, how many scenes of gratuitous beauty like this one have played out over the millennia with no one there to see them? How much beauty has gone unseen and unappreciated in our world? To take it a step further, our technologies are beginning to let us see some of the wonders of the universe and the incredible beauty there for the first time ever, yet that beauty has been unknown and unknowable to us until now. And as our technologies get better, more beauty will surely be revealed.

This raises the question, why is all this beauty there? What purpose does it serve if no one is there to appreciate it? Why is the Creation so full of gratuitous beauty?

The ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato taught that the three transcendentals—the Good, the True, and the Beautiful—undergird all existence. The early Christians recognized truth in this and identified the origin of the transcendentals in God, the source of all goodness, truth, and beauty. And Christian theologians and mystics have long recognized that Plato was right: the beauty in the world is a pale reflection of the beauty of God Himself.

God delights in beauty. Why else would He have built so much of it into the Creation knowing that no one would ever see it or hiding it for untold years until we could discover it?

We would do well to pay more attention to beauty. It may well prove to be a route bringing us closer to the heart of God.