The Story of Beauty in Church History

David de Bruyn

Most Christians throughout church history would have been puzzled by the phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” For most believers for 1600 years, beauty was a real, objective quality, existing in God first, and then found in the created world.

Our era is the exception when it comes to beliefs about beauty. Only with a growing rejection of objective truth and objective good and evil in the last two hundred years did it become common to hear that beauty is nothing more than a “personal preference.”

How did the church at large come to embrace similar views? Wouldn’t Christians defend the notion of beauty, since it is tied to the concept of the glory of God? To trace the winding tale of beauty in church history, we must begin before the church began.