Thou shalt make beauty for beauty’s sake

The renovation of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris following the 2019 fire took five years. An estimated 500 craftsmen worked on the project, which was astonishingly meticulous. The New York Times reported that engineers even brought in a “soundscape archaeologist” to help the architects understand the ways their design would impact the echoes of music and footfalls across the cathedral. (The Times piece on this effort is, itself, a work of art.)

It might feel tempting to criticize such extravagance, and many have. Following Notre Dame’s re-opening last month, a self-described “effective altruist” wrote in Vox that to spend 790 million euro on the project was the moral equivalent of condemning to death thousands of malaria patients around the world who might have been saved by 790 million euro’s worth of mosquito nets.

Christians can appreciate the heart behind this view. The disciples asked this same sort of question when the woman anointed Jesus’ feet with an alabaster jar of “expensive” perfume a few days ahead of his crucifixion. Shouldn’t our time, money, and energy belong first to the "poor"? Isn’t "making beauty" far less valuable?

Not necessarily. “Why do you trouble the woman?” Jesus asked his disciples. “For she has done a beautiful thing to me” (Matthew 26:10).

First, a bit of background: “effective altruism” (EA) is a term coined by Oxford philosophy professor William MacAskill, who asserted that the most “effective” philanthropy—typically measured in number of lives “saved”—is the most ethical philanthropy. Effective altruists love mosquito nets, for example, because they’re cheap and extremely effective in fighting the spread of malaria (still one of the leading causes of preventable deaths worldwide).

Christians agree that wise stewardship is a virtue. But without a strong foothold in the larger framework of Christian morality, EA slides into the absurd.

First, it assumes that humans can so proficiently and exactly understand, predict, and execute cause and effect that we might as well be omniscient. To say that rebuilding Notre Dame is the moral equivalent of killing a malaria patient is like saying we can precisely track the physical dollars we send around the world; as if ten dollars sent to Notre Dame somehow physically rips ten actual dollars from the hands of an aid worker in Zambia.

But EA has an even bigger problem: It can’t answer why suffering is bad in the first place. It can’t explain why life is worth saving; or why it’s more worth saving than, for example, a marble column in a Gothic cathedral. Most public-facing effective altruists (MacAskill, Sam Harris, Peter Singer, Elon Musk) are avowed materialists, making their position even more illogical. If human beings are mere clumps of matter anyway, what distinguishes us from a cathedral?

Christians, on the other hand, have a comparatively “easy” answer here. We believe life is valuable because God gave it to us, and for a purpose. We believe human lives are more valuable than all other lives because only humans were made in His image. We trust that temporary human suffering is not the worst thing that can happen to us. And we believe that beauty is morally good, because God loves it.

In the very beginning, God called the world He made “good.” He filled His psalms with poetic odes to the sky and the stars and all sorts of beautiful things which “declare the glory of God.” The Old Testament law commands the Jews to make a meticulously detailed ark and Temple, and to make sacrifices of burnt incense for an “aroma pleasing to the Lord.” Thou shalt make beauty for beauty’s sake.

And because God is generous and good, beauty has practical use for us, too. The sense of awe we feel when we experience something beautiful can lift our mood, calm our nerves, and draw us outward. It can point us to God.

To be clear, it’s not the Christian position that donating to the cause of aesthetic beauty in a restoration project is morally equal to paying for food or water for the homeless person on the sidewalk in front of you. We have a philosophical framework for this, too. Augustine called it the “doctrine of moral proximity”: Our greatest responsibility is to meet the most profound needs closest to us.

But the irony in scoffing at the price tag for art is that in professing to value people over money, it actually values money too much. Solomon wrote about this in Ecclesiastes: “And I commend joy, for man has nothing better under the sun but to eat and drink and be joyful, for this will go with him in his toil through the days of his life that God has given him” (Ecclesiastes 8:15).

The Christian, it turns out, can be much freer with life and money than the effective altruist. We should be wise stewards. We should care for each other. And we should make beauty, because life is a breath.