Beauty So Old and So New: On the Continued Moral Salience of Formal Beauty

Classical accounts of beauty that emphasize harmony, unity, and radiance have come under sustained moral criticism in modern theology and philosophy, particularly in light of historical atrocities. After Auschwitz, such conceptions of beauty have been accused of moral escapism or irrelevance, prompting a turn toward cruciform accounts that seek to secure beauty’s moral salience by locating the paradigmatic manifestation of beauty in the cross of Christ: The cross of Christ reveals a deeper, darker beauty that can subvert the deformity of evil by assuming it into itself. This article uses Jeremy Begbie’s account of beauty as a case study to argue that at least some cruciform accounts of beauty risk conceptually and metaphysically entangling beauty with evil, thereby aestheticizing it. Against this backdrop, the article proposes a rehabilitation of formal beauty understood in classical terms. It argues that formal beauty can be morally salient in a horror-torn world through what is termed contrastive aesthetic insight . Rather than absorbing evil, formal beauty stands over against it, allowing evil to appear more clearly as deformity, lack, and violent disruption of the peace of being. This contrastive function sharpens moral perception and informs agents’ practical and attentional orientation to the world. Beauty, on this account, remains fragile and demanding yet capable of orienting moral vision in a world marked by horror.