Greek culture did not claim that the world was wholly beautiful. Its myths include monstrosities, mistakes, and bodies that fall outside any ideal. Plato sharpened that tension into philosophy. Sensible reality, as he saw it, was a diminished copy of a more perfect world of forms. The visible world was not the final standard. It was an imitation, and often a poor one.
At the same time, Greek artists treated the Gods as the model of supreme beauty. Olympus became a reference point. Statuary aimed at perfection through proportion, balance, and restraint. Beauty was not assumed. It was pursued.
In Christianity, key parts of this relationship were inverted. From a theological and metaphysical point-of-view, the entire universe is beautiful because it is divine workmanship. Creation is beautiful because it is made by God and with intention. In this framework, even ugliness and evil are pulled into a larger account of meaning. They are not celebrated, but are no longer outside the order. Christ, the human expression of divinity, is often portrayed at the moment of humiliation and suffering. The central image of redemption is not a serene body but wounded. Early Christian writers insisted on the goodness of all beings, and they anchored that insistence in scripture. Genesis states that at the end of creation God saw all that he had made and it was good. The Book of Wisdom adds a striking claim: the world was created according to number, weight, and measure, that is, according to criteria that resemble mathematical perfection.
Philosophy reinforced an aesthetic view of the cosmos. The idea that the world reflects ideal beauty has Platonic roots. Calcidius, in his late antique commentary on Timaeus, speaks of the splendid world of beings and its peerless beauty. The world, in this view, is not only functional. It is radiant. It is meant to be seen as an image of a higher form.
Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite intensifies the metaphor of radiance. Beauty is not merely a property that objects possess. Beauty is a cause that pours itself out. It distributes fairness to each being according to its measure, and it produces harmony and splendor across creation. The language is luminous: beauty appears as light that makes things beautiful.
Similar and dissimilar things, species and forms, and the many layers of causes and appearances, are gathered into a unity that exceeds any single part. Medieval authors return repeatedly to this theme, sometimes described as the beauty of the whole, or the all beauty of the universe.
But the claim that the universe is beautiful confronts an obvious problem. Evil exists. Deformity exists. Corruption exists. If beauty and goodness are traditionally linked, then saying the universe is beautiful can also imply that it is good. How can that be reconciled with what the world plainly contains?
Augustine provides one answer. In De ordine, he acknowledges that we often perceive disharmony, even an insult to sight, when parts are arranged incorrectly. Yet he argues that error itself belongs within a larger order. In the Confessions, he insists that evil and ugliness do not exist as positive realities in the divine plan.
A related approach justifies ugliness by analogy with art. Deformity and evil function like shadow in a painting. Chiaroscuro makes light intelligible. Contrast reveals structure. The presence of darkness can disclose the coherence of the whole, even when the darkness is not desirable in itself. Others push the argument further. Sin disrupts order, but punishment restores it, so even the damned can be presented as evidence of an underlying law of harmony.
What about attention from the object to the observer. What is judged ugly may appear so because of flawed perception: poor light, the wrong distance, an oblique angle, or air that blurs contours. The judgment of ugliness, then, can be a report about conditions of viewing, not only about the thing itself.
During and after the Renaissance, the reevaluation of the human body produces a new problem: excessive beautification. Distressing events are sometimes rendered with an emphasis on noble strength or gentle sweetness rather than raw brutality. The torture becomes secondary to the aesthetic of endurance. In some cases, the result is openly eroticized, as in many depictions of Saint Sebastian, where the wounded body is presented as an object of desire as much as a symbol of faith.
One subject resists this softening more often, that is the hermit. The hermit is marked by deprivation, exposure, and time in harsh places. The desert is not flattering. Baroque spirituality uses hermits to celebrate disdain for bodily comfort, fasting, flagellation, and discipline. The stylites, who lived on columns, intensify the image. Weather, insects, illness, and relentless interior struggle become the visible cost of their spiritual stance. Their ugliness is treated as testimony and not failure.
Sartre’s No Exit presents an inferno without flames. Three people are confined in a room with the light always on and the door closed. In ordinary life, people can evade the gaze of others, or at least pretend that they are not fully seen. In Sartre’s room, there is no escape from judgment. The scorn of others becomes the punishment. One character begs for physical torture instead, because pain seems simpler than exposure, but the point remains: there are no instruments needed. Hell is other people.
This long arc yields a critical question – what to do with ugliness in a world we want to call meaningful? Greek culture showed that the world was not uniformly beautiful and treated beauty as an achievement. Christianity, in many of its dominant strands, insisted that the whole is beautiful because it is created, and then built philosophies to account for what harms the eye.
One can use the beauty of the whole to minimize the suffering of the part. A better use of the tradition is more demanding. Ask whether beauty is fragile, or whether it is robust enough to include shadow without denying it. Ask whether number, weight, and measure describe a world that is easy, or a world that holds together even when it hurts.
References
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Plato’s Timaeus,” online reference article, Accessed February 12, 2026.
- Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Divine Names, online translation at Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
- Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Book VII, online translation at New Advent.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Medieval Theories of the Transcendentals,” online reference article.
- Tertullian, “To the Martyrs,” online translation at New Advent.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, online essay and collection materials on Saint Sebastian iconography.
- Oxford University, Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity database, record and materials on Simeon Stylites and stylite traditions, Accessed February 12, 2026.
- Jean Paul Sartre, No Exit, bibliographic record and synopsis in major online reference sources.