Réflexions à la Française, Part 1: A Philosophy of Beauty and a Repurposed Train Station

Almost a year ago God gave my wife and I the opportunity to spend a couple weeks in Paris, with side trips to London and Mont Saint Michel. This excursion impacted me in ways that I am still processing. After a year of reflection, I am ready to put some of my thoughts down in writing for pubic consumption. What follows is the first of what will hopefully be a series of posts where I will unpack the things I observed and the lessons I have drawn.

Paris is beautiful.

Don’t believe the naysayers and perennial pessimists who would tell you otherwise. Of course, like every city in the world, it has its not-so-nice sections, places where tourists are advised not to go, and yes, the Islamic invasion has taken its toll (more on that in a future article). But none of this has succeeded in tarnishing the shine of the City of Lights. From the moment Itacyara and I ventured out of our apartment (in Neuilly-sur-Seine, not exactly Paris, but close enough) and strolled along the Seine – with its charming boat-houses and shaded walkways – we were enchanted by the beauty of our surroundings.

When we emerged a few minutes later on the storied Champs-Élysées the first thing that caught our eyes was a Five Guys restaurant. But then we turned out heads and saw in the distance the majestic Arc du Triomphe, and all crass commercialism was forgotten.

An hour or so later found us at the Galeries Lafayette, which is billed as a shopping mall, but which makes any other shopping mall I have ever been in look like K-Mart.

And it was from the roof of this building that we got our first unobstructed view of the iconic Eiffel Tower.

And this was just the first day. Throughout our stay Itacyara and I found ourselves repeating over and over “this is so beautiful!”

A Philosophical Side Rail on Beauty

Down through the centuries much ink has been spilled in the search for a definition of beauty. Among all the different theories of beauty that have been put forward, the divergent views of Plato and Aristotle are especially intriguing to me.

Plato saw beauty in the forms (his “world of ideas”) . The closer to the forms, the more beautiful. Thus he took a jaundiced eye to human art, which, as an imitation of the imitation of the forms, was twice removed from the formal reality. In his Republic he goes so far as to ban poets from his imaginary society for their negative effect on the youth. He prefers instead to weave a false narrative (he calls it a “noble falsehood”) that would serve to educate the young of the polis as to their civic duties. Though Plato would probably bristle at the term, in modern times we would call this “propaganda”.

Aristotle, on the other hand, pushed back on Plato’s view. Objects themselves were beautiful because of observable properties like symmetry and proportion. And while he acknowledges that art is the imitation of reality, he sees it as being useful to society, having a cathartic, educational and motivational effect on the population.

What, you may ask, does this have to do with Paris? Quite a bit, actually.

You see, beginning in the 11th century and continuing through the 14th century Aristotle’s works were rediscovered and distributed among the universities of Europe. This amounted to a philosophical atomic bomb in the heretofore largely platonic atmosphere of European academia. The Greek philosopher’s thoughts on beauty and art were extensively commented on by the likes of Thomas Aquinas. These commentaries were in turn read by the priests and monks who were in charge of building churches, resulting in, among other things, the majestic cathedrals the sprung up throughout Europe.

More on those cathedrals later, but now we need to stop at a train station.

The Musée d’Orsay

Among the most fascinating places we visited while in Paris was the Musée d’Orsay. This stately building houses a truly impressive collection of art, including works by Van Gogh, Renoir, Monet, and sculptures by Rodin.

Of course we enjoyed seeing all of these, but since our visit I have found myself reflecting more on the building that housed them than on the works of art themselves.

The Musée d’Orsay did not begin life as a museum. The building was built at the turn of the previous century, and was called the Gare d’Orsay…and for you non-francophones out there that means it was a train station. Now here’s the thing: it is possible to take any building and turn it into an art gallery. Just make sure it is properly air-conditioned, then hang the pictures on the wall. But not every such re-purposed building would look like it was supposed to be an art gallery. With its soaring archways framing a glass structure that lets the light pour in, to it’s open gallery (where once trains arrived and departed), to the beautiful clock that looms over the main entrance – this building makes more sense as an art museum than it did as a train station.

This means that back in the waning days of the 19th century a bunch of Parisians got together and said “let’s build a train station, but let’s make it so beautiful that later on it can be an art museum and nobody will think it odd.”

And this brings me to the question that has haunted me ever since I visited the museum: Why have we stopped making ordinary things beautiful?

Of course, to answer that, we probably need to first answer another question: Why did we start making ordinary things beautiful in the first place?

And to answer that question we need to go back to Aristotle and the cathedrals.

From Notre Dame to the Gare d’Orsay

Remember I said that the Scholastic philosophers like Thomas Aquinas picked up Aristotle’s views on the nature and usefulness of beauty. It’s important to note they did not reproduce them wholesale. Rather they ran them through the Christian filter, and generally (though not universally) found them more useful than their platonic counterparts. When applied to beauty, this meant that the aesthetic value of creation could, and indeed should be reproduced in art and architecture, and that this reproduction could serve to elevate the thoughts of man to God.

Hence the quest for beauty was also a quest for God. Artistic endeavor first reached for the heavens, then spread to the ordinary things. First Notre Dame, then the Gare d’Orsay.

Of course there are echoes of Eden here. The main feature of our original paradise was perfect communion with God, in a place where Earth and Heaven met. But the task was always to expand the garden, to fill the earth, to spread the beauty.

And once we have that answer to the second question firmly in hand, the answer to the first becomes evident. We no longer make normal things beautiful because beauty has no overriding purpose. By the time the Gare d’Orsay was being build a materialist framework had been taking hold of Europe for at least two hundred years. They thought they could set God aside but still keep all their aesthetically beautiful things, just as Eve thought she could eat the fruit and stay in the garden. Both were wrong.

But for a little while it probably looked like they succeeded. The ripple effect from the Scholastics was enough for them to build the Gare d’Orsay, after all. But now…well…now we get the Montparnasse Tower, a structure so hideous that all I had to do was Google “ugly Paris skyscraper” and it was the first building to pop up. The only redeeming feature of this monstrosity is that it offers perhaps the best view of the Eiffel Tower. And even here there is perhaps a metaphor, as we stand in our ugly materialistic world and gaze on the beauty bequeathed to us by our ancestors in their search for God.

*For a scholarly work on the link between the Scholastics and the building of cathedrals, see here.

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