I recall an event during the angst-ridden years of my early teenage life when I was standing a crowded gymnasium full of strangers. (We weren't playing basketball, it was a kind of school event.) It was one of those times (you know those times) when I was unusually conscious of every movement my body made and wanted very badly to appear like I knew someone. As my eyes flitted this way and that across the room, I happened to make eye-contact with a girl off in the distance who appeared to have the most breathlessly beautiful face. She cried out upon seeing me, and came bounding towards me like I was an old friend. I had never seen her before, and had no idea what was happening, but I involuntarily smiled and waved stupidly, either because I had half convinced myself that I knew her or because it was simply impossible not to smile when a face like that is looking at you. You know those times in the movies when the guy sees the girl and suddenly everything starts moving in slow motion while a 70's love song plays in the background? Well, Hollywood wasn’t pulling your leg this time. It was exactly like that.

But the moment she passed the five-yard zone, her eye contact veered away a little to my left, and she threw her arms around some other stranger I had never met. Cue the broken vinyl sound effect. What just happened!?! I had already named three of our children. My feelings of sublime romance transformed into feelings of sublime stupidity. And no, I never talked to her. Ever.

I’m not hosting a pity-party for Sad Single People here. Something like this has probably happened to you at some point or another, and it definitely wasn’t the last time it happened to me (that was only the beginning, welcome to adolescence.) But enough about that. I have burned every last remnant of my five-hundred page poem titled No Woman Has Ever Loved Me orEver Will so as to preserve my untarnished reputation for future scholars. No: I want to make a different point with this story. The funny thing about that girl is that I can’t remember what it was about her face that made it so beautiful. In fact, I can’t remember her face at all. What was really beautiful was the face she made. Her expression was something I can’t describe to you at all, not even if I sketched out every square inch of her features with deadly accuracy.

I’ve deliberated for weeks on writing this article, because I wanted to talk about beauty. And I’ve come to the conclusion that I really have no idea what beauty is. I know that beauty is, that is, I know that it must exist somewhere outside my mind. Even if you reject the colloquialism “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” you’re inevitably setting yourself up for a long-winded dispute over what exactly makes a thing beautiful. Admittedly, some things are a little grey. Body types, artistic styles, toy poodles—sure, it’s all up for grabs. Debate over that all you want. But the constellations in the deep country skies? A sunset on the Oregon coast? The changing of the seasons, or the birth of a human child? Don’t tell me that’s a matter of taste. As our Whitworth professor Dr. Forrest Baird would say, “If you don’t think that’s beautiful, there’s something wrong with you.”

But there is a whole cerebral dimension to beauty that doesn’t abide by any of those indisputable standards. It’s like the difference between physics and quantum physics—the laws just don’t match up. Sometimes I have the honor of meeting a woman who I think must be the most beautiful creature that God has ever created. I’m about to whip out a second draft of my five-hundred page poem, and then they tell me, inexplicably, that they used to struggle with anorexia. It stuns me. I want to say “How could you ever feel insecure about your body? You're not underweight or overweight. There’s not a single flaw on you from head to toe. You’d make Michaelangelo’s David jealous.” In my personal experience, I have noticed that the young women who are most insecure about their looks are also, oddly enough, the most pretty. No matter how many people tell them they are beautiful, they are always feeling ugly inside. And there’s undeniably something missing in those kinds of women (and men, too). A face is only as beautiful as the soul that animates it, and nothing ruins the beauty of a face like a scowling soul.

And then I think about the girl in the gymnasium. I wonder: what did her face look like the moment before she saw her dear beloved? Was it ugly? Beautiful? Plain? I haven’t the slightest clue. Like I said, I can’t remember what her face looked like. All I remember was that it was beautiful. Where did I get this sense of beauty? It is not something obviously beautiful, like a waterfall or the fireflies of the Midwest. The only conclusion is that it was something internal and subjective, either on my mind or hers, that transformed the way I perceived her.

Of course, it is this kind of psychological experience that inspires the saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Despite my overwhelming intuitive sense that beauty must exist outside of my mind, I am driven simultaneously by an equal and opposite intuition which insists that beauty is a trick of the mind, and diminishes in direct correlation with one’s ability to perceive it. For the purposes of our discussion, perhaps it would be best to divide these sensations into categories of Primary and Secondary beauty. Primary beauty is based on the assertion that there are certain shapes, patterns, and experiences outside of ourselves that are inherently beautiful whether we like it or not. Secondary beauty is the elusive kind of beauty that flashes in the eyes of another person for a brief moment, then flickers away before you even realize you’ve seen anything.

Perhaps an illustration would help. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lucy Pevensie reads a Magician’s Book, and learns of a magic spell “to make beautiful her that uttereth it beyond the lot of mortals.” In the book, Lucy sees a picture of herself representing what she would look like if she uttered the spell. “The real Lucy looked away after a few minutes because she was dazzled by the beauty of the other Lucy; though she could still see a sort of likeness to herself in that beautiful face.” This is Primary beauty. The beautified Lucy is an idealized human form, chiseled to almost mathematic perfection, like the Helenic statue of ancient Athens. People will say that the idealized Lucy is merely a product of societal expectations, but no one who has really beheld a beautiful face (in the primary sense) is going to argue about societal expectations. And yes, we must admit it: nothing breeds envy, contempt, and despair like Primary beauty, especially when you look in the mirror and realize that you yourself could never possibly be beautiful in that way.

But then comes Secondary beauty. Later in the scene, Aslan appears behind Lucy, and as Lucy turns around to see him, everything changes. Here Lewis writes that dazzling transformative line:

“Then her face lit up till, for a moment (but of course she didn’t know it), she looked almost as beautiful as that other Lucy in the picture, and she ran forward with a little cry of delight and with her arms stretched out. For what stood in the doorway was Aslan himself, The Lion, the highest of all High Kings.”

Have you ever seen this happen in people? Every once and a while you come across a face you would have never thought as remarkable, until suddenly, it sees him. It sees her. Suddenly, the nose and eyes and mouth assume an arrangement you never saw it assume. Nothing on the face physically transforms. He (or she) simply makes a smile that suits him (or her) so well that you can’t describe it as anything but beautiful.

How do I explain this phenomenon? Well, let’s go back to that old phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. When we think of this phrase, we tend to emphasize one particular word:

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

But what if we emphasized a different word? Suppose we looked at it this way:

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Suddenly the phrase means something totally different. It is not simply the beheld, but the beholder himself who is beautiful. He is made beautiful simply by nature of his title as the beholder. Imagine this phrase as a face, and imagine the words are the facial features. The words of the phrase were not tampered with or rearranged. But the expression the phrase made, once you made a different face out of it, changed the meaning entirely.

So it seems the secret to being beautiful was quite literally staring us right in the face.

To behold beauty is to be beautiful. Isn’t that the whole point of a story like Beauty and the Beast? The Beast would always remain hideous until he had learned to love another. It wasn’t enough for the Beast to simply see that Beauty was beautiful. To see the Primary beauty, to simply acknowledge the fact of her beauty and then turn inward to seeth in his own ugliness, would never break the spell. He needed Secondary beauty: he needed to behold Beauty herself. And the moment he did, the spell was broken. At that moment he transformed into a being commensurate to the Beauty he saw. He became beautiful.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Or what if we looked at Milton’s epic, Paradise Lost? As Satan surveys God’s infallible garden, and observes the sinless couple enjoy their innocent nuptial love, he is filled with hatred:

“aside the Devil turnd
For envie, yet with jealous leer maligne
Ey'd them askance, and to himself thus plaind.

Sight hateful, sight tormenting! thus these two
Imparadis't in one another’s arms
The happier Eden, shall enjoy their fill
Of bliss on bliss, while I to Hell am thrust” (IV: 502-508)

Again, Satan experiences Primary beauty. He acknowledges how beautiful Eden is, but he cannot respond with joy. He sees it as Lucy saw the other Lucy in the picture, as some kind of inaccessible bliss that will never be endowed to him. How could he ever be a part of this, as the fallen archangel, as a hideous serpent? Who could ever love a beast?

But later, as Satan crawls forward to tempt Eve in solitude, something different happens. He suddenly sees her as he never saw her before:

“She most, and in her look summs all Delight.
Such Pleasure took the Serpent to behold
This Flourie Plat, the sweet recess of Eve
Thus earlie, thus alone; her Heav'nly forme
Angelic, but more soft, and Feminine,
Her graceful Innocence, her every Aire
Of gesture or lest action overawd
His Malice, and with rapine sweet bereav'd
His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought:
That space the Evil one abstracted stood
From his own evil, and for the time remaind
Stupidly good, of enmitie disarm'd,
Of guile, of hate, of envie, of revenge” (IX: 454-466).

This passage has never ceased to haunt me, ever since the first time I read it in high school. Notice the difference in word choice between the two passages. In the first passage, Satan “with jealous leer maligne // Ey'd them askance.” But in the second passage, Milton writes “Such Pleasure took the Serpent to behold.” In the first instance, Satan eyes Eden, but in the second passage, he beholds it. Suddenly, Satan becomes “stupidly good.” He beholds Beauty herself, and, for a brief moment, becomes beautiful. He was never really exiled from Beauty: he was only made ugly by his inability to see it. In an imaginative fiction never told in Genesis, Satan peers at Eve in the distance, and thinks to himself—if you’ll pardon the expression—“Oh my God. What the Hell am I about to do?”

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

And that, my friends, is the best portrait I can give of my understanding of Beauty. It is an alignment, a congruence, or even a kind of marriage, between the Primary and the Secondary beauties. In other words, true Beauty is the act of aligning the beauty inside yourself with the beauty outside yourself. The Secondary beauty is made complete by beholding the Primary, and together they compose a symphony, a solemn waltz, which humans for centuries have been calling Beauty. For years I was always baffled by what Jesus meant when He said “to he who has, more shall be given, but for he who does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him.” It sounds like a horrible injustice. Why should the man who has nothing deserve even less than he already has? But now, after looking it in light of Primary and Secondary beauty, it all makes sense. You may have all the Primary beauty that the world could ask for, but unless you have Secondary beauty, and be able to behold the beauty in another, your Primary beauty counts for nothing. Some are born with Primary beauty, but Secondary beauty is a choice. And if you do not have Secondary beauty, even your Primary beauty will be taken away. You will have the face of Beauty and the heart of the Beast, and unless you have that spark of Joy to animate your lovely face, you will always be feeling ugly inside. And you’d be right.

What made the girl in the gymnasium so beautiful? The answer is simple. She had seen someone she loved. And perhaps, at the end of the day, there is really no difference between Love and Beauty. It reminds us of Paul’s teachings: “though I speak in the tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I am but a noisy gong and a clanging cymbal.” Or, to quote the lyric from Les Miserables: “to love another person is to see the face of God.”

It is humbling enough to realize that the girl in the gymnasium, who seemed so beautiful because she had seen me, had not, in fact, seen me. But even more humbling is the fact that maybe, just maybe, she had not even seen the person next to me either. The joke was one both of us. It was never about us. She had seen the face of God.