The Curious Effect of Exposing Children to Beauty

Anybody who goes through life with an open mind and heart will encounter moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words. These moments are precious to us. When they occur, it is as though, on the winding, ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across a window, through which we catch sight of another and brighter world - a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter. There are many who dismiss this world as an unscientific fiction. I am not alone in thinking it real and important. - Sir Roger Scruton

When C.S. Lewis was a little boy, his brother Warnie showed him a miniature garden he had constructed in a “biscuit tin”. Something about that miniature world grabbed Lewis’ imagination and created in him what he later called “joy”, though one gets the impression from Lewis’ elaboration on the idea of “joy” that in some sense he meant “longing”. As an adult convert to Christianity, Lewis harkened back to that miniature garden as something that over time became a kind of a lodestar for him, because the beauty it represented planted a seed that was eventually instrumental in undermining his determined atheism.

Lewis did not have a particularly happy childhood. His relationship with his father was fraught. He lost his mother at a young age, after which he spent time at a boarding school which was run by an abusive headmaster.

What I find fascinating is that this seed, planted during his childhood by his exposure to beauty, only ever germinated in his adulthood. His memory of childhood beauty was so impactful that he himself credited it as being a factor in his coming to faith.

J.R.R. Tolkien was another writer who recognized the importance of beauty and goodness as clues to the meaning of the universe. He also had a difficult childhood, during which he was orphaned. Nevertheless, as a child, he fell in love with the beauty of the natural world, and those childhood impressions of natural beauty informed both his faith and his writing in his adulthood. Notwithstanding the difficulties of his childhood, his exposure to beauty was formative, significantly affecting the trajectory of his life.

For both Tolkien and Lewis, their ability as children to recognize beauty ultimately altered the courses of their lives, even though it was only later that they understood the profound significance of that childhood experience.

Hopefully the reader is starting to detect a pattern. What prompted me to write these observations was something I stumbled across when I was looking for a quote by Whittaker Chambers. Chambers, though he is almost forgotten by contemporary media, was one of the most consequential men of the twentieth century. His memoir Witness is more than a memoir - it is a theological work of art.

Chambers, like Lewis and Tolkien, had a difficult childhood, not least as a result of his own parents’ determined atheism. Chambers grew up to be an atheist himself, a determined communist, and was actively engaged in espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. Eventually he broke with the communists and ultimately informed on his contacts in the U.S. State Department. He also came to a faith in Christ.

In his memoir, he describes two childhood experiences in which he was exposed to beauty and goodness. That exposure planted seeds which germinated in his adulthood and, like Lewis and Tolkien, nudged him toward faith.

The first experience Chambers writes about was a time when he wandered off and found himself in front of a high hedge that he could not see over. He wormed his way through the hedge and discovered, on the other side, an entire field full of purple thistles in full bloom.

“Clinging to the thistles, hovering over them, or twittering and dipping in flight, were dozens of goldfinches - little golden yellow birds with black, contrasting wings and caps.

This sight was so unexpected, the beauty was so absolute, that I thought I could not stand it and held to the hedge for support. Out loud, I said: ‘God.’ It was a simple statement, not an exclamation, of which I would then have been incapable. At that moment, which I remembered through all the years of my life as one of its highest moments, I was closer than I would be again for almost forty years to the intuition that alone could give meaning to my life - the intuition that God and beauty are one.”

Three giants of twentieth century literature. Three difficult childhoods. All having seeds planted in them, seemingly unexpected and unintentional, by their childhood exposure to beauty. All of these seeds germinating in their adulthood, finally emerging as faith, infusing each of their writing in profoundly impactful ways.

One almost gets the sense that childhood exposure to beauty can have an inoculating - even preservative - effect on a person’s spiritual life. Notwithstanding each of these authors’ difficult young lives, there is something about having been exposed to beauty as a child that they credit as decisive in their respective understandings of their faith.

Chambers recalls another impactful moment in which he witnessed the beauty of goodness. I can hardly read what follows without weeping. How can anyone not be moved who loves a child?

There was a big girl at school who seemed much older than I; she may have been fifteen or sixteen. Her family was extremely poor; I had heard that her father was a drunkard. I thought that she was dreadful to look at. Her head was rather large. Her face was red-skinned, bony and hard, and there was an expression on it that I did not understand, but which I now realize was hunted and knowing.

The other children call the unhappy girl “Stewguts”. As she walked home from school, they would form a pack around her, yelping “Stewguts! Stewguts!” until she went berserk. They were careful to keep out of her reach, for she was quick and strong. I never took part in these baitings. My mother warned me never to have anything to do with that girl, never to speak to her.

Stewguts had a younger sister in my class - a pasty-faced child who looked a little like a sheep. She always kept her eyes down, as if she were keeping a secret. She was also very stupid.

One day, during recess, I found myself alone in the classroom with this younger sister. Nobody else was in the room. The door to the cloakroom, which was beside the blackboard at the front of the classroom, opened cautiously. Stewguts peered in warily, and, seeing only the two of us, slipped in.

She had come for a purpose. To impress the meaning of words on us, the teacher used to draw a column of flowers on the board with colored chalk - a different color for each flower. Opposite each flower was a word. The teacher would point to the word. If you knew it, you were privileged to go to the blackboard and erase the word and the flower. This was called “picking flowers”.

Stewguts drew a column of colored daisies on the blackboard. Then she beckoned her sister to come up. Patiently, she went down the column of words, asking her sister each one. The younger girl got most of them wrong. Gently, they went over and over them again. Stewguts never showed any impatience. Sometimes, she let her sister “pick a flower”. I watched fascinated, listening to the girls’ voices, rising and falling, in question and answer, with the greatest softness, until, with Stewguts’ help, almost all of the flower had been “picked”.

Then there was a tramp of feet in the hall outside the room. Stewguts slapped down the pointer and hurriedly erased the last of the flowers. Suddenly she took her sister’s face in both of her hands and, bending, gently kissed the top of her head. As the hall door opened with a burst of voices, Stewguts silently closed the cloakroom door behind her and fled.

I knew that I had witnessed something wonderful and terrible, though I did not know what it was. I knew that it was a parable, though I did no know what parable meant, because I knew that in some simple way what I had seen summed up something very important, something more important than anything I had ever seen before. It is not strange that I should not have understood what I saw. What is strange, and humbling, is that I knew I had seen something I never could forget. What I had seen was the point at which from corruption issues incorruption.

I originally decided to write this post simply because I had been struck by the curious overlapping experience of these authors - Chambers, Lewis, and Tolkien. All with difficult childhoods. All exposed to beauty as children. All profoundly affected as adults by their memories of that exposure.

But maybe there’s also a call to action here. For anyone who has felt helpless to alter the difficult trajectory of a child’s life, it could be that by exposing that child to beauty, you are placing a marker that points him back to what is true. Maybe every time a child is exposed to beauty, some breadcrumbs are being scattered around his childlike mind and heart, a trail which he can someday follow to find his way to God. That’s how it seems to have worked for some of the most consequential writers of the 20th century. Maybe it’s worth at least giving it a try.