Presented at the 2024 CiRCE National Conference: A Contemplation of Prudence.

Many traditional-minded Christians boldly claim that beauty is objective—but privately, they have a few doubts. Their insistence that beauty is objective is often a frustrated reaction against the absurd claims of relativists who say that Bach is no better than Bon Jovi, and that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. At the same time, attempting to prove the beauty of a certain song is pointless. We know beauty when we see it, when we hear it, but it is often beyond our ability to explain logically. It is easy to talk about the attributes of beauty, but beauty itself evades our grasp.

In this lecture, Joshua Gibbs attempts to explain the following: how to have good taste, why relativists are so annoying, why relativists aren’t wrong about everything—just most things, why beauty is objective—but not in the same way that facts are objective, and why St. Paul’s strange teaching that Christians should think about things “that are of good report” isn’t actually that strange.