Robert E. Proctor.

In doing research on the origins of the liberal arts, I've discovered that beauty played a large and well-recognized role. Here are some books that have deepened my understanding of this forgotten but, in my view, recoverable dimension of the liberal arts tradition.

Mathematicians and physicists have long recognized that beauty, understood as objective order and symmetry, points to truth. In his recent Science and the Trinity: The Christian Encounter with Reality (Yale University Press, $15, 203 pp.), physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne invokes the often-quoted remark of Paul Dirac, one of the founding figures of quantum theory, that it is more important to have mathematical beauty in one's equations than to have them fit the experiment. "Of course," Polkinghorne writes, "Dirac did not mean that empirical success was an irrelevance in physics--no scientist could believe that." What he meant was that the failure of equations to fit the experiment might be traced to bad approximations or to faulty experiments themselves. "But if the equations were ugly," Polkinghorne observes, "well, there really was no hope for them." Dirac, he continues, "made his many great discoveries, including the existence of antimatter, by a lifelong and highly successful quest for mathematical beauty."

The recognition of beauty as an objective constituent of reality may be a bridge between the sciences and the arts and humanities. The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-88) made beauty a vital question for contemporary theology. Pattern of Redemption: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Continuum, $29.95, 336 pp.) by Edward T. Oakes provides a highly readable introduction to Balthasar's thought. Balthasar believed that ancient Greco-Roman concepts of beauty pointed toward what the Hebrew Bible calls the "glory" of the Lord. Oakes makes a formulation that I have used with great success in my teaching. A truly beautiful form, he maintains, has two characteristics: it attracts, and it is inexhaustible. Balthasar would say that in whatever medium--music, literature, painting, sculpture--a beautiful form captures the mystery and depth of being, and thus points to infinity.

The relationship between beauty and infinity is the theme of David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans, $35, 554 pp.). Hart also pays tribute to Balthasar, whose work "genuinely inaugurates a new kind of theological discourse." For Hart, Platonic metaphysics, postmodern philosophies (especially Nietzsche's), and Christianity are all narratives. But where the Christian story persuades through the beauty of its gospel of the peace of Christ, other narratives persuade through rhetorical violence (a violence that can win over Christians themselves, Hart observes). The Christian story of Creation, Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Eschaton, moreover, is the only narrative of being in which difference and particularity are not forcefully overcome in some overarching metaphysical totality, but rather are recognized as infinite variations in the gift of creation from a triune God. God is a dance of love; and for Hart, the beauty that creates infinite differences and harmonizes them peacefully is the Trinitarian "divine counterpoint" of the music of Bach, whom Hart provocatively calls "the greatest of Christian theologians." Bach's music, with its infinite possibilities of variation and resolution, points to the Christian "beauty of the infinite."

And what about the beauty of human artistic creation? Eugene O'Neill's Last Plays: Separating Art from Autobiography (University of Georgia Press, $39.95, 256 pp.) by Doris Alexander shows how O'Neill took the stuff of his life and transformed it in his dramas. Alexander has spent her career studying the creative process whereby the human mind gives birth to art--her previous books include Creating Characters with Charles Dickens and Creating Literature out of Life: The Making of Four Masterpieces--and is well equipped to explore the genesis of O'Neill's famously autobiographical plays, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten. Alexander sets out to correct what she calls the prevailing "misinformation" concerning O'Neill's life. "If there was anything O'Neill himself was clear on," she writes, "it is that a literal following of the historical facts will never add up to a tragic revelation of the meaning of human life.... No one can achieve emotional truth, much less philosophical truth, by reporting everything irrelevant or contradictory that falls within a particular set of facts. An artist of necessity selects his materials."

For example, in Long Day's Journey into Night, Eugene is present not only in the character representing his youthful self, but also in the personalities of the mother and father. In thinking about the emotional build or even the fundamental meaning of a scene, O'Neill freely adopted, adapted, changed, and invented events and attributes, Alexander points out, in order to develop material "better suited to the needs of his story." The needs of his story are aesthetic. O'Neill's plays attract through their inexhaustible portrayal of the human search for love. It is beauty--not autobiography--that gives them their truth.

Robert E. Proctor is Joanne Toor Cummings Professor of Italian at Connecticut College.