Eternal Beauty and Ephemeral Flesh — On Patrick Sherry & Hervé Guibert
In Spirit and Beauty: An Introduction to Theological Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2002), Patrick Sherry writes:
“Art, in its highest achievement, gives us a glimpse of eternal beauty and a foretaste of the reality to come.”
This sentence binds the essence of art to two dimensions: “eternal beauty” and “the reality to come.” For Sherry, art is not merely a vehicle of sensory delight or social commentary. It is, in a theological sense, a disclosure—an opening toward a dimension that transcends human finitude.
Where Sherry Meets Guibert
By contrast, the French writer Hervé Guibert, in works such as L’Image fantôme (1981) and À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie (1990), explores art, photography, the body, and the experience of dying with unflinching candor. For Guibert, beauty resides not in eternal permanence but in the fleeting instant. He once wrote:
« La photographie est la certitude de l’évanouissement. »
(“Photography is the certainty of disappearance.”)
Here, photography—and by extension art—is not the guarantor of eternal beauty but the apparatus that testifies to the fragility and mortality of embodied existence.
A Dialectic of Eternity and Transience
If we reinterpret Sherry’s “foretaste of the reality to come” through Guibert’s lens, this future reality might not necessarily refer to religious salvation or transcendent order. It could instead signify the inevitability of death, anticipated in advance, and within it, the beauty that flares up precisely because it is destined to vanish.
For Sherry, art offers a glimpse of eternity.
For Guibert, art confirms the certainty of disappearance.
These perspectives are not simply opposed but intertwined. Beauty acquires its aura of eternity precisely because it is shadowed by transience and decay.
Conclusion — The Double Nature of Beauty
Art both reveals eternal light and reflects mortal darkness. Sherry’s “eternal beauty” and Guibert’s “certainty of disappearance” illuminate, from different angles, the same paradoxical truth.
Beauty is at once a foretaste of the future and an imprint of loss. This tension is what prevents art from collapsing into mere ornament or entertainment, instead raising it to the level of an experience that shakes the foundations of life itself.
