ABSTRACT
Recognising the beauty and being moved by the beauty of something or of an experience are tied up with its transitory nature. To recognise beauty is to be moved, to understand is to allow something to be itself, and scientific understanding requires a relationship. Because, if beauty is a guide to scientific truth, then scientists need to adopt two different attitudes at once. They need to be willing to be personally affected by the beauty of the world, open to its subjective impact, and they need to value that beauty for itself, not for what it can do for people. Reading Josef Pieper, for example, on Faith, Hope, Love, or Rowan Williams's wonderful book of lectures Grace and Necessity has elicited a deep sense of resonance between author's lived experience as a scientist and the vision of the world their theologies express.
