Geoff's Miscellany

Beauty, according to the Thomists, is rightproportion, brilliance, and integrity. Evolutionary theorists have tried, and in some cases managed, to find biological grounding for our concepts of beauty. For instance, they at least seem to grasp the relationship between human beauty and reproductive viability, but even these relationships are associational rather than necessary.

But it is more ineffable than that. David Bentley Hart is more expansive:

One of the ideas that emerges from the first two chapters of Genesis is the distinction between creation and cultivation, nature and art, or even chaos and order.

For instance, when God makes the world it is a chaotic emptiness (Genesis 1:1-2), but through the next several verses, he organizes it into a series of useful categories. Then he makes humanity, explaining that not only would they reproduce and eat, like the other creatures, but that they would be blessed, take dominion, and bear the image of God. So man is to subdue (or cultivate in context) the created world.