The via pulchritudinis
Zenit today translates Pope Benedict’s lovely meditation yesterday on the via pulchritudinis, beauty as a way, a path, to God. Before speaking of art that is expressive of Christian faith, he has two paragraphs on the experience of art as a signal of transcendence:
Perhaps it has happened to you at one time or another — before a sculpture, a painting, a few verses of poetry or a piece of music — to have experienced deep emotion, a sense of joy, to have perceived clearly, that is, that before you there stood not only matter — a piece of marble or bronze, a painted canvas, an ensemble of letters or a combination of sounds — but something far greater, something that “speaks,” something capable of touching the heart, of communicating a message, of elevating the soul.
A work of art is the fruit of the creative capacity of the human person who stands in wonder before the visible reality, who seeks to discover the depths of its meaning and to communicate it through the language of forms, colors and sounds. Art is capable of expressing, and of making visible, man’s need to go beyond what he sees; it reveals his thirst and his search for the infinite. Indeed, it is like a door opened to the infinite, [opened] to a beauty and a truth beyond the every day. And a work of art can open the eyes of the mind and heart, urging us upward.
Two theologians in particular have focused on beauty as a way to God. Hans Urs von Balthasar made it the pivot around which much of his theological enterprise turned, and David Tracy has made use of the encounter with classics of art as an analogy for the moment of faith. This may strike many people as too “subjective”–what would be required to find beauty in the cross of Christ?–they want more “objective” ways to faith, “proofs”. But the via pulchritudinis usefully reminds us (and this is something true not just of religious faith) that it is fatal to disjoin the objective and the subjective since it is only by exercising our subjectivity authentically that we can reach the objective, the real. Truths reside in minds.
Wow! Thank you so much for posting this meditation by Pope Benedict XVI and especially for the link! (He quotes Chagall, one of my favorites.)
“Late have I loved you, Beauty, so ancient and so new.” (Augustine, “Confessions”)
“Beauty will save the world” – Dorothy Day often quoted this line from Dostoevsky.
OMG: How lucky for me to comment on this post.
I took several courses online with the STEP at Notre Dame:
On Prayer, created by Lawrence Cunningham and Vatican II: the Experience and the Event, based on Joseph Komonchak’s lectures on Vatican II.
Thanks for highlighting this.
I’ll echo the above commenters and add my thanks for this post and link.
Here are three reflections on beauty and religion that have stayed with me over the years:
1 – an article by Fr. Andrew Greeley (perhaps in Commonweal) many years ago in which he exhorted priests and parishes to strive for beauty in worship—beautiful music, preaching, proclaiming, windows, sculptures, banners, etc.—because we humans first perceive that something is beautiful, then that it is good, finally that it is true. Greeley saw beautiful worship as the first step in evangelization and catechesis (or at least that’s how I remember what he wrote).
2 – the mystery novels of Tony Hillerman which are (alas) my sole source of information about traditional Navajo religion, a religion in which beauty and the importance of “walking in beauty” is very important.
3 – many years ago a retreat leader suggested the following practice as a spiritual discipline well suited to contemporary urban life: take a moment to gaze at someone and perceive the beauty in them. City life offers numerous daily opportunities for this practice: waiting at a stoplight or a crosswalk, riding the bus, standing on a train platform, waiting for an elevator. Part of the discipline is not staring, ogling or invading the person’s privacy. Part of it is finding a beauty unique to that person. Part of it is finding beauty in people you don’t find beautiful on first glance. Part of it is finding beauty in your meditations on the struggles that person might have endured in life—what caused the gray in her hair, the wrinkles on his face, the calluses on someone’s hands, their limp.
Luke Hill;
Re #3: the suggestion of your retreat leader (Beautiful!)
Just this morning I read something a bit like that suggestion in the New York Times.
The Fluid Human Dance That Is Grand Central
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/arts/dance/art-of-summer-grand-centrals-fluid-human-dance.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=grand%20centrl%20station&st=cse
Here’s the English translation:
http://www.zenit.org/article-33326?l=english
Here’s the original Italian:
http://www.zenit.org/article-27780?l=italian
Luke Hill 09/01/2011 – 2:38 pm :
http://www.agreeley.com/articles/beauty.html
[...] A. Komonchak comments on a meditation by Pope Benedict which speaks of art and transcendence. An excerpt from the [...]
I love it.
I recently had a frustrating online discussion with someone who was on the “progressive” side of the liturgical spectrum and who, I think, thought my request to consider the importance of beauty smacked of “conservative” leanings. What an impoverishment for progressives!
I really wish Pope Benedict was not a pope, so that I could simply appreciate and admire his meditations, free of the dark backdrop of his faults in governance.
Helen,
You wrote,
Do you have a link for these courses?
Gene:
Here are the links:
STEP (Satellite Theological Education Program
http://step.nd.edu/
http://step.nd.edu/course-descr/vatican-II.html
http://step.nd.edu/course-descr/on-prayer.html
On the point of the beauty of the cross and Dostoyevsky, it is interesting to not that Dostoyevsky was profoundly moved and deepened in his faith by Holbein’s painting of Christ taken of the cross.
http://www.hans-holbein.org/91069/The-Body-of-the-Dead-Christ-in-the-Tomb-1521-large.jpg
It is grim but to Dostoyevsky showed that Christ was truly human and his death was also fully human. It had a profound transformative effect on him. Dostoyevsky plunged into the darkest recess of human life but always with a view to justice.
The old monk, the Elder Zossima, in the the Brothers Karamazov says that we are all of us personally responsible for everyone else.
Yes. Thanks.
http://www.gradesaver.com/the-brothers-karamazov/study-guide/section6/
http://www.classicreader.com/book/276/39/
“… something far greater, something that ‘speaks,’ something capable of touching the heart, of communicating a message, of elevating the soul.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:A_portion_of_the_Beowulf_manuscript.gif
Sometimes that means expanding our notions of beauty to encompass what doesn’t look like much.
You can see where the scribe made a downstroke, then picked up the pen to finish a letter. The ink has faded so you can see where the lines overlapped. Such effort for such modest results. It is both humble and victorious. A hand, maybe wrapped in linen or wool against the chill, starting the beginnings of a great literature at a dicey time in human history in an obscure place. A heart that had faith that the effort mattered and was to the greater glory of God.
The definition of art used here seems to be rather limited, if we think of it as only what is beautiful, what elevates the soul, unless we stretch the definition of “beauty” so much that it becomes tautologous, and can include displays of bricks across the floor and animal parts in formaldehyde.
In a different context, we say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and beauty can be found anywhere, not just in works of art of a particular style. And there Jesus found beauty even in suffering.
Perhaps, rather than saying that beauty leads us to God, we should say that what leads us to God is beautiful – and that can include anything and everything, since the Incarnation.
I can see beauty in the acceptance of suffering, but not in the suffering.
Helen:
Thanks very much for the links.
St. Augustine in a couple of sermons linked the two biblical statements: the Suffering Servant had no beauty or comeliness to him and yet he was the “fairest among the sons of men.” It takes the eyes of faith to see the beauty in the ugliness, Augustine said. And what is the beauty that we love in Christ? he asked. “The crucified limbs? The pierced side? Or the love? When we hear that he suffered for us, what do we love? The love is loved. He loved us so that we might love him back, and that we might be able to love him back, he visited us with his Spirit.”
If we accept Aquinas’s five ways (viae) as reason’s way to proving the existence of God, via fidis as the way to accepting the existence of God, via Christi as the way to God, may not His Holiness be suggesting that via pulcritudinis is a way to “experiencing” the presence of God in the creative process of women and men?
It seems to me the experience that makes me exclaim: “Wow! that is so beautiful!” is an experience that penetrates to the core of my being (through my senses true). This is especially true where beautiful music is concerned. When I first heard Beethoven’s violin concerto I said to a friend: “That led me to the gates of heaven. And left me there.”
It’s a wonder to me that something so easily analysed physically – a bow drawn across a string of catgut – can produce such a metaphysical experience.
Thank you, Joseph, for Augustine on suffering.
Ann, I agree that there is no beauty in suffering itself – that’s why I didn’t say “the beauty of suffering”. The idea was rather that Jesus looked on the suffering person with love – whatever we love is beautiful. And this is not just seeing the “acceptance of suffering”, or seeing the beauty of the person “despite the suffering”. The suffering IS an integral part of the suffering person. When we love somebody, we “accept” them as they are, with all their deficiencies. If we manage to love ourselves, knowing that we are loved, we accept all our own “suffering”. Then healing can begin.
We are all beautiful people!