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Our last three
pontiffs have exhorted Our Catholic faith is “the
graced but free human acceptance of God’s self-communication in Christ
as mediated by the Christian community.”[1] It
has two dimensions, the objective and the subjective. The objective
aspect refers to the faith that has been revealed and taught by the
Church—it is the faith that a Catholic believes in; the subjective
aspect refers to a Catholic’s personal response to the objective—the
faith that I personally and fully believe in. [2]
If God has revealed beauty to us
in the order of creation, then God’s revelation of love includes
beauty, as well as truth and goodness. Reasonable faith tells us that
all things are beautiful in themselves because whatever exists
originates from “the unconditional shining of the divine in creation.”[3] The entire cosmos has been declared “very good”
and God’s “work of art” (Gen. 1:26; Eph. 2:10). The Catholic’s
faith-response participates with God in the co-creation of beauty in
the world. The faith-response of a Catholic to God’s revelation of
beauty remains incomplete without the theological category of beauty,
without a theological aesthetics.[4] This
article is presented as an apologia to our clergy and religious leaders
to renew their understanding of beauty and to restore its rightful
place in the Church’s proclamation of the Gospel. A person deprived of beauty is
like a person deprived of love. A person cannot attain happiness
without beauty—sensible, intellectual or religious. The point is to
live in such a way that the pleasure derived from beauty is morally
good and of high quality.[5] The experience of
beauty brings with it something good, true and uplifting. It makes a
person more completely human. Ugliness brings the opposite. Surely,
ugliness captures our attention, but however fascinating, it cannot
uplift us or give wholesome pleasure. Ugliness denigrates us as human
beings. Beauty enables people to rise
above the daily grind and contributes to an ordered society. A nation
cannot function properly without the beauty of religious and national
celebrations, parks and playgrounds, art exhibits, musical and literary
performances. Deprived of beauty for any length of time, society seeks
other forms of pleasure, often vulgar and offensive to the dignity of
the human spirit. To experience beauty, one must
have leisure, but a relentless work ethic dismisses leisure as wasted
time. Still, society guards a free weekend as a precious value. We know
instinctively that we work to live and not the other way around.[6] We anticipate time off, whether it be the
weekend or its equivalent. In practice, however, this view is
everywhere challenged. What is leisure? Leisure is not
just cessation from work, but another kind of activity. Leisure is not
idleness but “the enjoyment of the natural ecstasies of life …
reflection amidst preoccupation … an attitudinal approach to life.”[7] Leisure disengages man and woman from the cares
of life, freeing us to wonder at natural or artistic beauty. Still it
must be noted that leisure varies from one person to another and from
one culture to another. What may be leisure for one is work for
another. Despite difference in age or status, this word conveys
universal understanding. Leisure is life-giving and brings
with it freedom from external constraint, joy, fulfillment and meaning.
Beauty fosters reverence and awe for life. Josef Pieper rightly
observes that “from a purely business point of view, Sunday worship and
the coffee break are qualitatively the same: they both contribute to
making better workers for the enterprise.”[8] Western civilization is indebted
to the Jews for keeping the Sabbath holy and for valuing it as a gift
from God to come aside and rest. Ceaseless work dulls the sense of
wonder, a thought implicit in the psalm verse: “Be still and know that
I am God” (Ps. 46:10). As if to confirm the need for leisure, Jesus
tells us, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy
burdens, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). If beauty evokes
wonder, wonder evokes reverence—reverence for nature, for the arts and
most of all for one another as God’s beloved images. Leisure is not
only the basis of culture, but a stepping stone to God and a
preparation for divine worship.[9] To be sure, there are exceptions
in entertainment that express universally accepted virtues. Some films,
like To Kill a Mockingbird, Les Miserables, Gandhi and Bella, and some TV shows like The Cosby Show, are such examples,
not to mention the great American musicals and the sheer delight they
offer a general audience. Film companies like Act One, Inc. engage in
formation programs for Hollywood writers and executives. New majors in
higher education are currently preparing our youth to produce
entertainment of high quality.[10] In general,
however, the media deserve a failing grade in transmitting universal
values that are beautiful, true, good and loving—except perhaps at
Christmas time. Instead of asking if their consumers will be better
people for using their programs or products, they are concerned with
sales and profits. How can we discuss beauty in such
an unlovely world? Despite the grim pictures that daily enter our
homes, we still yearn for beauty, truth, goodness—all qualities of
love. The human race may be flawed by limitation and sin, but at heart
we do want these positive qualities to be supported in the family, in
society at large and in the Church. Throughout the centuries, the
Catholic Church has taught, celebrated and inspired the arts understood
as beautiful. As the greatest patron of the arts through the centuries,
the Catholic Church recruited the finest artists of every age to
express the Christian faith in music as well as in the visual and
literary arts. Artists elevated the minds and hearts of the faithful by
making divine mysteries felt and understood through what is human. The
Church promoted beauty as a treasury of faith and as a stepping stone
to contemplation, expressed beautifully by Irenaeus of Lyons in his
dictum: “The glory of God is man and woman fully alive, but the glory
of man and woman is the contemplation of God.”[11]
The cathedral at Chartres, for example, stands as a remarkable
testament to these words. Sadly, in recent years, the study of beauty
has been neglected in our education and in our liturgical worship.
Whatever moral ascendancy the Church had in former years has been
abdicated to the media. We as a Church no longer understand the meaning
of beauty, and von Balthasar laments this fact: Our
situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much
courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she [beauty] will
not allow herself to be separated from her two sisters … We can be sure
that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a
bourgeois past—whether he admits it or not—can no longer pray and soon
will no longer be able to love. [12]
Beauty’s role in the life of
faith has never been considered superficial or elitist. Our last three
pontiffs have exhorted artists and the faithful about the need for
beauty in the life of the Church. Paul VI exhorts artists: “Remember
you are the guardians of beauty in the world,”[13]
while John Paul II has stated that the Church needs art and that art
needs the Church.[14] Benedict XVI has repeated
a favorite theme: that our Church leaders must rediscover beauty by
their own formation and then teach it in relation to truth, goodness
and love itself. He has preached not simply about the necessity of
beauty. In fact, echoing von Balthasar, he pleads for the restoration
of beauty to her rightful place in the Church’s identity and mission.[15] Several years ago, I taught
sixth-graders who lived in blighted areas of New York City. Every
semester, we would take bus trips to the country, and the beauty
flashing before their eyes delighted them to no end. I was overjoyed to
observe the children romp through the countryside, free of family
concerns. Theirs was a simple and direct intuition of beauty. In the
classroom setting, the children studied the fine arts. After some
guidance, they were able to enjoy them. They came alive in these
pleasurable experiences! What can be surmised from these
two anecdotes? What was revealed to the children had order, harmony and
goodness shining out from them. The children were attracted and drawn
to nature, which gave them deep satisfaction. In one case, beauty was
directly intuited, while the other required guidance. Beauty, love and
enthusiasm—what is good in life itself—are closely linked. My students’
experiences make this clear. Beauty is the dynamic splendor
residing deep within a being.[17] A thing of
beauty reveals itself and pleases the eye. [18] When
beauty is seen, it strikes the entire person as coherent, intelligible,
dynamic and good—all attributes of being itself.[19]
The parts fit together. While beauty, truth and goodness are viewed
today largely as civic virtues, in the classic tradition of philosophy
they are transcendentals, because they spill over to encompass every
level of being. Beauty is the most tangible of
the transcendentals. More than truth and goodness, the beautiful is
initially the most attractive because its appearance is visible to the
eye. The senses respond directly and immediately to outside stimuli.
The beautiful draws us because of the sense pleasure and delight it
arouses in us. Then the sense faculties pass on the beauty to the
spiritual faculties for them to judge and enjoy. Love of the beautiful
is part of the human experience, and this ability separates men and
women from non-rational animals. Art is first of all disciplined
creativity, a skilled way of making or doing something that results in
the creation of beauty and order. A work of art serves as a
communication between the artist and the beholder. The highest type of
art integrates both sensory and spiritual responses. All great art is
religious because, despite the artist’s awareness or lack thereof, it
is an act of homage before the divine artist.[21] If art delights the senses and
spiritual faculties, then sacred art represents the highest form of
this enjoyment. If beauty is a power that attracts for its own sake,
how much more the invitation of sacred beauty that readies us for a
vision of God! It is no secret that the hallmark
of Eastern Christianity lies in the incomparable beauty of its
liturgical life. It was just this sacred splendor that persuaded
Vladimir, grand prince of Kiev (d. 1015), to accept Eastern rather than
Western Christianity. Legend has it that after sending his envoys to
search for a religion of beauty and joy, Vladimir was deeply moved by
their account of the splendor of the Byzantine Greek Liturgy celebrated
in Constantinople. The Chronicles of Nestor (1116) reports their
impressions: And
we did
not know if we were in heaven or on earth, for on earth there is no
such beauty. Nor do we know what we ought to say. One thing only do we
know: that God was living there with men, and that their form of
worship is the best of all. We cannot forget this beauty.[24]
In the West too, incomparable
beauty engages us in sacred
architecture—theology in stone, especially in the great European
cathedrals built out of Catholic faith. As they rise into the sky, they
put us in From ancient times, people from
every race and color have held that music, more than any other art
form, is the deepest form of human expression. To the Greeks, music
possessed an almost mysterious and magical power. Indeed, music has the
power to touch and move the person at the deepest part of the spirit.
To the Ancients, a person imitated the kind of music he or she listened
to or played. With repetition, one personified this music. Before liturgical music is
composed, it needs a text, scriptural or canonical. The text tells us
what we should think; the music, what to feel. The text must be true to
Catholic teaching. Therefore, the text should have a God-centered
theology. Egocentric lyrics or those that are sugar-laden are
unsuitable for musical settings because they are too worldly and
insufficiently transcendent. Cheap sentimentality that caters to
emotion weakens Christian faith. We need strong and courageous texts
united to strong and courageous music. Both must support us to live the
Christian faith, which, in today’s world, may call for martyrdom of one
kind or another. Many Catholic and Protestant texts are theologically
sound, while others contain abstruse or airy flights of fancy. One
example of the former is the Christmas carol “Hark, the Herald Angel
Sing.”[26] We have only begun to retrieve a
hymnography from Sacred Scripture and the patristic tradition. “Let There Be Peace on Earth” by
Sy Miller and Jill Jackson, an unfortunate but ubiquitous liturgical
staple, exemplifies bad, unlovely, so-called sacred music. It is a
roller-skating waltz with a kind thought expressed in a prosaic way. It
would have been the perfect song for Judy Garland! The overall body of
music written by the St. Louis Jesuits was poorly-constructed by
well-intentioned amateurs. Their music cheapens the scriptural texts
they use. For too long our Church leaders, clerical and lay, have
permitted wide usage of such music. This material should be purged once
and for all from liturgical repertory because it harms our faith.
Thomas Merton observes, “Bad so-called sacred art (like polluted air)
constitutes a really grave spiritual problem”; it “affect[s] us only
slightly at first, but in the long run, the effect is grave.”[27] Beauty gives us a foretaste of what we anticipate with hope—the ascent to God through the transformation of all reality, material and spiritual. The Catholic faith proclaims the rich and unfathomable truth that God is love, which assumes unity, truth, goodness and beauty. This truth invites man and woman to participate in these attributes. God is not only the beginning and the end of human satisfaction. Ideally, God is our true delight and greatest pleasure, who makes his face visible through beauty in the world. End notes  Sister Joan L. Roccasalvo, C.S.J. teaches in the theology department at Fordham University. She holds two Ph.Ds, one in musicology and the other in liturgical studies. After publishing extensively on musicological topics and on Eastern Christianity, she is now focusing on the topic of beauty, theological aesthetics and the sacred arts as expressions of faith. This is her first article in HPR. |
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