Contemplation of
Beauty
"The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty"
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
A message that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI)
sent to a meeting of the ecclesial movement Communion and
Liberation in August 2002. The group was meeting in Rimini,
Italy.
Every year, in the Liturgy of the Hours for the Season of Lent,
I am struck anew by a paradox in Vespers for Monday of the
Second Week of the Psalter. Here, side by side, are two
antiphons, one for the Season of Lent, the other for Holy Week.
Both introduce Psalm 44 [45], but they present strikingly
contradictory interpretations. The Psalm describes the wedding
of the King, his beauty, his virtues, his mission, and then
becomes an exaltation of his bride. In the Season of Lent, Psalm
44 is framed by the same antiphon used for the rest of the year.
The third verse of the Psalm says: "You are the fairest of the
children of men and grace is poured upon your lips."
Naturally, the Church reads this psalm as a poetic-prophetic
representation of Christ's spousal relationship with his Church.
She recognizes Christ as the fairest of men, the grace poured
upon his lips points to the inner beauty of his words, the glory
of his proclamation. So it is not merely the external beauty of
the Redeemer's appearance that is glorified: rather, the beauty
of Truth appears in him, the beauty of God himself who draws us
to himself and, at the same time captures us with the wound of
Love, the holy passion ("eros"), that enables us to go forth
together, with and in the Church his Bride, to meet the Love who
calls us.
On Monday of Holy Week, however, the Church changes the antiphon
and invites us to interpret the Psalm in the light of Isaiah
53:2: "He had neither beauty, no majesty, nothing to attract our
eyes, no grace to make us delight in him." How can we reconcile
this? The appearance of the "fairest of the children of men" is
so wretched that no one desires to look at him. Pilate presented
him to the crowd saying: "Behold the man!" to rouse sympathy for
the crushed and battered Man, in whom no external beauty
remained.
Augustine, who in his youth wrote a book on the Beautiful and
the Harmonious ["De pulchro et apto"] and who appreciated beauty
in words, in music, in the figurative arts, had a keen
appreciation of this paradox and realized that in this regard,
the great Greek philosophy of the beautiful was not simply
rejected but rather, dramatically called into question and what
the beautiful might be, what beauty might mean, would have to be
debated anew and suffered. Referring to the paradox contained in
these texts, he spoke of the contrasting blasts of "two
trumpets," produced by the same breath, the same Spirit. He knew
that a paradox is contrast and not contradiction. Both quotes
come from the same Spirit who inspires all Scripture, but sounds
different notes in it. It is in this way that he sets us before
the totality of true Beauty, of Truth itself.
In the first place, the text of Isaiah supplies the question
that interested the Fathers of the Church, whether or not Christ
was beautiful. Implicit here is the more radical question of
whether beauty is true or whether it is not ugliness that leads
us to the deepest truth of reality. Whoever believes in God, in
the God who manifested himself, precisely in the altered
appearance of Christ crucified as love "to the end" (John 13:1),
knows that beauty is truth and truth beauty; but in the
suffering Christ he also learns that the beauty of truth also
embraces offence, pain, and even the dark mystery of death, and
that this can only be found in accepting suffering, not in
ignoring it.
Certainly, the consciousness that beauty has something to do
with pain was also present in the Greek world. For example, let
us take Plato's "Phaedrus." Plato contemplates the encounter
with beauty as the salutary emotional shock that makes man leave
his shell and sparks his "enthusiasm" by attracting him to what
is other than himself. Man, says Plato, has lost the original
perfection that was conceived for him. He is now perennially
searching for the healing primitive form. Nostalgia and longing
impel him to pursue the quest; beauty prevents him from being
content with just daily life. It causes him to suffer.
In a Platonic sense, we could say that the arrow of nostalgia
pierces man, wounds him and in this way gives him wings, lifts
him upwards toward the transcendent. In his discourse in the
Symposium, Aristophanes says that lovers do not know what they
really want from each other. From the search for what is more
than their pleasure, it is obvious that the souls of both are
thirsting for something other than amorous pleasure. But the
heart cannot express this "other" thing, "it has only a vague
perception of what it truly wants and wonders about it as an
enigma."
In the 14th century, in the book "The Life in Christ" by the
Byzantine theologian, Nicholas Cabasilas, we rediscover Plato's
experience in which the ultimate object of nostalgia,
transformed by the new Christian experience, continues to be
nameless. Cabasilas says: "When men have a longing so great that
it surpasses human nature and eagerly desire and are able to
accomplish things beyond human thought, it is the Bridegroom who
has smitten them with this longing. It is he who has sent a ray
of his beauty into their eyes. The greatness of the wound
already shows the arrow which has struck home, the longing
indicates who has inflicted the wound" (cf. "The Life in
Christ," the Second Book, 15).
The beautiful wounds, but this is exactly how it summons man to
his final destiny. What Plato said, and, more than 1,500 years
later, Cabasilas, has nothing to do with superficial
aestheticism and irrationalism or with the flight from clarity
and the importance of reason. The beautiful is knowledge
certainly, but, in a superior form, since it arouses man to the
real greatness of the truth. Here Cabasilas has remained
entirely Greek, since he puts knowledge first when he says, "In
fact it is knowing that causes love and gives birth to it. ...
Since this knowledge is sometimes very ample and complete and at
other times imperfect, it follows that the love potion has the
same effect" (cf. ibid.).
He is not content to leave this assertion in general terms. In
his characteristically rigorous thought, he distinguishes
between two kinds of knowledge: knowledge through instruction
which remains, so to speak, "second hand" and does not imply any
direct contact with reality itself. The second type of
knowledge, on the other hand, is knowledge through personal
experience, through a direct relationship with the reality.
"Therefore we do not love it to the extent that it is a worthy
object of love, and since we have not perceived the very form
itself we do not experience its proper effect."
True knowledge is being struck by the arrow of Beauty that
wounds man, moved by reality, "how it is Christ himself who is
present and in an ineffable way disposes and forms the souls of
men" (cf. ibid.).
Being struck and overcome by the beauty of Christ is a more
real, more profound knowledge than mere rational deduction. Of
course we must not underrate the importance of theological
reflection, of exact and precise theological thought; it remains
absolutely necessary. But to move from here to disdain or to
reject the impact produced by the response of the heart in the
encounter with beauty as a true form of knowledge would
impoverish us and dry up our faith and our theology. We must
rediscover this form of knowledge; it is a pressing need of our
time.
Starting with this concept, Hans Urs von Balthasar built his
"Opus magnum of Theological Aesthetics." Many of its details
have passed into theological work, while his fundamental
approach, in truth the essential element of the whole work, has
not been so readily accepted. Of course, this is not just, or
principally, a theological problem, but a problem of pastoral
life that has to foster the human person's encounter with the
beauty of faith.
All too often arguments fall on deaf ears because in our world
too many contradictory arguments compete with one another, so
much so that we are spontaneously reminded of the medieval
theologians' description of reason, that it "has a wax nose": In
other words, it can be pointed in any direction, if one is
clever enough. Everything makes sense, is so convincing, whom
should we trust?
The encounter with the beautiful can become the wound of the
arrow that strikes the heart and in this way opens our eyes, so
that later, from this experience, we take the criteria for
judgment and can correctly evaluate the arguments. For me an
unforgettable experience was the Bach concert that Leonard
Bernstein conducted in Munich after the sudden death of Karl
Richter. I was sitting next to the Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann.
When the last note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor-Cantatas
triumphantly faded away, we looked at each other spontaneously
and right then we said: "Anyone who has heard this, knows that
the faith is true."
The music had such an extraordinary force of reality that we
realized, no longer by deduction, but by the impact on our
hearts, that it could not have originated from nothingness, but
could only have come to be through the power of the Truth that
became real in the composer's inspiration. Isn't the same thing
evident when we allow ourselves to be moved by the icon of the
Trinity of Rublėv? In the art of the icons, as in the great
Western paintings of the Romanesque and Gothic period, the
experience described by Cabasilas, starting with interiority, is
visibly portrayed and can be shared.
In a rich way Pavel Evdokimov has brought to light the interior
pathway that an icon establishes. An icon does not simply
reproduce what can be perceived by the senses, but rather it
presupposes, as he says, "a fasting of sight." Inner perception
must free itself from the impression of the merely sensible, and
in prayer and ascetical effort acquire a new and deeper capacity
to see, to perform the passage from what is merely external to
the profundity of reality, in such a way that the artist can see
what the senses as such do not see, and what actually appears in
what can be perceived: the splendor of the glory of God, the
"glory of God shining on the face of Christ " (2 Corinthians
4:6).
To admire the icons and the great masterpieces of Christian art
in general, leads us on an inner way, a way of overcoming
ourselves; thus in this purification of vision that is a
purification of the heart, it reveals the beautiful to us, or at
least a ray of it. In this way we are brought into contact with
the power of the truth. I have often affirmed my conviction that
the true apology of Christian faith, the most convincing
demonstration of its truth against every denial, are the saints,
and the beauty that the faith has generated. Today, for faith to
grow, we must lead ourselves and the persons we meet to
encounter the saints and to enter into contact with the
Beautiful.
Now however, we still have to respond to an objection. We have
already rejected the assumption which claims that what has just
been said is a flight into the irrational, into mere
aestheticism.
Rather, it is the opposite that is true: This is the very way in
which reason is freed from dullness and made ready to act.
Today another objection has even greater weight: the message of
beauty is thrown into complete doubt by the power of falsehood,
seduction, violence and evil. Can the beautiful be genuine, or,
in the end, is it only an illusion? Isn't reality perhaps
basically evil? The fear that in the end it is not the arrow of
the beautiful that leads us to the truth, but that falsehood,
all that is ugly and vulgar, may constitute the true "reality"
has at all times caused people anguish.
At present this has been expressed in the assertion that after
Auschwitz it was no longer possible to write poetry; after
Auschwitz it is no longer possible to speak of a God who is
good. People wondered: Where was God when the gas chambers were
operating? This objection, which seemed reasonable enough before
Auschwitz when one realized all the atrocities of history, shows
that in any case a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not
enough. It cannot stand up to the confrontation with the gravity
of the questioning about God, truth and beauty. Apollo, who for
Plato's Socrates was "the God" and the guarantor of unruffled
beauty as "the truly divine" is absolutely no longer sufficient.
In this way, we return to the "two trumpets" of the Bible with
which we started, to the paradox of being able to say of Christ:
"You are the fairest of the children of men," and: "He had no
beauty, no majesty to draw our eyes, no grace to make us delight
in him." In the passion of Christ the Greek aesthetic that
deserves admiration for its perceived contact with the Divine
but which remained inexpressible for it, in Christ's passion is
not removed but overcome.
The experience of the beautiful has received new depth and new
realism. The One who is the Beauty itself let himself be slapped
in the face, spat upon, crowned with thorns; the Shroud of Turin
can help us imagine this in a realistic way. However, in his
Face that is so disfigured, there appears the genuine, extreme
beauty: the beauty of love that goes "to the very end"; for this
reason it is revealed as greater than falsehood and violence.
Whoever has perceived this beauty knows that truth, and not
falsehood, is the real aspiration of the world. It is not the
false that is "true," but indeed, the Truth.
It is, as it were, a new trick of what is false to present
itself as "truth" and to say to us: over and above me there is
basically nothing, stop seeking or even loving the truth; in
doing so you are on the wrong track. The icon of the crucified
Christ sets us free from this deception that is so widespread
today. However it imposes a condition: that we let ourselves be
wounded by him, and that we believe in the Love who can risk
setting aside his external beauty to proclaim, in this way, the
truth of the beautiful.
Falsehood however has another strategem. A beauty that is
deceptive and false, a dazzling beauty that does not bring human
beings out of themselves to open them to the ecstasy of rising
to the heights, but indeed locks them entirely into themselves.
Such beauty does not reawaken a longing for the Ineffable,
readiness for sacrifice, the abandonment of self, but instead
stirs up the desire, the will for power, possession and
pleasure. It is that type of experience of beauty of which
Genesis speaks in the account of the Original Sin. Eve saw that
the fruit of the tree was "beautiful" to eat and was "delightful
to the eyes."
The beautiful, as she experienced it, aroused in her a desire
for possession, making her, as it were, turn in upon herself.
Who would not recognize, for example, in advertising, the images
made with supreme skill that are created to tempt the human
being irresistibly, to make him want to grab everything and seek
the passing satisfaction rather than be open to others.
So it is that Christian art today is caught between two fires
(as perhaps it always has been): It must oppose the cult of the
ugly, which says that everything beautiful is a deception and
only the representation of what is crude, low and vulgar is the
truth, the true illumination of knowledge. Or it has to counter
the deceptive beauty that makes the human being seem diminished
instead of making him great, and for this reason is false.
Is there anyone who does not know Dostoyevsky's often-quoted
sentence: "The Beautiful will save us"? However, people usually
forget that Dostoyevsky is referring here to the redeeming
Beauty of Christ. We must learn to see him. If we know him, not
only in words, but if we are struck by the arrow of his
paradoxical beauty, then we will truly know him, and know him
not only because we have heard others speak about him. Then we
will have found the beauty of Truth, of the Truth that redeems.
Nothing can bring us into close contact with the beauty of
Christ himself other than the world of beauty created by faith
and light that shines out from the faces of the saints, through
whom his own light becomes visible.
