"Tending the Fire that Burns at the Center of the World" by Professor David White

When I was a child in the 1960s, most summer Saturday mornings were filled with household chores. As my family cleaned, mowed, and cooked, the air was filled with the rich tones of our Lucite radio blaring the play-by-play of some distant baseball game, usually my beloved New York Yankees. When I was seven, my family traveled from Mississippi to visit relatives in Maryland. To our delight, my Maryland uncle had secured tickets for my father and me to see the Baltimore Orioles play at Memorial Stadium. We sat behind home plate about ten rows up. Nestled between my father and uncle, crunching Cracker Jacks, I breathlessly awaited the opening pitch. I can still recall the giant halide stadium lights, the smell of new-mown grass in the outfield, the red dirt in the batter’s box, the cloud rising from the resin bag on the pitcher’s mound, and the growling Hammond organ. When the players took the field, I was astonished by the magnificence of their uniforms, their resplendent knee-breeches, the orange Oriole embroidered on their caps and sleeves, the sensual click of their metal cleats. Although Church of Christ kids were expected to suppress such feelings, to me these players were gods. When the action commenced, I was instantly drawn into the game’s ballet—the pitcher’s windup, his showdown with a defiant batter, the fielders cheating right or left adjusting to the swing of the batter, the baserunners’ acrobatic hook slide,

Baseball first appealed to my heart, and later to my body as I learned its good rhythms, and only finally to my mind as an abstract truth. If, instead of taking me to see the Orioles at age seven, I had been given a book of rules, strategies, or facts, it would not have been nearly as compelling. Perceiving the concrete beauty of baseball set me on a path of lifelong enjoyment, play, and study. Participating in baseball’s beauty called forth abilities and virtues—hand-eye coordination, speed for running bases and catching long outfield flies, cooperation with my teammates, the ethics of losing (a lot), and the joy of playing well. Baseball’s beauty obliged me to share nearly every summer afternoon with neighborhood friends in local sandlots. Without beauty, baseball would involve mere technique, its strategies and statistics would be mere information. Rational thought seeks to map reality; beauty invites us to participate in its dance.

Today, a quiet renaissance of interest in beauty is taking shape as theological disciplines resist the Cartesian notion that humans are purely “thinking things” mastering a disenchanted world. In the popular imagination, the notion of beauty frequently calls to mind cosmetic surfaces, sexual allure, or vain triviality, yet beauty was once key to a coherent metaphysics signaling the wondrous depth of a particular being, of being itself, and of God. To reclaim beauty as more than mere decoration, we must attend to its existential, metaphysical, and theological significance. As implied in my baseball analogy, beauty suggests an ontology, an epistemology, and an ethics. Beauty is best grasped not by definition, but by multiple partial and halting insights. In the following paragraphs, I will gesture to a more fulsome notion of beauty, especially as it is taken up into Christian faith.

The Depths of Beauty

Beauty is ubiquitous. It appears on the vastest scales (as in the amazing photographs taken by the Hubble telescope of distant galaxies) and on the most minute (as in the Fibonacci pattern in a head of sunflower seeds). While beauty seems to play a role in natural selection, it cannot be reduced to this purpose. Dutch biologist F.J.J Buytendijk writes, “to put it simply, the birds are singing much more than Darwin permits.” 1 Beauty’s excess is woven into the fabric of creation.

Harvard aestheticist Elaine Scarry observes that when we encounter beauty we experience a surplus of aliveness, a “wake-up call” to the plenitude of life. “Beauty quickens. It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid, animated, living, worth living.” 2 Beauty palpably reminds that the world cannot be reduced to its efficient causes, that all things participate in a mystery that cannot be explained rationally without remainder, but exists as an “invisible nimbus of gratuity.” 3 There is an overwhelming given-ness in the beautiful, and it is discovered in astonishment, in an awareness of something fortuitous, adventitious, essentially indescribable, only in the moment of response, from the position of one already addressed and only now able to reply.

Unlike reason, subject to endless charges of subjective bias, beauty is objective— it possesses a phenomenal priority. We may quibble over how to interpret it, but we cannot doubt its existence. 4 There seems to be more agreement over the beautiful than the truth. 5 Beauty’s authority is manifestly a public announcement, not a gnostic secret. According to Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, “Beauty proclaims God’s glory and creation’s goodness with equal eloquence and truthfulness in each moment, in each interval within being.” 6

Beauty holds a certain ethical significance. According to Scarry, “Beauty establishes a contract or covenant between the perceiver and the beautiful object, compelling the perceiver to attend carefully to and protect the ‘aliveness’ of the beautiful object.” 7 In the moment we perceive beauty, we are absorbed into the world, joining the community of beauty. In the words of French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, beauty requires us to “give up our imaginary position at the center. A transformation takes place at the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate reception of sense impressions and psychological impressions.” 8 British philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch tells of a day when she was anxious, resentful, and brooding, preoccupied with her problems; but how upon seeing a beautiful kestrel flying above her, all of the space formerly in the service of protecting, guarding, and advancing the self was now free to be in the service of something else. 9 In the aesthetic moment of wakefulness, one is moved to cherish the other. Beauty makes us want to share it with others, friends, and strangers, and thus participate in beauty’s own eros. People gather at art galleries and museums to share experiences of beauty. According to museum gift shops, a common postcard message says, “The impressionists are breathtakingly beautiful; I wish you were here! Come as soon as you can.” 10

Beauty brings copies of itself into being. Scarry notes that the philosopher Wittgenstein “says that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it.” 11 It makes us want to reproduce it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes, the imitation of beauty crosses sensory modes, such as when the smooth cheek of a child prompts a caress or inspires us to play with them or care for them. This crisscrossing of senses prompted Augustine to think of God when he touched something smooth and pleasant. Theorists of child development believe that before the onset of language, young children perceive all stimuli crossmodally. Psychoanalyst Daniel Stern observes that the “child-directed speech” of a parent to their infant involves rounded, alternating high to low pitch, affect-laden speech, such as “helllll-ooooo…bayyyyy-beeee.” 12 Such sing-song words offer an aesthetic embrace that invites the infant’s attention, attunes it, and draws it near. In a recent study, researchers ran an endless loop of a recording of Chinese mothers cooing to their infants. They were surprised to find that graduate students under stress came frequently to sit in the room and listen, to comfort themselves. 13 The mothers’ beautiful cooing, even in an unknown Chinese dialect, traversed fields, crossed modes, affected moods and behaviors of not only their infants but also of graduate students in an entirely different culture. Beauty seems not to be, as Kierkegaard supposed, simply a bourgeois affectation that circles in upon itself, but instead it drives toward filling the world with its quality.

Beauty affects a shift in historical perspective beyond present troubles and contradictions. In Only a Promise of Happiness, philosopher Alexander Nehamas concludes that beauty manifests a hope that life would be better if the object of beauty were part of it. 14 Hart states that “Beauty seems to promise a reconciliation beyond the contradictions of the moment, one that perhaps places time’s tragedies within a broader perspective of harmony and meaning, a balance between light and darkness; beauty seems to absolve being of its violences.” 15 In J.R.R. Tolkien’s Return of the King we find Frodo and Sam hunted by dark forces taking rest for the night.

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach. 16

Beauty’s light touches the intellect with the initial stirrings of cognition. According to Hart,

The truth of being is “poetic” before it is “rational” (indeed, it is rational precisely because of its supreme poetic coherence and richness of detail), and thus cannot be known truly if this order is reversed. Beauty is the beginning and end of all true knowledge: really to know, one must first love, and having known, one must finally delight; only this “corresponds” to the Trinitarian love and delight that creates. 17

For the Greeks and many Church fathers, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty were transcendentals, qualities of every particular being by virtue of existence which are perfected in God. In his exposition on Dionysius, Thomas Aquinas holds that God, the supreme Beauty, is God’s own existence, ipsum esse subsistens, hence all things only have being by participating in God’s extant beauty. 18 As such, beauty is a chain joining finity and infinity, this world and the depths of God. Because earthly beauty participates in God it marks a spiritual ascent to God. Pseudo Dionysius identifies beauty as the divine perfection that accounts for the good’s allure. 19 Beauty is the divine perfection that serves as the foundation for love (as a name for God) and any other that pertains to the good’s attraction.

Beauty in the Biblical/Theological Tradition

Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar believed that theology is “supposed to be the study of the fire and light that burn at the centre of the world. Theologians had reduced it to the turning of pages in a desiccated catalogue of ideas, a kind of butterfly collection for the mind.” 20 Philosopher Maurice Blondel warned in 1870 of the danger in treating God in this way: “As soon as we regard him (sic) from without as a mere object of knowledge, or a mere occasion for speculative study, without freshness of heart and the unrest of love, then all is over, and we have in our hands nothing but a phantom and an idol.” 21 For Balthasar the living God must be supremely concrete; not something abstract. He saw this everywhere in the Bible.

Genesis (1:31) speaks of God creating and consecrating creation as good (tov) which can also be translated as harmonious or beautiful. Psalm 19:1 (NASB) tells us “The heavens are telling of the glory [kavod, dripping with glory] of God; And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.” According to biblical scholar Gerhard von Rad, Israel’s most intensive encounter with beauty was in the religious sphere. In the priestly tradition, the focus of Israel’s rapt delight was the glory of God perceived as a reflection of the transcendent (I Kings 8:11) or as otherworldly brilliance, “the heavenly robe or light in which glory is clothed which, though fatal to mortal eyes, must with the divine triumph fill the whole earth” (Ezekiel 38:18; Isaiah 6:3; 40:5; 60:1ff.). 22 With the prophetic tradition, the term “glory” comes to be charged with moral-ethical significance. It would signify a “holy people” obedient to God’s “holy will.” In the later messianic tradition, priestly and prophetic strands merged in the “figure of divine glory” who, in bringing the historical process to fulfillment in peace and justice, would bring all of creation into participation in the divine glory.

According to Balthasar, the Gospel of John depicts Jesus Christ as the “form of God” or “God’s Art.” 23 The cross-shaped form of the Word-made-flesh is a selfauthenticating “disclosure of God.” In the New Testament, the words, actions, and sufferings of Jesus form an aesthetic unity, held together by the “style” of unconditional love. Love is beautiful, because it expresses being and is touched by being’s radiance. Balthasar again, “Before the beautiful … the whole person quivers. He (sic) … experiences himself (sic) as being moved and possessed by it.” 24 When this subjective experience occurs as the result of a genuine confrontation with the dramatic, historical revelation of the Triune God in Jesus Christ, this phenomenon demands the name, not of mere beauty, but glory—as that irreducibly other, uncontainable splendor which breaks forth at the advent of divine presence.

Christian religion begins in the self-communication of the wholly other God and the thanksgiving offered by the creature ecstatically “overtaken” by what it has received. Balthasar insisted that there is no neutral stance from which to reflect on ethics. Only when overawed by God’s divine glory can we love our neighbors—hence we love others in the measure of love with which God loves. For Balthasar, the hallmark of the true God, which renders the mission of Christ wholly credible as God’s definitive engagement with the world, is love that radiates the quality of “excess,” the “ever greater,” the “yet more.” 25 In the face of the recklessly self-forgetful character of God’s crucified love, the most appropriate response is summed up in the Johannine exhortation, “so we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers”(1 Jn 3:16). The aesthetic form and measure of God’s action in Christ provide the model for Christian action. Balthasar anticipates our protests: “It will be objected that such a program of action demands the character of a saint. This may well be; but from the very beginning, Christian living has always been most credible, where at the very least it has shown a few faint signs of true holiness.” 26

The Church’s Poiesis

Out of the breathtakingly beautiful gesture of Christ’s self-giving love, the church built a new form of sociality founded on a message of forgiveness of sins, care for the poor, beatitude, salvation, and eternal life for all. We as the church are called to be Christ’s living body, manifesting God’s beauty “in the style of love,” and beauty can be our first word as we advance God’s will on earth with extravagant gestures of poiesis. Let us look and rejoice and participate in the beauty of God’s creation and Incarnation with a freshness of heart. Let us shed the shackles of abstract argument and pragmatic calculation. Let us re-enchant finitude with infinity even as we open ourselves to being ravished by beauty. Let us contemplate the outrageous beauty, the “shook foil” 27 of the created world. Let us create and find succor in stories, poems, songs, and liturgies that make our hearts explode with delight and compassion. Let us learn forms of justice that seek not only utter and empty freedom, but forms of justice striving to realize a vision of a beautiful life together, a vision including confession, forgiveness, reconciliation, hospitality, charity, and the mutual exchange of good gifts. Let us make room for young poets to speak their rage, even as we give voice to hope that can make harmony from dissonance. We may have been wounded, some severely, within this world of injustice, pain, and discord, yet within each of us, there is a child breathlessly awaiting the visceral joy of smelling the fresh-mown grass and watching an opening pitch, the joyous release of being carried away by song, the empowerment of a gesture of solidarity, or awaiting awakening by the artistry that Christ inaugurated and which, at its best, the church imitates. May we all be given eyes to see the beauty of creation and of the Creator. May our spirits thereby be made newly resilient and may we be filled with joy and peace. v

NOTES

1. Frederik Jacobus Johannes Buytendijk, Het Spel van Mensch en Diet als openbaring van levensdriften (Amsterdam, 1932); Adolf Portmann, Biologie und Geist (Freiburg: Herder, 1963), 22–29.

2. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, (Princeton: Princeton Press, 1999), 24, 25.

3. A phrase coined by David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 283.

4. David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 17.

5. John Locke, The Works of John Locke, Esquire: In Three Volumes, Fifth Edition (London: Birt, Browne, Longman, Shuckburg, Hitch, Hodges, Oswald, Millar, Beecroft, Rivington, Ward, Cooper, 1751), 519.

6. Hart, Beauty, 21.

7. Scarry, 90.

8. Simone Weil, “Love of the Order of the World” in Waiting on God (New York: Routledge, 2010), 98.

9. Scarry, 113.

10. Ibid., 6.

11. Ibid., 3.

12. Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 140

13. See Candace M. Crosby (2005) “Intuitive parenting repertoire utilization by Caucasian-American and Mandarin Chinese mothers with two- and four-month-old infants”; unpublished doctoral thesis at The University of Montana, p,. 16. It has been demonstrated that babies’ preferences are not linked to the actual words used by mothers because they will turn their heads even if the speaker is using a foreign language. They report that motherese is a comfort language even if it is listened to in a foreign tongue.

14. Alexander Nehemas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 54.

15. Hart, Beauty, 16.

16. Tolkien, The Return of the King, Lord of the Rings, Book 6, Ch 2, “The Land of Shadow,” (New York: Del Ray, 2011), 211.

17. David Bentley Hart, “The Offering of Names,” in The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics (Minneapolis: Eerdmans, 2017), 26-27.

18. Vernon J. Bourke, trans. Expositio in Dion. De div. Nom. 4.5-6 as quoted in The Pocket Aquinas (New York: Washington Square Press, 1965), 269.

19. John Parker (translator), “On Divine Names. Caput I. Section VII.” in Dionysius the Areopagite (Grand Rapids: James Parker and Co, 1897) public domain, 14.

20. Stratford Caldecott, “An Introduction to Hans Urs von Balthasar,” Catholic Education Resource Center, last modified 2001, originally published in Second Spring and based on his article in the Catholic Social Science Review v 5, “The Social Thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar,” 2000), 183–190.

21. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan translators, Maurice Blondel: The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956), 93.

22. Walter Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, 2 vols, trans. J A Baker (Philadelphia Westminster Press, 1965), 1:277.

23. See John 1:1ff and Philippians 2:5ff.

24. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 1 Seeing the Form, (Edinburgh, T&T Clark, 1982), 247.

25. Hans Urs von Balthasar, My Work in Retrospect (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 41.

26. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Engagement with God: The Drama of Christian Discipleship (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 55.

27. “… The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil …”; Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur” Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985).

David White is The C. Ellis and Nancy Gribble Nelson Professor of Christian Education at Austin Seminary. Educated at Asbury Seminary and Claremont School of Theology, he is ordained in the United Methodist Church. He has written several books including Joy: A Guide for Youth Ministry (2020). He served recently as a scholar in the Theology of Joy and the Good Life project at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.