"The Spiritual Significance of Beauty"

I do! I enjoy watching and really get jazzed around College World Series time.

When I was young, I was introverted, shy. I was drawn to baseball and also painting and music as ways of being seen, heard, and known in the world. The deeper I got into art and music, the more I began to recognize that there’s something beyond the mere resonant frequencies of strings, there’s an inarticulable depth and meaning. I had a guitar teacher who had synesthesia, an unusual blending of the senses: he would play a chord and see a vivid color. For him music crossed boundaries, and it occurred to me that music was crossing boundaries for me, too. I was playing music and finding spiritual meaning and resonance.

Yes, and let me note the danger of a performative contradiction in trying to theorize the very reality that I’m saying is finally mysterious and inarticulable. When I look back at what I’ve written, I can say, Yes, this captures what I think and feel about beauty, but at the same time, in a very real sense, it doesn’t come close, because I’m trying to talk about something that has depth and mystery.

Yes—and this goes back to Pseudo-Dionysius and his observations about beauty— there’s something about beauty that does not allow us finally to grasp or articulate it, but at the same time, there is something about beauty that sparks a desire to know. Terminology centered around beauty is an attempt to try to reclaim something like contemplative awareness. For me this is not esoteric; there’s real urgency. We have to reclaim this if we’re going to live in a world that isn’t violent and hostile. We need practices that call us to attend to the beauty in each other.

Yes, beauty is not neutral. We don’t know beauty dispassionately or clinically. Beauty calls us beyond ourselves and makes us want to share in it with other people. At the end of the day, and this is from Elaine Scarry, we are joined in a covenant with beauty. In my own music and art, I have found that to be true. It is also a way of knowing which bears resemblance to what we hope to be true about the gospel. The beauty of the gospel claims us, draws us into itself, and compels in us a desire to share it with others.

Historically, from Thomas Aquinas all the way back to Augustine, theology was the queen of sciences, so all things were considered to have theological significance, and I affirm that claim. Beauty is not just an anomaly, not just a peak experience. It speaks to us of the glory of a creator. It points toward the perfection of God. The same holds for the beauty of the incarnation of Christ. Theology makes the connection to the Creator, to the creation of all things ex nihilo, all of which God called good (which can be translated as “harmonious” or “beautiful”). So, beauty is at once something that is recognizable by everyone—and let me say, almost everyone now in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences is writing about aesthetics—but theology is what names its depth that finally connects to God.

Yes, I think this issue is best articulated as a response to modernity. I think we are at the far end of a historical era in which the modern idea of pure reason had overwhelming appeal, but postmodern philosophy is discovering its flaws and unveiling the way it hides biases that can serve as sources of oppression. And it does that in part by objectifying things. I look out my window and I see a tree. And when I try to think about it in the terms of modern rationality, in terms of cellular biology or photosynthesis, or in economic terms, such as in a board foot of lumber, then it doesn’t have significance beyond its use value. This is what I’m trying to speak against, together with Hans Urs von Balthasar and many others, this disenchantment of the world. With terms like “excess” or “surplus” we’re trying to say there’s something about this tree beyond its use value. We’re trying to say that something is lost when I parse it in terms of biology or economics, for that tree also speaks of mystery, and it speaks of God. This is an attempt to re-enchant the world. Charles Taylor says we are porous to the world, not just the buffered selves pictured by modern rationality. What’s at stake here is reclaiming a sense of how we engage a world that is sacred, sacramental, that is alive with God, alive not just with fact but with value.

Christians have always had beauty embedded in our liturgies, embedded in our songs, in our language for the glory of God. This is a way of restoring to Christianity something that was lost in the modern retreat into pure reason. That’s what is at stake for Christians, trying to drink from our own wells again, finding something understood by the Patristics, especially the Cappadocians, understood by Maximus the Confessor, by Thomas Aquinas.

Balthasar was the twentieth century’s leading advocate for reclaiming beauty. He says that in the modern era, beauty has been flattened into surfaces, reduced to decorative appeal. The grand tradition that he’s drawing from is much deeper. For him beauty is a way of speaking about wonder and the beauty of creation that opens onto something beyond it. He thinks that beauty in the modern era has been coopted by advertising or relegated to the margins by reason, so that it does not connect with transcendence.

When we see beauty, Balthasar says, we perceive its form and its “splendor.” We’re drawn in by the shape given by art, by the unity of dark and light, the unity of the elements of an artistic or a natural scene of beauty, we’re drawn into its form.

But he says there’s also something beyond that, its lumen, the light that’s beyond it, that prevents us from ever exhaustively comprehending it. Here it can be helpful to think of an icon, how an icon draws us in but also draws our gaze beyond it, evoking our desire, ultimately, to its source in God.

You are naming something that is hard to address in a 3000-word essay! But I am in total agreement that to whatever extent anyone is trying to articulate a theodicy that reconciles God or beauty with evil in the world in any easy or immediate way— that I reject out of hand.

I don’t find theodicies of any sort satisfying. Speaking confessionally, I think of Ivan Karamazov in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, who says he would give back his ticket to existence if the price that had to be paid were the tears of even one small child. I’m in total agreement that there is no way to finally make meaning out of evil in this world. Beauty does not do that. But beauty does provide a kind of backdrop, a reminder that beauty is the foundation of things. In a sense, what I’m saying about beauty is not different than what Dr. King says about justice, you know, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. There is no easy way of making sense of evil in the world. Still, in mysterious ways, beauty points towards God and ends with the beauty of God.

All this could also be related, as it does for Jürgen Moltmann, to hope. For Moltmann, hope names a way of reclaiming motivation for works of goodness, works of justice in the world. And I would say in a similar way that to be reminded of beauty reminds us and compels us toward works of goodness in the world. It doesn’t reconcile in any easy way the horrors of evil in the world, but it can compel us to be about God’s work of goodness and beauty and justice in the world.

Yes, in that example I was making the point about how beauty crosses modes. These graduate students find themselves gravitating toward the voices for comfort in a particularly stressful time. There’s a sense—and here I am following Alexander Ne- hemas—that beauty offers a promise of more complete healing.

So, Balthasar along with others before him—Magnus the Confessor, Dionysius— they’re identifying the incarnation as God’s art, as the beauty that finds its origin, its ground, in the infinite perfected in God, which is manifest in a concrete way in Jesus Christ—and not only in his crucifixion, but in his life and teachings. We might say that Christ was always, in the incarnation, about crossing over, about joining in solidarity with the other on behalf of the other. We find this in the stories of the woman at the well, joining with the tax collectors, healing the lepers, the Good Samaritan … all of the parables have something of this ethic of crossing over and joining in an ecstatic sort of self-giving way on behalf of the other. This is what Balthasar characterizes as the beauty of God, the beauty of the gospel, that originates in the self-giving love found in the Trinity. Christ’s crucifixion is in continuity with his life, for it is about giving himself on behalf of others. This is what Balthasar characterizes as God’s art.

I think it opens up the world as a sacramental reality that compels us to live more fully into our ethics. The modern world has flattened everything into efficient causality, and that tempts us to flatten each other into ideological caricatures. We have forgotten how to see depths in each other. I think the world is crying out for the contemplative practices of artists, who will linger for a long time with, say, a landscape as they paint it. In order to know it well they do study after study, making sure they see it with different lighting and experimenting with different colors as they seek to create it in its truth. This is not a new thought for contemplatives. Walter Burghardt said that contemplation is a long lingering loving look at the real. And this is something all artists know. Art is not just trying to pull something out of my head, art is trying to name what is truly there, to show the shimmering goodness that lies beneath the ordinary.

Terminology centered around beauty is an attempt to try to reclaim something like this contemplative awareness. For me this is not esoteric. There’s real urgency. We have to reclaim this if we’re going to live in a world that isn’t violent and hostile. We need practices that call us to attend to the beauty in each other.

Maybe, but I am no expert on Eastern Orthodoxy. For me, this is in the Wesleyan tradition. John Wesley was trying to reclaim something that had been lost that he saw in the Cappadocian Fathers. He was trying to reclaim beauty in a more expansive sense and grace, prevenient grace, in a more expansive sense. Today it is important for Christians of all sorts to try to mine these resources.

Yes, well, first, that is Gerard Manley Hopkins’s image, not mine. What Hopkins is trying to get at is the alterity of the earth, that it is other than me, other than us, that there is finally a shimmering goodness that lies beneath the ordinary, that can’t be reduced to what an ego projects upon it. This follows Jean Luc Marion on the idol and the icon. The idol is that which draws our gaze, but in the end only reflects back our own egos. The icon draws our gaze beyond, and that’s what the image of shook foil is trying to speak of: how the world announces the holy in its otherness from us. J.R.R. Tolkien says that those who write imaginative fantasy write about golden apples and rivers that run with wine in order to awaken us to the outrageous beauty and the awareness of the real created order. They use fantastic imagery not to transport us to some mystery land, but in an attempt to awaken us to the outrageous beauty of the created order as it actually exists. That’s what I want to evoke with Hopkins’s image of shook foil.

I hope the church, especially, can break its bondage to reductive and objectifying forms of thought and action. I hope that we can once again live and move in a world alive and enchanted, a world where fact and value are united, where all things point to God, and where God points to the goodness of all things, including to the joy and gift of creative human work.