Upon these things of Beauty

VATICAN CITY, MARCH 29, 2006 (Zenit.org).- The Church faces the challenge of understanding how beauty can be a "way of evangelization and dialogue," says the Pontifical Council for Culture.

Indeed.

Beauty has been a topic of great interest in me for some time now. Being a woman, and an an american one at that, it's almost imposible not to reflect on beauty daily, in some way. It definitely seems that the world has it's own idea of beauty and like it or not we still call this place home. So, we're caught between what the world tells us we should be and the sneaking suspicion that we are and should be so much more. I was happy to see that the Cardinals are reflecting on the power of beauty in evangelization. Beauty is what leads us to truth. But it's tricky....if we follow wordly beauty to find truth we end up reading Cosmo as Gospel.

I found a paper that I wrote on beauty for my Moral Theology class here at the Institute, back in my first semester, and I've posted some excerpts here;

On the one hand it seems that beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder. And yet there is something profoundly objective about beauty. It is something our words fall short of and yet obvious to us when we encounter it. Beauty is striking and it stirs us to awe and wonder. Joseph Pieper noted that in its original sense beauty is “the glow of the true and good irradiating from every ordered state of being, and not in the patent significance of immediate sensual appeal” Beauty is so rarely thought of as a form or ordered state of being that to even speak of it that way makes it sound grey, stoic and anything but beautiful.

When we free ourselves from sin and allow grace to transform us “from one degree of glory to another”we can then experience with Christ the fullness of that which we see embodied so well in those in love. The beloved becomes truly beautiful, not in an artificial way but in a way that is truer than most things experienced in life. This beauty attracts us to that which is truly good because at the heart of it is true love in response to a gratuitous gift. Worldly beauty can then be redeemed by the gaze of the bridegroom. Even that which does not appear ‘beautiful’ by the worlds standards can be revealed as extraordinarily exquisite when seen through the eyes of love.
“The Transfiguration hearkens back to Moses’ own encounter with the divine in the form of the burning bush, and it looks forward to the mysterious post-Resurrection body of Jesus. In each instance, glory is experienced as a transformation that does not consume or destroy what is being transformed. The ordinary becomes extraordinary without becoming something wholly other.”(Wolfe)

In Karol Wojtyla’s dramatic meditation on Matrimony; The Jewelers Shop, Andrew explains this very transformation in his heart for Theresa; “beauty accessible to the senses can be a difficult gift or a dangerous one; I met people led by it to hurt others—and so gradually I learned to value beauty accessible to the mind, that is to say, truth.”
How are we then to order our sense of beauty? If beauty is objective can we in fact order the way in which we perceive it? Yes, in a sense. I believe we can (and must if we are to strive for holiness) reorder our sense of beauty. I say reorder because this new idea of beauty is already part of the plan that is in us, and is in fact nothing new at all. It is the objective sense of beauty that already ultimately attracts our desire. This worldly sense of beauty which I have referred to is merely the truth that has been twisted by our sin, evil, and social influence. Worldly beauty strives ultimately for selfish satisfaction; “an object unduly possessed”. With this sense of beauty we do perceive something as beautiful because of the goodness reflected in it but because it is only the yearning of our senses that drive us toward the object with an intent to capitalize on it and not a self-giving love of the object for its own sake. Thus this type of beauty is self interested and seeks ultimately to grasp the object in order to possess it and use it for our own sake.
A proper sense of beauty by contrast, is not self interested, “it is a refusal to grasp and an indefectible adherence to Him who gives” and therefore paradoxically, by its very nature, is the cause of our delight. This sense of beauty is love and as such not only seeks not to grasp the beloved, but seeks in fact to give of self because it is also beckoned by the other. As Hans Urs Von Balthasar states, “A being appears, it has an epiphany: in that it is beautiful and it gives itself, it delivers itself to us: it is good. And in giving itself up, it speaks itself, it unveils itself: it is true(in itself, but in the other to which it reveals itself)”.






“Too late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new, too late have I loved you! Behold, you were there within me while I was outside: it was there that I sought you, and, a deformed creature, rushed headlong upon these things of beauty which you have made. You were with me, but I was not with you. They kept me far from you, those fair things which, if they were not in you, would not exist at all.” St. Augustine

Thoughts on beauty?