Friday, November 12, 2021

Behold


Apropos of nothing and everything, this week my mind turns to beauty.
  These days are replete with beauty as color creeps across the face of the parish, in her trees and shrubs and leaves.  The long-angled light of late autumn emphasizes the brightness by juxtaposing shadow and dialing down the brightness of the sky to a deeper blue background and beyond.  Every glance of sunshine is more radiant while there is such shortage of it, bounded by the growing darkness, and it cannot heat or hurt with the intensity of summer. 

I went out to the grocery store today and took the long, slow road in order to enjoy the beauty that drapes our streets and neighborhoods.  Still in November, I could roll down the windows and enjoy the fresh air; it was rich and lovely.  I have never heard anyone describe Silver Spring by leading off with ‘beautiful’, but that would be a grave omission these days.

Beauty speaks to us of the truth of faith in revealing the love and care of the Creator, the sublime artist whose every work is directed toward revealing Himself to us.  No system or synthesis can produce the harmony of unicities that is an autumn maple, a snowfall, or a running brook.  This is manifest when we who image the Creator and are able to create undertake to produce beauty.   Nothing is so complex as simplicity, nor so arduous as beauty.  

We crave beauty and respond to it, some more than others of course, but it is a human thing to do.  It is a false and divisive thing to say ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’.  Beauty is a bond that unites us, and the one who beholds beauty alone pines for someone to whom to say, Look! and from whom to hear, Ah!  Beauty begs to be described yet often begets silence.  Beauty can be inarguable.

St. Thomas regards beauty as a property of being, a feature of reality, whereas the Enlightenment makes it a colorful subjective ‘value’ pasted over the penny-plain objective ‘fact’. For Kant, to say that the San Marco altarpiece is beautiful is merely to voice one’s feeling of pleasure at seeing the San Marco altarpiece; nothing in the painting corresponds to the judgement. By contrast, for Thomas, a thing is not beautiful because it is loved; it is loved because it is beautiful. Our minds through our senses perceive the beauty of Angelico’s altarpiece; they do not produce it. Beauty is not read into works of art, God’s and men’s; it radiates out of them. As Gerard Manley Hopkins says, it ‘keeps warm / Men’s wits to the things that are’.  (From The Beauty of Holiness and the Holiness of Beauty by John Saward.)

My first years as a priest, I found myself depleted at the end of a day in which I spoke and wrote and responded and explained and conversed and socialized and attended.  The well was dry.  What I needed was beauty.  A string quartet by Beethoven, even one movement of a quartet, could refresh me. 

But beauty is not an occasional visitor, nor hidden somewhere in an album; all creation is shot through with the beauty of truth and goodness and love.  We are given to see and know and respond to beauty, as well as make beauty, and even be beauty, for our Creator God did marvelously create the dignity of human nature, and yet more marvelously re-create it, through Christ our Lord. 

For all men who were ignorant of God were foolish by nature; and they were unable from the good things that are seen to know him who exists, nor did they recognize the craftsman while paying heed to his works; but they supposed that either fire or wind or swift air, or the circle of the stars, or turbulent water, or the luminaries of heaven were the gods that rule the world.  If through delight in the beauty of these things, men assumed them to be gods, let them know how much better than these is their Lord, for the author of beauty created them.  And if men were amazed at their power and working, let them perceive from them how much more powerful is he who formed them. (Wisdom 13:1-4)

Monsignor Smith