God’s Beauty
…the Church since the Enlightenment has either abandoned the topic of beauty or belittled it as a mere trifle. She has forgotten the close links between truth, beauty and love…. But God has given us beauty, and given it to us for a purpose. Our enfleshed spirits need pleasure, enjoyment and delight, just as the intellect seeks truth, and the will is attracted to goodness. Beauty is part of being human, and without it happiness cannot be fully realised. Beauty lightens daily burdens and helps society live in harmony. A thing of beauty uplifts us and expands our openness to reality. It reminds us human beings of our dignity, made as we are in God’s image, and called as we are to the divine likeness…. As von Balthasar puts it: “whoever sneers at (beauty’s) name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past—whether he admits it or not—can no longer pray, and soon will no longer be able to love…”
Beauty is what delights us—its quality and design please our senses, but also our other faculties: memory and imagination, intellect and will. We can perceive beauty directly and intuitively, even if we do so by our experience and preconditioning. The beautiful strikes us as good and true, but understanding it may require some guidance….
When confronted with beauty’s revelation, people are drawn to it beyond themselves. Something good and true has taken place in this experience.
The biblical experience of God takes place in the senses. In Christ, God appears to us right in the midst of the world’s reality. Jesus uses simple things—bread and wine, fish, oil and water—to convey his message and accomplish his mission. The encounter with the Incarnate Christ necessarily takes place through the senses, through which alone humanity becomes aware of reality….
Von Balthasar writes that ‘everything depends on the effects of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and especially touching the Word of Life, all of which culminates with the placing of the fingers in the wound on the side’. Christianity not only begins with the bodily; unlike other religions, it also culminates with the bodily: ‘we abide in the seeing, hearing, touching, the savouring and eating of this flesh and blood’….
Things are not beautiful because they delight us; rather, we enjoy and love things because they are beautiful. Beauty resides in things, objectively, whether or not we can see it. What we may need is a guide to help us see it.
When the beauty in question is that of Christ, it is, for Balthasar, the Catholic Church that at once continues and mediates the form of Christ, and provides the guidance we need if we are to perceive his mystery.
Beauty needs, however, to be seen in a wider context; it is not an end in itself. God is Love; beauty is an attribute of love. Moreover, God’s love goes beyond mere eros; God’s love is agape, self-sacrificing gift. We must understand God’s entry into our horizon in terms of the great dogmas of the Trinity and the incarnation. The self-giving of Jesus demonstrates that love’s beauty consists in its being given unconditionally and without limit.
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