Dietrich Von Hildebrand’s Aesthetics: A Vision Of Beauty We All Need

By JAMES MONTI

Dietrich von Hildebrand. Aesthetics. Edited by John F. Crosby and John Henry Crosby. Two volumes. The Hildebrand Project, Steubenville, OH, 2016 and 2018. Available at various outlets.

From Calvary onward, the great battle for the salvation of souls has been a war fought on many different fronts. The decline and fall of church art, architecture, and music that began in the 1950s and reached its low point in the 1970s has taught us that one of the crucial battle lines concerns the value of beauty. The stripping of beauty from our altars and sanctuaries has impoverished the spiritual life of the Church. But the restoration of beauty that has begun in earnest in many places is renewing the Church at the grassroots level. There is also the growing realization that beauty has a power to evangelize and change hearts where all else fails.
For us as Catholics in the English-speaking world, the definitive guide to what beauty is and why it should matter to all of us has now been fully placed into our hands with the recent completion of the English edition of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s masterpiece on the subject, his Aesthetics, published in two volumes by the Hildebrand Project.
Let me begin by stressing that this is a work for everyone to read. For while von Hildebrand can easily be ranked as one of the most brilliant Catholic minds of the twentieth century, what is especially striking about his writings — exemplified here by his Aesthetics — is that he speaks to us directly from his heart, the words he pens being the effusion of a man who passionately desires to share his insights with us, who earnestly wants us to see what he sees. His lovely widow Dr. Alice von Hildebrand has told me that as her husband composed this book the words effortlessly poured out of him at the astounding rate of thirty pages a day.
Von Hildebrand wrote passionately because he recognized that our lives are serious business; and thus it is that he undertakes the subject of beauty with circumspection: “Some things can be approached only with great reverence, for it is only then that they disclose themselves to us as they truly are. One of these is beauty” (Aesthetics, volume 1, p. 1). There is good reason for reverence in entering this realm, for “beauty is a reflection of God, a reflection of His own infinite beauty, a genuine value, something that is important-in-itself, something that praises God” (ibid., p. 2).
Although his subject matter is in itself philosophical — aesthetics, “the exact philosophical analysis of the realm of beauty” (volume 1, p. 11) — von Hildebrand addresses it in a manner that makes for very nourishing spiritual reading. Beauty ennobles us, he explains, it makes us contemplative, it “fires us with enthusiasm,” it protects us against “impurity, baseness, every kind of letting oneself go, brutality, and untruthfulness,” it elevates our souls and “opens our hearts” to transcendence (ibid., pp. 5-7).
Moreover, “Beauty can take hold of us and move us to tears; it can fill us with light and with confidence; it can enthrall us, take us into the depths, and draw us in conspectus Dei (‘before the face of God’)” (ibid., p. 48).
Von Hildebrand is resolute in teaching us that beauty is an objective reality and not merely a subjective judgment, that the value of beauty is something that can be known with “absolute certainty” as found in a particular work of art, or a landscape, or a particular animal (volume 1, p. 66). And beauty has a mission: “Beauty appeals to us to be received: it speaks to the spirit of the human person and contains a message for us” (ibid., p. 72). Beauty, as it were, “‘demands’ to be perceived” (ibid., p. 73).
Von Hildebrand discusses beauty across a vast spectrum that embraces not only the art gallery and the orchestra hall, but also nature and what he calls “lived life” (volume 1, pp. 349), the beauty-imbued moments of daily life that everyone can identify with:
“The role of beauty is not restricted to those moments in which one is consciously looking at beautiful things. . . . The beauty of the environment in which one lives — one’s house, even if it is very simple . . . the beauty of the sun that shines into the house, and of the shadow cast by a tree — all this nourishes the soul even of the simplest man or woman, entering into their pores even when they are not concentrating on it. And this applies to every situation in life” (ibid., p. 3).
As one would expect, Von Hildebrand addresses in considerable detail, particularly in volume two, the many manifestations of beauty in great art, in the masterpieces of painting, sculpture, architecture, literature and music. Time and again he cites and discusses the works of Michelangelo, Raphael, Mozart, Bach, Wagner, Cervantes, and Dostoyevsky. Particularly prolific and fervent are his references to the plays of Shakespeare and the music of Beethoven. Alice von Hildebrand has told me that there was a copy of Shakespeare’s works at her husband’s bedside on the day he died. Von Hildebrand describes Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as a work of unparalleled perfection “from the first note to the last” (volume 2, p. 407). And he devotes over five full pages to explaining the riches of Beethoven’s opera Fidelio (ibid., pp. 470-475).
Equally valuable are von Hildebrand’s insights into how a great artist does what he does.
“The process by which a great artist creates a significant work of art remains a great mystery,” he observes, dependent upon “the artistic gift that God has bestowed on them” (volume 2, p. 225). He notes too that in representational artworks such as landscape paintings and portraits, a great artist reveals what it is hidden and gives us a “deeper penetration” of his subject than what “the eye of the non-artist” can see (ibid., p. 222), citing as an example of this Hans Holbein’s powerful portrait of St. Thomas More (ibid., pp. 231-232). In a similar vein, he describes the act of musical composition as “a gift of God”:
“Plato is not wrong to call the poet a ‘seer,’ and this applies equally to the composer. Artistic invention does not have the character of an arbitrary fiction. Rather, it includes an element of ‘hitting’ on something. In artistic invention, something objective is seen, especially in the moment of insight, in the inspiration, which has the character of coming to the artist as a gift, a decidedly receptive element” (ibid., p. 406).
Of particular importance are von Hildebrand’s reflections upon art, architecture, and music devoted to the service of God. Identifying the Mass as “the most sublime meaning of a church” (volume 1, p. 120), he states emphatically, “The unequivocal purpose is the creation of a space for divine worship with a sacred atmosphere that helps us to recollect ourselves and fills us with reverence” (volume 2, p. 51). When a Catholic church is fittingly designed, it provides “the specifically solemn, sacred atmosphere, indeed the atmosphere of mystery” demanded by its purpose, and is imbued with “not only a distinguished breadth and greatness, and a stirring nobility, but also the beauty of a delightful intimacy” (volume 1, p. 120; volume 2, pp. 48-49).
Turning to the religious images within a church, von Hildebrand stresses that a crucifix is not to be fashioned primarily as art for art’s sake, but rather “at the service of the adequate contemplation of the form of the crucified God-Man and of the sacrifice of the Cross” (volume 2, p. 172).
Turning to Gregorian Chant, Von Hildebrand emphasizes that it is an art form totally devoted to divine worship so as “to give wings to our sharing in the enactment of the mystery of the Holy Sacrifice and of Holy Communion.” This music is utterly wedded to “the performance of the sacred rite,” for “The words have an absolute primacy as pure prayer, as the praise of God, and the singing participates fully in this prayer” (volume 2, pp. 503-504).

Contemplative Calm

Von Hildebrand has a way of identifying, revealing, and articulating what many of us have experienced but have not been able to put into words. This can be seen in his engrossing exploration of the beauty to be found in nature, a subject to which he devotes much attention in the pages of volume one.
His treatment of the beauty of night is truly sublime:
“Night also possesses a unique solemnity thanks to the silence, the cessation of the stream of activity, the contemplative calm that spreads out over everything. There is a great seriousness surrounding night. Night receives a special note from the silence of human beings and the moving praise of nature that ascends in the night to the Creator alone. The fact that all now unfolds in solitude — the rustling of the brook, the magnificence of the trees — without human beings and without most of the animals, bestows on nature a kind of poetry and majesty that is completely different from what the day bestows on nature” (volume 1, p. 302).
With good reason von Hildebrand has been described as a “doctor of the human heart,” having authored several books devoted to the subject of love. Here too, in his treatise on Aesthetics this subject runs as a leitmotif throughout, surfacing time and again, as when he speaks of “the unheard-of gift of gazing into the eyes of a beloved person” (volume 1, p. 5). Elsewhere in the text, he reflects beautifully upon the expressiveness of the human face:
“. . . the immediately intuitive givenness, the self-manifestation in a human face of something in a person’s psychological or even inner personal life . . . is something extraordinary, a mirandum. This is most remarkable in the case of the eyes, or the look….Especially mysterious is the fact that it takes only a slight physical alteration of this little organ for something so significant and personal to come to light, and with such a highly differentiated quality” (ibid., pp. 139-140).
There is so much more to this monumental work of Dietrich von Hildebrand than I have been able to share with you in the lines above — his concept of especially beautiful periods in our lives that he calls “regions of time” (volume 1, pp. 358-361); the apprehension of striking landscapes as “inventions” of God (ibid., pp. 314, 320); his vision of streets and roads as a metaphor of our pilgrimage through life (volume 2, p. 87). Implicit in the writings of von Hildebrand is the noble premise that each of our lives, no matter how humble the circumstances, has in the eyes of God a profound purpose that is of eternal importance.
Von Hildebrand’s vision of beauty summons the soul to its eternally noble calling.