By PAUL KRAUSE
“How can we love anything but the beautiful?” So wrote St. Augustine. Beauty was once a hallmark of Catholic theology and Catholic identity.
In a world now stripped bare of beauty, intentionally so, as it takes our mind away from the transcendent, and, therefore, away from God, the want for beauty by so many still offers a great spiritual opportunity to be reconnected with the Divine. From the pageantry of liturgy to sacred music, the imperative of Beauty is something that nourishes the soul.
The Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke is probably the most important philosopher of beauty in the modern age (as well as being an important political philosopher). His Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful outlines the essence of both aesthetic forms.
Beauty, Burke pronounces, has “an appearance of delicacy, and even of fragility, is almost essential to it.” Burke also declares that the beautiful “has no mixture of lust, and its object is beauty. . . . The passion of love has its rise in positive pleasure.” From Burke we understand that beauty is pleasing to the senses, it causes us to experience love. And love, being the unitive force according to St. Thomas Aquinas, draws all things to it.
The delicacy and tenderness of beauty is what produces its sense of “fragility.” Beauty is always on the cusp of being destroyed. Burke also writes that because beauty is fragile and often in distress it invites us to defend it, cherish it, be drawn to it in order to protect that delicacy of beauty. Beauty draws us to it and unites us in love with it.
In contrast to the beautiful is the sublime. Burke maintained that the sublime was “the passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.” He also wrote that the sublime “suggest[s] the idea of danger.” The sublime, in short, is intensely pathological, overburdening, asymmetric; it causes us to feel small, weak, and fragile in its presence.
Burke was wrong. Wrong in the sense that he kept a neat division between the sublime and beautiful. Burke didn’t think the sublime and beautiful could overlap. But he was also right. Right in the basic sense of what the sublime and beautiful encapsulate and make us feel, their power to and over us.
What Catholic theological aesthetics gets right is this blending of the sublime and beautiful. We can often be overwhelmed to the point of tears in hearing wondrous music, a music that at once invites us to participate with it but also makes us recognize that asymmetry between us and the transcendent. We depend on the transcendent, not the other way around. These are quintessential aspects of the sublime.
Likewise, the towering scope and size of cathedrals, paintings, and high altars create that sense of inferiority that Burke characterizes with the sublime.
But in the presence of the grandiosity of cathedrals, religious paintings, and high altars we feel not that dread terror or horror that Burke associates with the sublime but a feeling of pleasing serenity, a still calmness, a sense of love that is characteristic of the beautiful. Some experiences of that asymmetry Burke identifies with the sublime produce a sense of serenity in the face of beauty.
Catholic theology understood the connection between the beautiful and the sublime. The culmination of God’s love for us, to bring salvation to the world through Jesus Christ, led to Christ’s Passion and death. Walk into any church and you will find Christ on the cross. It was a brutal death, in a word, it was sublime.
But Christ’s death and the sublime reality of it also reveal the scandalous beauty and love of the God who became flesh and dwelt among us. In seeing Christ’s sacrifice, at least with the eyes of faith, we see not dread but beauty and not fear but love.
The fragility of Christ causes us not to turn away but to run to Him in His suffering. This drawing us to Him in suffering is that defining element of love that is part and parcel of all things beautiful. Yet at the same time, in Christ’s Passion we also encounter our radical dependence on God. This asymmetrical relationality, characteristic of the sublime, humbles us to a greater understanding of the love of God. As such, it beautifies God even more.
What makes Catholic theology unique is its blending of the sublime and beautiful in a way that reveals beauty as the superior transcendental form that is also a chief characteristic of God. It was Augustine who also wrote that “God is always beautiful.” The experience and understanding of the beauty of love is what the Christian life is about.
Christ said to His disciples before going to His death, “You shall abide in me in love.” Our yearning for beauty, then, is also reflective of our spirit of love since beauty and love are intimately tied together.
We instinctively still know this. Some of the most beautiful moments in art, in film, in life are when individuals sacrifice themselves for their beloved. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” We find not dread terror but beauty in such moments. Catholic theology always knew that. And the rekindling of the spirit yearning for beauty when such moments are encountered in life reveals Beauty as a pathway to God, an open road for the evangelization of the arts, of culture, of our souls.
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