I read a story this week that at first glance made me shake
my head and laugh. Then after a moment I
began to think that the story was actually covering something brilliant. Buried in the Odd News section of the UPI
website is a short story about a principle of a Private Christian School who
canceled classes due to “Beautiful Weather.”[i] Now to be honest I think most people would laugh
when they first heard this, some might be uptight and be upset that school
would be canceled for such a frivolous reason.
Now, parents have to figure out a way take care of their children that
are home for the day unexpectedly. But maybe,
just maybe they should take the day off work for the same reason and teach a
rapidly if not almost completely lost maxim to their children of the importance
of Beauty. I am not talking about the definition
of what TV, movies or society calls beauty.
That is why I mentioned that it is a dying precept in today’s world. So briefly I would like to look at what is
Beauty and have we lost the meaning of it? I would content that the question of beauty is
an ontological question. The proper
relationality of the ontological perspective of beauty is what is needed.
Now the discipline that I tend to fall under is known in
philosophical realms as Phenomenology. Mainly
stemming form the lines of thought from Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty
and more recently Ricoeur. I don’t
expect most people to know anything about them or what Phenomenology is. Honestly I sometime wonder if people working
in that field really know what it is.
But in an effort to as briefly as possible summarize it, consider it a
study of relationship. The relationship
of the thing, or being to others, it’s environment and itself preferably from
an ontological perspective.
Phenomenology has had its share of unusual ideas and
characters. In my experience many Epistemologists
have been uncomfortable with it. Maybe this
is because it can seem to lack a logical and scientific edge to it on a cursory
glance. But then again, I think to most
of the world philosophy in general is concerned an oddity and especially so are
the philosophers.
I said all this to point out my bias on the excursion on
Beauty. I assume since the school is in Georgia
they don’t get many “Snow Days”. After
reading about the “Beauty Day” at the school, and once I was over my laughter I
thought of a theologian by the name Hans Urs von Balthasar. His seminal work is his 16 book trilogy of systematic theology with his first book made up of 7 volumes being a
theological aesthetics called “The Glory of the Lord”. I happen to love Balthasar’s work and I
really only have one thing to say to his most recent detractors that haven’t taken
the time to read his works but rather rely isolated quotes; John Paul II was making
him a Cardinal before he died so argue with him he approved of his work.
Beauty Lost
Balthasar begins his Aesthetics with an introduction into
Form. In fact the first book in his Aesthetics
is titled I: Seeing the Form. He reminds the reader of what traditionally
until the modern era had been the cornerstone of thought, the three transcendentals,
The Good, The True & The Beautiful. From Plato to Aquinas all societies looked to
the transcendentals for meaning and purpose.
According to Balthasar, Beauty “dances as an uncontrolled splendor around
the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable
relation to on another.[ii]
He contends that the idea of the
transcendental of Beauty is become lost.
“…[How] impoverished Christian
thinking has been by the growing loss of this perspective which once so
strongly informed theology.”[iii]
Indeed it is hard not to agree with him. When was the last time you sat down to
explain something and began with beauty?
It is not normal for beauty to be the starting point. Rather as Balthasar points out it is
sometimes the ending point but not the beginning. Of course today we are taught to believe that
beauty is subjective and “in the eye of the beholder.” What one might call beautiful is somewhat
subjective, but is beauty itself subjective?
For example, take Andres Serrano’s work Piss Christ. It is considered
both beautiful and profane. How is this
duality of state possible?
By claiming this, it makes what is beautiful is up to the perceiver rather
than that which is being perceived the perceiver is thus given the power of true
form and Being. An archetypal form is
granted to a plethora of perceivers in an illogical contradiction of being and
truth. This paradigm of reality is
unsustainable at best. As Balthasar
points out, “In a world that no longer
has enough confidence in itself to affirm the beautiful, the proofs of truth
have lost their cogency. In other
words, syllogism may still dutifully clatter away like rotary presses or
computers which infallibly spew out an exact number of answers by the
minute. But logic of these answers is
itself a mechanism which no longer captivates anyone. The very conclusions are no longer
conclusive.”[iv]
So what is lost with the loss of the Beautiful? What are the ramifications to man with the
onset of the prevailing thought of the loss of transcendental in regards to
beauty? “[If] this is how the transcendentals fare
because one of them has been banished, what will happen with Being itself? … The witness borne by Being becomes
untrustworthy for the person who can no longer read the language of beauty.”[v]
For the Christian this dilemma is explained by the Imago
Dei, man is created in the image of God.
God is the true Being. Man is
created in his image which is man participating in this image giving man
being. Man is able to comprehend the
transcendentals because of this relationship he has with God in his image. “As
body, man is a being whose condition it is always to be communicated; indeed,
he regains himself only on account of having been communicated. For this reason, man as a whole is not an
archetype of Being and of Spirit, rather their image; he is not the primal
word, but a response; he is not the speaker, but an expression governed by the
laws of beauty, laws which man cannot impose on himself.”[vi]
The loss of beauty is a reflection of the loss of
relationship that man has with God. The
loss of participation in Being. The
relationship is marred as is the image. Man
must have a restored relationship with God in order to participate in
Being. Colin Gunton also see the
relationality or loss of it in the Imago Dei as pivotal and tied to the “fragmentation
of the realms of truth, goodness and beauty.”[vii]
“Human being in the image of God is to
be understood relationally rather than in terms of the possession fixed characteristics
such as reason or will...the displacement is damaging and sometime demonic in
its outcome, because only where relatedness is held in tension with genuine
otherness can things, both human and divine, all be given their due.”[viii]
Beauty Restored
So how is this relationship to be restored? How is it possible to regain the true being
of beauty? Gunton touches on this when
he says, “the world is what it is by virtue of its relation to those who bear
the image of God. The shape that the word
takes is in large part determined by what we, the human creation, make of it….[It]
can be said that the created world… reflects in different ways the being of God
in communion. The human creation, made
in the image of God, reflects most directly the divine being in communion.”[ix]
Paul Ricoeur talks about the use of symbols that represent
and participate with Being of divine for the purpose of bringing about real
ontological change for an eschatological end.
He shows how a multitude of civilizations have reached out to bridge the
gap between the relationship of man and the divine. That is it symbols that take on the sacred
nature of the divine in essence of the relationship with them.[x] While I am not going into a study of Ricoeur’s
hermeneutics, of which I ascribe to, my purpose here is to show the importance
of the symbol as participating in the things represented. In other words, of the being participating
with the Being. That form receives its
form from the true Form and that often for the purpose of restoring a relationship
with the divine.
The problem is that this always begins with the created
reaching out to the creator, the being trying to reach out to the Being. The Christian response to this differs from
all other accounts as it begins with the primordial sacrament. “The foundation of all this is the
incarnation.”[xi] Edward Schillebeeckx’s work Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter WithGod, shows how it is only through this out reach of divine love in the
primordial sacrament that is Christ, that man can have a restored relationship
with the divine and thus is the Imago Dei restored. It is through divine love that beauty is
regained into the transcendentals. “For
a sacrament is a divine bestowal of salvation in an outwardly perceptible form
which makes the bestowal manifest; a bestowal of salvation in historical
visibility…. Human encounter with Jesus
is therefore the sacrament of the encounter with God.”[xii] Participation with the divine is possible solely
because of the divine sacrament.
By restoring the relationality of man and the divine the
place of beauty returns back with that of transcendental Being, or the
divine. It requires an ontological
perspective to truly perceive beauty. Returning
to Balthasar we find, “Christian form is the most beautiful thing that may be
found in the human realm…. It is from the standpoint that we must look to our
supreme object: the form of divine revelation in salvation-history, leading to
Christ and deriving from him.”[xiii]
With this in mind I say that the school principle hit the
nail right on the head when he declared that there should be no school because
it was a “Beauty Day.” One of the most
profound statements I have seen in a long time is that of the Principle, “’The
thought occurred to me that it would be great to call school off some day
because it was too beautiful a day to go to school.’”[xiv] So the next time you can go take advantage of
God’s grace to us, call your boss and the school and let them know that you are
not going that day, rather you are going to go fly a kite with your children.
[ii] Hans
Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord:
I. Seeing The Form. (New York:
Ignatius Press, 1982), Pg. 18.
[iii] Balthasar.
Pg. 9.
[iv]
Ibid. Pg.19.
[v]
Ibid.
[vi]
Ibid. Pgs. 21-23.
[vii]
Colin E. Gunton, The One, The Three and
The Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity The 1992 Bampton Lectures.
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pg.6.
[viii]
Ibid. Pg. 3 & 6.
[ix]
Ibid. Pgs. 216 & 217.
[x]
Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil.
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), Pg. 168.
[xi]
E. Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of
the Encounter with God. (New York: Sheed an Ward, 1963), pg. 18.
[xii]
Ibid. Pg. 15.
[xiii]
Balthasar. Pgs. 28 & 29.
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