The structure of beauty

Below is a short excerpt from an essay I wrote on the subjective evidence of faith, as it is presented in the first volume of Balthasar's 15-volume Triptych. I think that Balthasar's understanding of form gives us some insight into the structure of beauty and the way in which it functions as the transcendental property of being that reveals and shows forth being. Beauty is the visibility of being. From these reflections we can move into understanding how beauty and the sacred combine to form a compelling argument for the validity of the Catholic faith, as lived by Mother Teresa. In the essay, I take the finale to Mozart's Jupiter Symphony as an example of beauty's visibility:

Here is the relevant excerpt: 

What does Balthasar mean when he talks about form? For starters, it is an aesthetic category. Form has two elements: “Both natural and artistic form has an exterior which appears and an interior depth, both of which, however, are not separable in the form itself.” (147). In keeping with the medieval aesthetic tradition that finds its root in Plato, Balthasar calls the exterior aspect the species (that which is seen) and he calls the interior aspect the lumen. The lumen is the radiance, splendor, or glory (divine lumen) breaking out of the species.

Two important aesthetic consequences result from the species-lumen structure. First, as we noted before, “The content (Gehalt) does not lie behind the form (Gestalt), but within it” (147). So if we are to perceive the content we can only perceive it in and through the form. Second, the appearance of the form does not merely point to an “invisible, unfathomable mystery,” but is also the mystery itself (146). It both is and is not what it signifies. This is the dialectic of disclosure and un-disclosure that we alluded to earlier in our comments on Christ’s hypostatic union. In sum, the form is both the “real presence of the depths” and a “real pointing beyond itself to these depths” (116).

An example of the double movement of disclosure and non-disclosure.
We cannot look directly at the sun, but can come to know its radiance through
its appearance in the form of the clouds. The clouds both reveal the sun (we could
not directly look at it otherwise) and conceals it (the illuminated cloud is not the sun).

Take an example—Mozart’s finale to the Jupiter symphony (No. 41), a work that Balthasar finds irresistibly beautiful (cf. Love Alone is Beautiful, 53). I hope we can begin with the shared assumption that the symphony qualifies as beautiful. But what is the source of that beauty? Why is it beautiful? The beauty of the finale of Mozart’s symphony reveals itself in the sounding notes, especially in the way the coda simultaneously weaves together the five independent themes of the symphony, an unprecedented feat of integral complexity in the history of music. We can identify these themes in technical language and observe the subtlety of Mozart’s attention to details. In a certain sense the beauty is the arrangement and order of the sounding notes (what else is there?).

So the sound is the species. Yet we are certain that the beauty is not merely this collection of sounding notes. The notes also point to some irreducible mystery beyond the notes, which the sound reveals—allowing the mystery to break out in a radiant splendor from the notes—even as it hides the mystery (we sense that the mystery, whatever it is, is not subject to time, for instance, but the finale expresses it in time and so hides its non-temporality). What is the mystery, though? Is the symphony “about” something?

Some will say it expresses Mozart’s will to defy gloriously the buffets fate has dealt him: the recent death of his daughter, the loss of his audience’s interest, his brokenness and debt, the outbreak of war. But this is not the mystery, even if it is the context of the mystery that reveals itself. It cannot be reduced to an utterance. Still, we feel that the mystery is beautiful in that it shows something about reality. And the way it shows that je ne sais quoi is truth-full. The symphony corresponds to something in reality: the dynamism, balance, order, and resolution of the symphony mirrors something of cosmic proportion that is beyond rational explication. It defies formulation. Mozart’s re-presentation of the mystery somehow points to and touches the self-showing beauty of being, that point at which all the questions of man find resolution. There is a gratuitousness of the finale’s beauty that carries within itself its own credibility. The necessity of the symphony—the feeling that no note could be added or taken away from it, unless by Mozart himself—demands our surrender, yet we cannot say why. We will return to these reflections later.

Hubble image of stellar dust. NASA.

The Classical notion of Vollendung (“the form which contains the depths”) and the Romantic notion of Unendlichkeit (“the form that transcends itself by pointing beyond to the depths”) together “constitute the fundamental configuration of being” (116). Being becomes a portal to the theological. If we properly behold the form of a thing, we behold both its appearance and its radiance, “as the splendor, as the glory of Being” (116). These depths transport us to the last horizon of being, the point at which all reality becomes intelligible. We also note that in our experience of being, the vertical and horizontal are equally necessary: we “plunge (vertically) into the naked depths” through an encounter with the “horizontal (form)” (117). In other words, in our experience of beauty, we gain access to absolute being through a particular existent. The parallel between the horizontal-vertical unity of the beautiful and the hypostatic union of the God-man is, I hope, apparent.

We must also note that eros is always involved in perception of form. “Already in the realm of nature, eros is the chosen place of beauty:” whatever we love appears as, “radiant with glory,” and whatever is glorious in itself, “does not penetrate into the onlooker except through the specificity of an eros” (Love Alone is Beautiful, 54). There is a meeting between the perception of the subject and the radiance of the object. A double extasis occurs, in which the beholder is drawn out of himself and into the object perceived, into the depths of the mystery. The object, for its part, radiates a splendor that draws the subject towards it. These two movements are the subjective and objective aspects of perception.

A truly beautiful work of art, in its radiant glory, never ceases to fascinate the viewer, drawing him into the depths of the present mystery. The viewer becomes unaware of time, unaware of himself, and joins himself to the mystery. The experience of falling in love captures the movement well. The lover, in his love for the beloved, forgets himself and is transported into the eyes of the beloved that shine in splendor.