Pope Francis's favorite artists

Also from the big interview (see last post for link). This list I found quite impressive.

“I have really loved a diverse array of authors. I love very much Dostoevsky and Hölderlin. I remember Hölderlin for that poem written for the birthday of his grandmother that is very beautiful and was spiritually very enriching for me. The poem ends with the verse, ‘May the man hold fast to what the child has promised.’ I was also impressed because I loved my grandmother Rosa, and in that poem Hölderlin compares his grandmother to the Virgin Mary, who gave birth to Jesus, the friend of the earth who did not consider anybody a foreigner.

“I have read The Betrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni, three times, and I have it now on my table because I want to read it again. Manzoni gave me so much. When I was a child, my grandmother taught me by heart the beginning of The Betrothed: ‘That branch of Lake Como that turns off to the south between two unbroken chains of mountains....’ I also liked Gerard Manley Hopkins very much.

“Among the great painters, I admire Caravaggio; his paintings speak to me. But also Chagall, with his ‘White Crucifixion.’ Among musicians I love Mozart, of course. The ‘Et incarnatus est’ from his Mass in C minor is matchless; it lifts you to God! I love Mozart performed by Clara Haskil. Mozart fulfills me. But I cannot think about his music; I have to listen to it. I like listening to Beethoven, but in a Promethean way, and the most Promethean interpreter for me is Furtwängler. And then Bach’s Passions. The piece by Bach that I love so much is the ‘Erbarme Dich,’ the tears of Peter in the ‘St. Matthew Passion.’ Sublime. Then, at a different level, not intimate in the same way, I love Wagner. I like to listen to him, but not all the time. The performance of Wagner’s ‘Ring’ by Furtwängler at La Scala in Milan in 1950 is for me the best. But also the ‘Parsifal’ by Knappertsbusch in 1962.

“We should also talk about the cinema. ‘La Strada,’ by Fellini, is the movie that perhaps I loved the most. I identify with this movie, in which there is an implicit reference to St. Francis. I also believe that I watched all of the Italian movies with Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi when I was between 10 and 12 years old. Another film that I loved is ‘Rome, Open City.’ I owe my film culture especially to my parents who used to take us to the movies quite often.

“Anyway, in general I love tragic artists, especially classical ones. There is a nice definition that Cervantes puts on the lips of the bachelor Carrasco to praise the story of Don Quixote: ‘Children have it in their hands, young people read it, adults understand it, the elderly praise it.’ For me this can be a good definition of the classics.”

Processes, spaces, peripheries, horizons

Another fascinating and overlooked quote from the pope's interview: 

"We must not focus on occupying the spaces where power is exercised, but rather on starting long-run historical processes. We must initiate processes rather than occupy spaces. God manifests himself in time and is present in the processes of history. This gives priority to actions that give birth to new historical dynamics. And it requires patience, waiting."

This is a rather cryptic comment. I am intrigued how Pope Francis's rejection of occupying space links up rather well with his concept of peripheries. A periphery is a boundary--it is a line, a limit, a demarcation. A periphery is not a space. It is a vector, a velocity and direction--in other words, a process. A periphery is the edge of space. Occupation of space, control of power, appears to win out in the present moment, but over time, historical processes displace spaces. So God acts in history as a vector, rather than occupying a space.

I think to understand this comment more fully, we need to turn to a comment the pope made earlier in the interview when referring to St. Ignatius:

"I was always struck by a saying that describes the vision of Ignatius: non coerceri a maximo, sed contineri a minimo divinum est (“not to be limited by the greatest and yet to be contained in the tiniest—this is the divine”)....it is important not to be restricted by a larger space, and it is important to be able to stay in restricted spaces. This virtue of the large and small is magnanimity. Thanks to magnanimity, we can always look at the horizon from the position where we are. That means being able to do the little things of every day with a big heart open to God and to others. That means being able to appreciate the small things inside large horizons, those of the kingdom of God."

St. Ignatius

Of course, without saying it, Pope Francis is referring to the logic of the Incarnation here. God is not limited by the greatest things (God is greater than the universe) and yet he is contained in the tiniest (God emptied himself to become a baby in a manger). But it is also the logic of God's essence. It is the interplay of God's transcendence (He is infinitely above and other than all things) and his immanence (He is more intimate to all things than they are to themselves). As Augustine has it: God is more intimate to me than my innermost self and higher than my uppermost self--interior intimo meo et superior summo meo (Confessions, 3.6.11). God is not limited by the greatest spaces, and yet he is in a sense contained in the tiniest. How is this the case? Oddly enough, Thomas Aquinas seems to suggest that God is immanent because he is transcendent. God's transcendence or infinity (his being-esse, his comprehension all perfections) is the ground of all created being that participates in God's esse (i.e., His act of being). And so God is in all because he is above all.

If that confuses you, it should. Check out the Summa (I, 7-8).

In the Incarnation, God reveals in concrete terms what he already shows forth in his essence--that the God who is above all is also in all and present to all. In the Incarnation, this truth takes on a vivid reality. The God who is not subject to time assumes a human nature in time. And he does so in a way that spurns occupation of space, that is, possession of power. God knows that possession of space is static while processes are dynamic. In his utter poverty, Jesus initiates a historical process that changes the world. He changes the vector of history.

Incarnation window from Chartres Cathedral.

The Pope then brings all of this high-flying theology down to earth. The spiritual takeaway from the logic of Incarnation, the dynamics of God's metaphysical relationship with creation, and the rejection of occupying space is this: we can "appreciate the small things inside large horizons". 

Again, the theme of peripheries! A horizon: the boundary between earth and heaven, the mutual limit of each domain, the space in which earth becomes heaven and heaven becomes earth (here again we find the logic of Incarnation and Sacramentality). If the horizon of our life, the eschatological orientation of being, is the Kingdom of God, then all of our actions, even the smallest, can have eternal significance. 

In fact, we could say that the more meaningless our actions seem, the greater significance they have. This is the case because small actions, actions on the periphery (as opposed to space-occupying actions) are God's privileged channels for changing the world. Indeed, precisely because an action seems so small, there are great opportunities in it for love. Why? Because love is humble; it does not seek aggrandizement. To love when no one is looking, when there is no reward on the other end, when choosing not to love would be so easy--it is then that love counts the most, because it is then that love gives freely and purely.

Let's ask St. Therese for light on this point, whose feast day we celebrated recently. Mother Teresa, who took her name from Therese, looked upon her as a guide to the spiritual life. A good summary of Mother's teaching (although I can't verify that she ever said this sentence word for word) is this maxim commonly attributed to here: We can do no great things, only small things with great love. 

The Little Flower

Peripheral beauty

The Cross is the fullest revelation of God's love that man has received. So the Cross is the most beautiful creation, insofar as it most fully reveals the hidden depths of God's-being-love. And perhaps we could say that the pinnacle of this revelation was Christ's cry of thirst from the cross, his thirst for our love, to love and be loved by us. And we find this beauty, today, at this moment in history, on the periphery of existence. If we are looking to discover beauty in our life, if we want to find something more meaningful--what are we waiting for? Duc in altum. Launch into the deep! Into the depths of the love of Christ, into uncertainty, into a life lived in radical trust.

The application of beauty

What are the end of all these musings on beauty? Why spend the time trying to grasp the relationship between beauty and being, the structure of beauty, and its relationship to love? I think because more fully understanding beauty is a key to unlocking Mother Teresa's vision of the human vocation.

Mother teaches us that we must make our lives something beautiful for God. I think we now have the tools to explicitly describe what Mother Teresa implicitly grasped:

• Christ's crucifixion is the apex of created beauty, insofar as it most fully reveals the depths of divine being whose essence is love (we can understand the processions of the Trinity from Father to Son and Father and Son to the Holy Spirit as perfect gifts of self [=love]. The crucifixion is a creaturely icon of this self-gift). Our entrance into this beauty is a double ecstasis. It is a meeting of thirsts: Christ's thirst to love and our thirst to be loved. Or Christ's thirst to be loved and our thirst to love. Here is the core of the charism of the Missionaries of Charity. 
• Holiness (beauty) is the goal of human life. This could change how we understand even the smallest of our tasks. If we are able to orient all of our work towards the final goal of holiness, and if we understand holiness as beauty (the glimpse of God that breaks out of our life and into the lives of others), we can find intense meaning in even the smallest tasks.
• The Church teaches the path to beauty. To want to live a beautiful life is not some false sentimentality. The objective path to beauty (and the most beautiful life is the holy life, inasmuch as the holy life more fully reveals the being of God who is love) is taught to us by the Church, above all in Scripture and Tradition as interpreted by the Magisterium. The Church calls us to holiness and gives us the means: Tradition and Scripture guide us, the Magisterium instructs us, the Sacraments strengthen us and prepare us to live charitably, and our prayer feeds us. Mother Teresa's holiness was a holiness lived from and for the Church. Let us make her mantra our own: I will give saints to Holy Mother Church [starting, we could add, with myself!].

I hope to return more to the theme of beauty and its relation to Mother's charism in future posts. 

Summa on beauty

In the last several posts, we've done some heavy philosophical lifting to get at a better understanding of beauty. In case I lost you in those abstractions, here is a brief summary of those posts:

1. Beauty is objective. Some beings are more beautiful than others, although every being has some share in beauty, insofar as all beings possess esse, a participation in God's being. Those beings who more fully participate in the being of God, show forth more of they mystery of being, and therefore are more beautiful, from an ontological perspective. A tree and a human can both be beautiful, but the spiritual capabilities of man make him more beautiful (a tree cannot think, will, or commune with God, but a man can do all these and more).
2. Beauty is the self-revelatory property of being. Here is a quick take on the relationship between the transcendental properties of being: A thing is good insofar as it is desirable; what is desirable is also intelligible, insofar as it must be known before it can be desired (True); only that which is visible to the intellect, presenting itself, can be known by the intellect (Beautiful); what can present itself as "this thing" rather than "that thing" must be unified (One). In this schema, beauty is the bridge by which we come to a deeper understanding of the mystery of being itself.
3. Beauty is characterized by a lumen-species structure. There is an appearance (species) of a mystery that breaks forth from what appears (lumen). So a beautiful being simultaneously reveals and hides the mystery it re-presents. Think of Christ's humanity revealing the invisible divinity. 
4. Beauty is closely related to the dynamics of love. Insofar as there is a double movement that results in union between the lover and beloved, so too in our experience of the beautiful, there is a double movement from the beheld and the beholder that unites the two. 

Sainte-Chapelle, Paris.
Stained glass is another good example of how beauty both reveals 
and hides a mystery. It symbolically shows forth some of the mystery of the 
New Heavens and New Earth. It presents us with a radiant darkness!

In our next post, we will apply some of these findings to Mother Teresa's charism. 

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.

Beauty and mimesis

In my last post, I gave a thumbnail sketch that focused on the objective basis of beauty. I ended my post with the conclusion that beauty, as the epiphany of form (Plato), is the self-showing property of being (Balthasar). It is being as it relates to the apprehension (we could say this idea comes from Aquinas, but to be clear, it's still a disputed question whether or not beauty is a transcendental for Thomas--for those interested here is an audio presentation on the issue from St. Thomas Aquinas College).

The point of all this, remember, is to better appreciate the role that beauty plays in the charism of Mother Teresa. A fuller understanding of beauty, I am convinced, can help us more fully  and explicitly grasp what was implicitly intuited by Mother Teresa: that to live beautifully, far from being a sentimental cliche, is in fact the deepest vocation of humanity.

In this post, I want to raise the question of what it means to say that beauty is the revelatory character of being qua being. Now when it comes to representational artwork, we could call this the mimetic character of art, it is rather easy to see how beauty is the epiphany of form, even when form becomes more stylized (in the modern period) or symbolic (in the medieval period). Below, a few examples of representation art in different media:

Turner, Sunrise with Sea Monsters. Oil on canvas. 1845.

Raphael, School of Athens. Fresco. 1511.

Stigmatization of St. Francis. Stained glass. Barfusserkirche. 1235-1245.

Personification of Ktisis (Foundation). Byzantine mosaic. 500-550.

We could say the same about representational sculpture and even music (insofar as some pieces are representative of emotions, for example). But what do we make of art that is non-representational? Think about a painting by Pollock or one of Mozart's symphonies or abstract expressionist sculpture. these seem to be good test cases for trying to understand what we say when we say that beauty is the epiphany of form, the revelation of being. In the next post, I'll give some of my observations.

Beauty, being, and the transcendentals

[This post is a little heavier than usual. A summary of the argument and more interesting implications can be found at the end of the post!]

Most people today understand beauty to be a subjective appraisal of an object. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so goes the saying. This idiom is often resorted to when people disagree about whether or not something is beautiful. Imagine you and I are at an art gallery. You find a particular work beautiful, but I don't. We talk for a bit, and end up agreeing to disagree. And no hard feelings, we tell each other, because beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You're not wrong and I'm not wrong. We just have a different opinion. Beauty, this perspective proposes, is a matter of taste. Or is it? We're asking this question: Is there any on which can we judge something as more beautiful than another thing?

Before we answer that question, let's remember why we're asking it. What's at stake in the question? Why should we care if beauty has an objective basis or whether it's just a matter of taste? it gets back to the teachings of Mother Teresa that we're trying to understand. "Make every action something beautiful for God," she instructs us. Well, if beauty is simply a matter of taste, than what makes an action beautiful or not beautiful is just a matter of taste, a matter of opinion. And once we accept that premise, we very quickly fall into moral relativism (the refutation of which would require another post, at least).

Not so uncommon a view today.

But back to the question: is beauty merely a matter of opinion? I think that the reduction of beauty to subjective judgment without an objective basis degrades beauty to the level of all other things that are a matter of taste. You might like vanilla ice cream and I might like chocolate ice cream, but we can disagree--it's a matter of taste. Vanilla is not objectively better than chocolate. We just have different preferences. Is the same true of art? Is a pop song by Ke$ha really just as beautiful as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (hint: the answer is no)? And if Beethoven's symphony is more beautiful, what is the objective basis for making such a determination?

Before we can answer that question, we need a small crash course in Aristotelian and Scholastic metaphysics in order to familiarize ourselves with two concepts: being and the transcendentals. I'll be drawing mostly from the thought of Thomas Aquinas. We proceed to our first question:

What is being? Ens est id cuius actus est esse [see this wonderful compilation of scholastic axioms]. Being is that whose act is to be. We could say that anything that is has being. But we should note that being is different than existence. Existence is dichotomous. A tree exists and a man exist. But a man exists in a different way than a tree. His act of being is different than the tree's. In scholastic terminology, we say that the particular mode of being of the man--i.e., the form of the man--is different than the form of the tree. A man exists as a creature that thinks, wills, feels, etc. A tree does none of these things, but it does grow and reproduce.

Here's my point: whereas existence is dichotomous (things either exist or they don't), being is intensive (things can exist in many different ways, on account of their different forms). To put it another way, being admits of degrees. We could say it's multichotomous, rather than dichotomous. A man has more being than a tree, because it can think and will and feel and move, whereas a tree can only grow and reproduce. Man more fully expresses the possibilities of being.

Hierarchy of Being.
From Rhetorica Christiana, 1579. 

Why should we care about the difference between being and existence, whether one is dichotomous and the other is intensive, etc? Keep reading. We need one more concept to get there, the transcendentals. What are the transcendentals? Transcendentale est universalis modu entis inquantum entis. A transcendental is a universal mode of being insofar as it is being. To put it another way: a transcendental is a property of being that pertains to all being qua being. All things that are possess these properties. 

In Scholastic philosophy, they are four: all being is one, true, good, and beautiful. Since all being as being has these properties, the transcendentals are convertible. So whatever is one is also true, good, and beautiful; whatever is beautiful is also one, true, and good; etc. Under this schema, what is beauty? Ens relate ad apprehensum. Being in relation to the apprehension. It is the revelatory character of being, the aspect of being that is self-showing, that gives itself to the intellect to be understood (as truth) and acted upon by the will (as good). As Balthasar would have it: "The basic phenomenon in all three of them [the true, good, and beautiful] was their epiphanic character, which permeates everything that exists: self-showing (beauty), self-giving (goodness), self-saying (truth), were all seen to be various aspects of this appearing. This appearing is a king of shining-out that recalls the illuminating action of light" (Chapter 5, section c in the Epilogue to his Triptych).

Of course, none of these are my ideas, nor are they new ideas. I'm relying here first of all on Plato's notion of beauty from Symposium: beauty is the epiphany of form that functions as a bridge to the divine (cf. 210 [acc. to Stephanus pagination]). I am also appropriating Heidegger's notion of aletheia (unconcealedness or disclosure), which he identifies as truth in The Origin of the Work of Art but later admits, correctly I think, that "to raise the question of aletheia, of disclosure as such, is not the same as raising the question of truth. For this reason, it was inadequate and misleading to call aletheia, in the sense of opening, truth" (On Time and Being, p. 70). I think what Heidegger was getting at with the notion of aletheia as the opening and disclosure of a world is what Plato understood as the epiphany of form and what the Scholastics would understand as beauty. So the notion of beauty as the self-showing aspect of being has a long and rather distinguished philosophical genealogy.

Plato's Academy. Mosaic from a villa in Pompeii.

At this point, perhaps you're thinking that not all things are beautiful and true and good. There seems to be much in the world that is not beautiful and good. Things like genocide, starving children, civil wars, and natural disasters that we read about in the news every day. Here it is important to keep in mind the aspect under which being is beautiful, etc. All being is beautiful as being. Some beings as evil agents are perverse and ugly. But even these people who do ugly things are still beautiful insofar as they are beings. They are morally evil, yes, but ontologically good, true, and beautiful. So we need to be careful to recognize the formal aspects under which we judge something as beautiful. 

To summarize: 

1. Being is that which is. Everything that exists has being, but not all being exists in the same way. Different beings exist through different modes (called forms). Being admits of degrees in such a way that one thing (e.g., a man) can have more being than another thing (e.g., a tree). 
2. The transcendentals are properties common to all being as being. That is to say: everything that is has these qualities. They are the one, true, good, and beautiful. Beauty is being qua being as it relates to the apprehension. It is, in other words, the self-showing property of being. 

With this framework, our conclusions about beauty fall into place rather easily:

1. All things that exist are beings. Some things have more being than others (they more fully express the possible ways of being).
2. All being possess transcendental properties. The more being a thing possesses, the more one, true, good, and beautiful it is qua being. Why? If beauty is the self-showing property of being, a thing that has more being will be able to show/reveal more being than that which has less. 

To answer our original question: we can judge something as more or less beautiful on the basis that it possesses and shows forth more being than another. This is primarily a conclusion that applies to the ontological realm. It would take quite a bit more work to move from here to the ethical realm, but I would at least suggest a way forward: the human who lives a more beautiful life is the one who more fully reveals the possibilities of being and the nature of being itself.

If God is the source of all being-- ipsum esse per se subsistens, being itself subsisting through itself (again, material another post!)--then the human who is most beautiful is the one whose life more fully reveals being itself by conforming itself to that Being's mode of being. And if the essence of that supreme being--being itself--is love, then the life that is most beautiful is the life most fully lived in love. And what is it to love? To will the good of the other as other (that is, for its own good and not for your own benefit). So Christ lived the most beautiful human life because through his human nature he most fully revealed (incarnated) being itself is and showed forth the possibilities of being. He most fully showed us what love is and how to love.

I would suggest that the saints and blesseds, including Mother Teresa, did something similar: showing us new ways of living in the world in conformance with the life of freedom that is life lived in and for God. 

Living flames

"I have come to cast fire upon the earth..."

The fire of divine beauty will transform us into living flames of charity.
Scripture is the Word on Fire. Christ is the flame.
Kindle this flame within your heart and cast it upon the world. 

Beauty, evangelization, and MT

Here is another fascinating video from Father Robert Barron. In it he discusses the role of beauty in the New Evangelization. here's his thesis: "The best way to evangelize...is to move from the beautiful, then to the good, then to the true. And to get that backwards is to evangelize very ineffectively." Since our culture tends to be suspicious of truth claims ("all religions are at their core the same"), and relativistic on the question of morality ("what's good for you isn't necessarily good for me"), it is best to start with the beautiful--simply to present beauty to a person. Not to tell them that what they're doing is wrong or that they're living a life of lies. Obviously no one likes that. Simply to show them the beautiful.

It is difficult to argue with something beautiful, perhaps because beauty doesn't make an argument. It shows forth something, it gives of its essence to the beholder. Beauty seizes us and compels us to enter into the world that it has created, the world that it shows forth. The experience of beauty is also something intensely personal (although beauty itself is not subjective), and for this reason it is a good place to begin evangelizing in the modern world, which places so much emphasis on subjectivity and personal experience. It is hard to deny the beauty of the Sistine Chapel, the Divine Comedy, or Palestrina's motets, as Father Barron notes. It is even harder to deny the beauty of a saintly life. 

I think this is one reason why Mother Teresa so fascinated the world. She did make claims about truth and goodness that cut against the modern world, especially on abortion (as she so often said, "abortion is the greatest destroyer of peace in the world"). But most people's first encounter with Mother Teresa was witnessing her work with the poor, the selfless sacrifice she made day after day for those who had nothing and no one. Who could fail to see the beauty of a life so lived? 

From the beautiful, we move to the good: when we encounter beauty we ask ourselves, how can I become like that? how can I become beautiful? And here we have the good. Once we are striving towards goodness, we are likely to ask ourselves about truth: what is the goal of my action in the world? what is the end toward which I am ordering all my activity? The beautiful opens us to the world of the good and true, in a way that seems more inviting than demanding. 

And so, when Mother Teresa gave the 1982 Harvard commencement speech, she could denounce abortion and call students who had cheated to repentance--and still receive a long standing ovation. Can you imagine any other Catholic religious figure giving a speech denouncing abortion at Harvard, that bastion of secular bastions, and receiving a long standing ovation? I think not.

Yet people listened to her, and listened intently. Why? Because she lived a beautiful life. She made great sacrifices that few others were willing to make, and so the world listened. And through that beautiful life she opened up to us more distant horizons and broader vistas, the life of beauty lived entirely from, for, and with Christ. She showed us that beauty is our portal into the divine. 

Something beautiful

Beauty was a key category for Mother Teresa. When I was at Kalighat, the home for the aged and dying in Calcutta, there was a sign that read, "Let every action be something beautiful for God." I think it was one of Mother's favorites. To those who implicitly criticized the work that she did as enabling the poor or somehow not being enough she would say: "I can do what you cannot do. You can do what I cannot do. Together we can do something beautiful for God." Many people have heard both of these quotes, but I suspect that not many people know what they mean.

Mother Teresa became a living presence of the divine beauty in the world. I think it is no small aspiration to want to become beauty. It is our vocation: to become beautiful. We are made in the image and likeness of God, and God is beauty itself. But we have lots of mud and grime caked on this image within us, and it takes hard work to scrape it away and let the divine light break forth.

In the next few posts, I'll be exploring beauty. I think if we can understand this concept better, we can come to a much deeper appreciation of what Mother Teresa meant in the above quotes.

What, after all, is beauty?

The mystery of repentance

Allegri's haunting setting for Psalm 51, David's great plea for repentance. It is an almost perfect expression of the heart's repentance. If at the Cross we encounter beauty itself--for the Cross is the revelation of divine love--then we encounter this beauty in the profoundest of ways when we open ourselves in repentance to this love. In our Confession, Calvary becomes present.

Let us examine ourselves. How have we offended Christ? Where do we need forgiveness? And in our joyful sorrow, let us turn to the Church's great gift to us, sacramental Confession. Our Lady will give us the strength to draw near to our Lord and beg his forgiveness. And we can be confident that he will grant it to us--not because we deserve it, but because Christ graciously wills it.

Recently Pope Francis reminded us that, "The confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord’s mercy motivates us to do better."

And as Mother Teresa would say, Confession makes us sinners without sin. 

How beautiful--to be a sinner without sin! 

We begin again, a new life.