Having the Sight to See Beauty

Word on Fire published a piece earlier this week that serves as a good reminder in the midst of the beginnings of this school year. Reflecting on an article penned by Dr. Eleonore Stump, “Beauty as a Road to God,” the piece is a meditation on the ways our openness to God is not stirred purely or even mainly by intellectual argument, but by an experience of being awakened to “a desire, a great yearning, an inchoate longing for something” that ultimately finds its satisfaction in God, alone. If our formation as Christians is meant to be complete, then, it’s meant to involve not only a formation of mind to grasp abstract Christian principles, but also a vision and heart to experience this desire, this “great yearning.”

For it’s worth noting that beauty can be something of a double-edged sword in the Christian life. While it’s certainly true that beauty is deeply moving, and can awaken in us a longing for its ultimate source, beauty can also be a slippery sort of road to travel to get to God, and an easy road upon which to be deceived. The New Testament speaks a lot about truth, and a lot about goodness. It says very little about beauty. Isaiah says of Christ that there was nothing beautiful in him that we should desire him. And Jesus himself says that he is the truth, and that only God is good. He doesn’t say the same about beauty. Finally the tradition is filled with saints who practiced asceticism toward things beautiful, whether people, or objects of art, or landscapes or houses. They didn’t do the same with truth or goodness.

And yet the Church also beautifully adorns its churches, and honors beautiful things when rightly viewed. There is indeed a great yearning within us, one which our resistance gets melted toward when presented with the “stealth bomber,” as Stump puts it, that is beauty. The key, perhaps, is having the right “heart to see it.” We could say that beauty is a kind of echo of Eden: Eve took the apple because it was pleasing to the eye, and the worldly person may be deceived and overthrown by beauty if pursued wrongly. And yet the saints seemed only to allow themselves to be more and more disarmed by the bounty of God in their experiences of the beautiful, and the scriptural places most filled with God’s presence are always described in the most refulgent ways the sacred writers could come up with – gardens and gold, music and gems.

Our task as Christians and evangelists, then, seems not only to look for and pursue beauty where we can, but to cultivate the eyes to recognize and love it rightly where it may most truly be found. The ultimately beautiful image, of course, is the crucified Christ himself – a figure of gruesome ugliness in appearance, but one that becomes deeply beautiful when what’s really going on is perceived: God’s own self-gift on behalf of the salvation of the human race. The longing beauty arrests in us is not only a longing for God’s presence, then; it’s even more deeply a longing for our redemption, a longing for the woundedness in our minds and hearts to be healed so as to resonate more fully with the truth, love, and goodness an experience of the beautiful alerts us to.

Hence the significance of our life-long educational task: to come not only to a deeper understanding of Christian doctrine and proofs, but to a deeper understanding of who we are, of the meaning of our “inchoate longings,” which can indeed point us to the One who lives to touch and redeem and fulfill them.

Tuesday was the feast of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, a Carmelite nun who experienced neither fame nor notoriety in life, but who has become one of the most influential women in the history of the Church.

With the second session of Synod on Synodality about to begin, Bishop Barron offers a preparatory reflection.

Dr. Ryan T. Anderson takes stock of the pro-life movement two years after Dobbs, and comments on what's in store for the future.