Beauty Goodness and Truth

The Act of Joy
An icon of Thomas Aquinas, by Nicholas Markell

A joy that many of us have occasion to experience – either directly or through friends and extended family – accompanies time with young children. Preschool and kindergarten teachers are by the nature of their work in the most favorable position to have this opportunity. The experience of joy we associate with time given in this way stands out for me because it is a shared joy – one shared with and inspired by those young ones who exemplify this virtue. For me, this experience has been awakened especially by my interaction with my granddaughters.

I have written previously about activities that I have enjoyed with our grandson. He shares being a grandchild of ours with six young ‘ladies’ in various stages of growing maturity. Here, I find myself musing about the wonder I have experienced with our granddaughters, who have been the source of some unique experiences for me. Having grown up with three brothers and no sisters, and having three sons and no daughters, I am encountering and learning things with my granddaughters for which I have not previously had the opportunity to experience first hand.

Among our granddaughters is one whom I like to describe as being ebullient. For she just naturally models energetic cheerfulness. She has her challenges, as we all do. But she approaches each new day’s activities with a joyfulness and positive spirit that are infectious. Though being a patient and engaging grandfather is still a growth point for me, I delight in her youthful exuberance.

An image that reminds me of my granddaughters among autumn leaves

I have mentioned before an icon of St. Thomas Aquinas that I particularly value (shown above). I have seen this image attributed to Brother Robert Lentz, but now believe it is by Nicholas Markell. This icon shows Blessed Thomas holding a small plaque with the following words: “Joy is the noblest human act.”

For many of us, joy is a welcome feeling and as such we think of it as something ‘that happens to us.’ Like love and forgiveness, joy therefore is generally an experience we anticipate receiving passively, and an experience for whose value we often rely upon feelings as our guide.

The beauty of Markell’s icon, and the quotation it features, is the reminder it provides that joy is also something we choose, something we do, and not simply something that we happen to feel. We rejoice; we can choose to enjoy; and we are able to express our joy about things we encounter or experiences that we have with others.

We experience joy when we read good books with our grandchildren

We live in a culture that tends to distrust expressions of joy, even though most people we know – and us with them – are sadly in want of it. Perhaps it’s because we encounter so few examples of spontaneous, genuine, and selfless joy, inspired by what we see around us. Is this because there is less beauty in the world these days, or are we less prepared to perceive it? My reflection and training incline me toward the latter belief. 

Joy is not one of the seven formally identified virtues taught to us by the greater Christian Tradition (among then, faith, hope, charity {or love}, prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude {or courage}). Yet, the traditional listing of virtues is not meant to exclude naming others, but rather to help us perceive their common source as well as their unity, being gifts given to us through Creation and through Redemption. Like other virtues, joy is a human capacity and a strength that we can develop through practice.

The rite for Holy Baptism in The Book of Common Prayer includes words that are prayed over candidates after they are baptized. Some of these words are particularly appropriate when thinking about the joy we often see expressed by children, but are also about something that we pray will be given to adult candidates for Baptism. In the rite, the officiant asks God to give the newly baptized persons “an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works.”

Here we discern a principal attribute of Beauty. In Beauty, among God’s works, we find a repository of joy and a source of wonder. For the beauty that we find in the world embodies and expresses our Father’s love for his Creation. Encountering this love brings us joy as we perceive its source and embrace him.

Today, I am thinking about the joy that each of my grandchildren encourages me to experience with them. I notice the natural joy that many children seem more able to find than do adults of my age. More readily, children delight in the world around them and in the experiences they are blessed to have. At the same time, and especially in this next phase of my life, I am reminded that joy – like Beauty, Goodness, and Truth – is not simply passively experienced. More importantly, joy is something that I want to – and can – practice.

So, with my grandchildren, I choose joy!

I close with a prayer attributed to St Francis, which speaks of joy as something we can contribute to a needy world:

Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is
hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where
there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where
there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where
there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to
be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is
in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we
are born to eternal life. Amen.

Reinhold Marxhausen and Finding Beauty
Reinhold Marxhausen

I am currently leading an adult learning group on the theme of Art, Beauty, and Transcendence. Some wonderful observations were offered by my fellow learners at our first session. After inviting our participants to introduce themselves and share a recollection of a memorable encounter with Beauty, I provided a discussion prompt: Is Beauty essential, or is it a luxury? We seemed to share a consensus that it is an essential part of our lives. And then a participant said, “I find Beauty everywhere!”

Hearing this, I thought of Reinhold Marxhausen, a remarkable artist and teacher who had a vision for how we all might approach our daily encounter with our ordinary, everyday circumstances. His captivating approach to life impacted many people beyond the classroom and studio – me among them. Here is one way to sum up the vision he shared with others: “Beauty can be found everywhere – you just need to look for it!” So simple is this message that I am sure it has more often been dismissed than pursued as a practice. 

Marxhausen in his studio workshop

Reinhold Marxhausen did not just send folks away to try this on their own; it became his mission to show people how to do it. This is made clear in a video of his appearance on the David Letterman show, with the interviewer doing a great job of giving rein to the artist’s creative spark and communicative abilities. Marxhausen‘s Letterman show appearance can be found on YouTube.

Reinhold Marxhausen on the David Letterman show, March 25, 1986

I continue to be intrigued by what Marxhausen’s abiding belief implies- that Beauty is found, in addition to how we are led to it by others, or more simply that it is something we just designate for ourselves. These are three different ways that we might encounter Beauty as a feature in our lives, if not as something even more profound for how we view our lives and the world.

Readers of my posts in this space will be familiar with the parallel I have discerned between the three principal forms of jurisprudence (or theories about the source of Law, and three main sources for our concept of the Good in our understanding of ethics. Found, received, and or made, are the three terms I use to summarize these three approaches to where Law comes from, as well as for sources of our notion(s) of the Good. In offering this summary, I do not exclude the possibility of other sources for Law and or the Good.

More expansively, according to the first view (1), Law and the Good are entities written into the structure of ‘reality.’ As such, these things are ‘there’ for us to find. Another possibility (2), sees Law and the Good as worthy principles we receive from those who have come before us, as things commended to us by longstanding traditions. We sometimes describe them as things that have stood the test of time. A third possibility (3) is that Law as well as the Good are sets of principles about which we come to agreement, or decide upon and enact for ourselves and others. Hence they are things of our crafting, things that we ‘make,’ as we project our preferences outward upon the world. Formal labels for these three approaches include natural law or Creation order (1), historicism or common law (2), and positivism or civil law (3). 

Here is something I want to stress: we are rarely consistent in how we think, perceive, and understand important aspects of our lives. We should therefore anticipate an overlap between these several conceptual categories for how we think about Law and about ethics.  In other words, a ‘both-and’ approach regarding them may be much more appropriate than seeing them in an ‘either/or’ way.

So, is Beauty amenable to a similar analysis? I think it is. For Beauty is found (1); we also discern Beauty in the company of others and through their guidance (2); and we surely fashion notions about what is beautiful through personal preference and decision-making (3). 

If you believe you have ‘found’ Beauty at some or at many points in your life experience, would you be content to accept the proposition that your encounter with Beauty is actually reducible to the social impact of others upon your perception, and or that it was and is merely the result of personal preference and choice?

Beauty: Found, Received, and Made
A photo from Èze, France (by my brother)

While undertaking my studies in ethics and moral theology, I discerned a significant parallel that has continued to shape my world-view. The parallel I have in mind connects how we understand law with how we understand ethics. In turn, I have come to see how this discernment applies also to how we appreciate beauty. 

First, about where law comes from. As I understand it, there are three principal theories about our source or sources for law, formally termed theories of jurisprudence. They are not mutually exclusive, and may function for us in overlapping ways. 

A common understanding regarding the source of law views the concept of law as fundamental to and discernible within the structure of reality. Law in this first sense is something we find, written into the patterns of the world, and of its many aspects. This idea gives rise to, but is not the same thing as, the so-called ‘laws of nature,’ or the principles that order the function of many things from the most basic particles within matter, and the function of waves like light and energy, the functions we discern within complex biological organisms however malleable they may seem to be over time, as well as within the structure of rationality. 

A well-known expression of this first concept of law is latent within the familiar phrasing regarding what it means to be a human being: “we hold these truths to be self-evident…” That is, certain truths or principles are there to be found, by those who exercise our capacity for reason and discernment. A simple but sometimes misleading label for this first concept of law is ‘natural law,’ which some skeptics might argue is neither!

The second most commonly recognized theory of the source of law can be articulated by observing those principles and ‘rules’ long-rooted in the history of our communities, which we receive from those who have come before us. British Common Law, which undergirds much of our tradition of law in the United States, is a prime example. ‘Received from history,’ and long relied upon by communities, are two basic ways to label and identify this concept of law. The familiar refrain, ‘we have always done it in this way,’ provides a ready example. 

The third way of understanding the source and character of law perceives law to be comprised of those principles and or rules that have been decided by individuals and communities. It is commonly called ‘positive law,’ a label that refers to the law that we posit, or put into place. The existence of law in this third category represents the assertion of will and of choice, for law in this sense arises from us as something we make, and is dependent upon our projection of what we wish or believe to be true. Many examples, from neighborhood clubhouse rules to Louisiana’s state constitution (resting upon the French Napoleonic legal tradition), are expressions of this approach. 

These three theoretical understandings of the source of law are relevant for my own field of ethics. For in ethics, there are three principal bases for our concept of the Good, and upon which our notion of the Good rests, which correspond to three principal forms of jurisprudence or theories of the source of law. 

Moonrise off the harbor breakwater in Antibes (photo also by Gregory Holmgren)

If this is correct, and I believe it is, then surely we can reason appropriately toward the same conclusion regarding Beauty as well as for Truth. For Beauty and Truth as Transcendentals play the same foundational role in our thinking as the Good, which functions as a principal reference point for ethics in human reasoning and experience.

This leads me to recognize how there are three principal ways of accounting for the source or sources of beauty. With regard to Beauty, positivists will contend that ideas regarding beauty are projections of those who hold them, whether by individuals or by communities. Historicists, in parallel with the common law tradition of jurisprudence, will say that notions of beauty are rooted in the histories of communities and the traditions, and are to this extent reliable guides for thinking about things. And – as follows from the preceding, those who accept the natural law tradition in jurisprudence are those most likely to view beauty as a given feature of reality, here and there for us to encounter, regardless of our shared traditions and personal aspirations. 

In closing, I want to restate a point I made above. Whether we are accounting for the source or sources of Beauty, Goodness, and or Truth, we may prefer one or more of three ways I have articulated based on the three principal approaches to the sources of law. Yet, all three approaches are likely to figure into and be a part of our thinking. For example, we may think that notions of beauty are rooted in nature, while valuing how our Western tradition of art has shaped our thoughts and those of our community, while still also recognizing how we may be somewhat arbitrary regarding the forms or standards of beauty that we prefer to value and pursue! Especially because the first or second of these three approaches may serve as a corrective to and perhaps as also a check against the potential liabilities associated with the third.

What Distinguishing Religion, Science, Magic, and Technology, Might Teach Us About Beauty
A book of essays by Peter Kreeft

Peter Kreeft has written an illuminating essay on the use of indirect communication by CS Lewis and Walker Percy. In it, and in a humorous recording of its content, he explores how both Lewis and Percy present the predicament of the modern person. We live as upside-down persons. And we are not among the first people in history to suspect this. (See St. Augustine, d. 430 AD)

As a way into the heart of his theme, Kreeft invites us to consider a hypothetical challenge posed to a child: take four common objects and sort them into two boxes. The four items are a baseball, a basketball, a baseball bat, and a basketball net. The two most obvious solutions to this challenge, based on the categories of being and doing, nicely set up a thought experiment that Kreeft intends for his audience to engage. He invites us to sort the following four things into two (undefined) categories: Religion, Science, Magic, and Technology. Try it. 

In taking up this simple quiz question, we discover one way that our contemporary thinking habits depart from those of our ancient forebears. Our common assumption that science and technology are sister fields, reliably distinguished by their empirical methodology from both religion and magic, reflects a misunderstanding. For what we may overlook in this supposition of an affinity between science and technology, as well as between the second pair of terms, is how our categorization of these four terms demonstates our understanding of what we consider to be real. And the key variable governing our typical way of sorting these four conceptual categories centers less on what is ‘real,’ and more on the significance of how we conceptualize our encounter with ‘reality.’

A theme that has surfaced from time time in this space, and which plays a large role in structuring my understanding of Beauty, rests upon my appreciation for the distinction between the meaning of the words ‘objective’ and ‘subjective.’ I credit my graduate research in ethics and moral theology for raising my awareness of what these terms can and do mean. With regard to Beauty, and more broadly about what is real versus what is presently actual in our awareness of things, ‘objective’ best refers to the objects of perception, and ‘subjective’ in a corollary way best refers to the subject of perception (I.e., to me, the observer, the knower).

CS Lewis in his Oxford study

Kreeft makes the case that both CS Lewis and Walker Percy shared a conceptual understanding with many philosophers and writers from the pre-modern era. In making the point, Kreeft quotes what he says are the three most illuminating sentences he has ever read about our civilization:

“There is something which unites magic and applied science [i.e., technology] while separating both from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike, the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique.”

And if we have not guessed where Kreeft is headed with all this, he puts the matter succinctly: “Technology is more like magic than like science.” It follows that he commends thinking of religion as being like science by also involving a search for what is real and true, even if differing in its methodology and content.  

Walker Percy at home in Covington, LA

A challenge related to Kreeft’s theme, regarding how we approach beauty, faces us as modern people. It stems from how – through the influence of our culture – we are inclined to think of art and architecture as being more akin to magic and technology, than to science and religion. For we tend to assume that artists and architects manipulate materials and space to stimulate certain responses from those who interact with their work. And, of course, they do. But is this all that these crafters of beautiful things accomplish? Are they not also among those who seek and make available to others instantiations of what is real, and more particularly of the beauty that is there for us also to perceive and come to know? I believe that they are. 

Artists and architects approach the world in a way that has an affinity with those who work in religion and science, while what they do may seem to be like the work of those who ‘practice’ technology or magic. For like all genuine seekers of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, scientists (especially theoretical physicists) as well as religionists include dedicated persons who want to know these real aspects of the world that may be apprehended by those who look for them.

I continue to learn by reflecting on these themes.

Note: Kreeft develops at greater length than I have scope here to address the significance of these and related distinctions. He does this in his essay, “Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos: The Abolition of Man in Late Night Comedy Format.” I commend an entertaining recording of Kreeft’s presentation of the essay’s content, which can be found on his website (by clicking this link).

Beauty & “The God of Wes Anderson”

This is a reprint of a review article by Germẚn Saucedo, titled “The God of Wes Anderson.” It is reprinted here with permission from the author, and from the publisher of the journal, First Things, where it first appeared.

A scene from Wes Anderson’s new film, The Phoenician Scheme

The God of Francis Thompson is a stubborn God. In his seminal poem “The Hound of Heaven,” a soul is on the run from God: “I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; / I fled Him, down the arches of the years.” The “hound” is persistent, however, and is always pursuing with “unhurrying chase, / And unperturbèd pace, / Deliberate speed, majestic instancy.” Who is this God whose love for us is so passionate and resolute, who will forgive even the gravest of sins and chase us to the ends of the world?

The God of Francis Thompson is the God that operates in Wes Anderson’s latest feature, The Phoenician Scheme. The film follows Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda (Benicio del Toro), an industrialist and morally bankrupt magnate in the style of J. Paul Getty or Aristotle Onassis who, after surviving yet another mysterious assassination attempt, decides to call upon his estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a novice “sister of the cloth.” He intends not only to bequeath his vast fortune to her, but also to enlist her in completing the “most important project of [his] lifetime,” the “Korda Land and Sea Phoenician Infrastructure Scheme.”

Many films have been accused of being “God-haunted,” hinting at the presence of God through the subtleties of the plot or the visuals. The Phoenician Scheme is more than “God-haunted”; he is very much present in the film. He is, in fact, played by Bill Murray. After a plane crash at the beginning of the movie, Korda briefly finds himself in heaven. There, he runs into his grandmother, who fails to recognize the man he has become. Time and time again, as assassins seek to end his life, Korda finds himself at the pearly gates. Each time, he is found lacking.

In the Confessions, St. Augustine famously recounts his youthful desire for the Lord to “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.” While amusing, this sentiment is spiritually disordered. Many of us live lives apart from God, hoping we can outmaneuver him at the last second, “lest he come suddenly and find you asleep.” Similarly, Korda realizes that he has delayed repentance and conversion until the last minute.

The “hound” is never far away, however. He manifests himself through Liesl who, despite practically being abandoned by Korda, has managed to become a pious nun. While reluctant to enter her father’s world of opulence and luxury, she nevertheless decides to play the role Korda has set for her, seeing potential spiritual fruits from the venture, and quickly begins the work of saving Korda’s soul. She easily forgives his past injustices toward her, brings love to the lives of Korda’s nine neglected sons, and attempts to humanize his enterprise. Liesl also attempts to evangelize the children’s tutor and her father’s new administrative assistant, Bjørn.

Korda’s journey to save his infrastructure project brings him ever closer to God. Liesl’s influence and example, as well as a confrontation with his past (and some amount of self-interest), leads him—along with his nine sons—to be baptized into the Catholic Church. In a defining act of selflessness, Korda gives up his fortune to cover the funding deficit of his major project and save it.

Wes Anderson’s films are often dismissed as mere aesthetic exercises, lacking narrative substance. His protagonists are usually “bourgeois with bourgeois problems,” while his visuals are frequently labeled as “twee” and “quirky.” Unlike the realism of directors like Ermanno Olmi, whose slow and contemplative style focused on the material reality of the lower classes, Anderson’s work is often seen as overly stylized and detached from reality.

But this surface-level reading could not be further from the truth. For Anderson, it seems, beauty is reality. To borrow Keats’s famous verse, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”; and it is through beauty that God makes himself known to us. When Liesl attempts to exit her father’s opulent world and take her vows as a nun, her mother superior declines, pointing to her love of lavishness—including a bejeweled pipe and diamond-encrusted rosary gifted by Korda, which Anderson commissioned from Dunhill and Cartier—as evidence of her lack of religious vocation. But she does not scold her for loving beautiful things. In fact, she comforts Liesl by saying that God glorifies himself with the lavish and palatial, as not everyone was meant to live in poverty.

In a Q&A at a New York screening of the film, Wes Anderson reflected briefly on the ability of rich magnates to do good, especially in today’s world. The artist has a similar potential. In Thompson’s poem, the “hound” claims that “[N]one but I makes much of naught.” While our riches and our art may amount to nothing, once offered up to God, they can become instruments of his love and mercy. God will never stop his pursuit of us in part because he, unlike the world, knows our full potential. Korda—like us—is thrown lifeline after lifeline, which can only be taken on God’s terms, not ours.

Unlike Korda, we should not wait for brushes with death and brief visits to the pearly gates to turn around and deliver the “hound” from his incessant chase. Every moment is an opportunity to do so. The curious and wonderful thing about the God of Francis Thompson, the God of Wes Anderson, is that he’s real, and he is always seeking us.

A promotional poster for Anderson’s new film

Note: Germẚn Saucedo serves as a Junior Fellow at First Things. I requested permission to reprint his review article because it seems so fitting to the material I explore on this website. I am grateful for this fine piece. I particularly appreciate Saucedo’s statement, based on a quote from Keats: “For Anderson, it seems, beauty is reality… and it is through beauty that God makes himself known to us.”

Leo XIV: The Beauty of Possibility

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Pope Leo XIV, upon his election

As an Anglican, I join other non-Roman Catholics in hoping and praying that the new Bishop of Rome will live fully into the beautiful opportunity he has been given. His new office brings with it a symbolic role for all Christians, to be a principled unifier and peacemaker. In this era, that will surely be a challenge.

People of good will seek truth where it is to be found. We want all persons to live in harmony with one another, and with the beautiful world in which we find ourselves. We see this spirit of inquiry and discernment exemplified in many Christian leaders, as well as in non-Christian leaders like the Dalai Lama.

At heart, we seek and desire to serve what Christians and Jews hold to be true regarding all human beings. For we believe that all persons were and are created in the image of God, and that despite the woeful effects of our sin, we all still bear that image, however much we may have lost likeness with God. This was the central insight that some Roman Catholic Christian thinkers, along with fellow spiritual travelers from other traditions, brought to the creation of the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights.

Principal documents from the Second Vatican Council display this theme in abundance. These texts continue to inform and guide wise souls who are genuinely concerned about the numerous lingering and emerging problems within the worldwide Church, and in the many societies and cultures where Christians seek to serve Christ in all persons, and respect the dignity of every human being.

Pope Leo has in large measure the same opportunity that we all have. May he have grace to live and serve well, and may we remember the importance of our own often overlooked roles in seeking to do the same. Every day brings new opportunities to seek and serve what is true, especially as we come to know the source of all Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, in Christ.

As St. Richard, the 13th century pre-Reformation Bishop of Chichester (England), taught us to pray: “Dear Lord, of thee three things [we] pray: to see thee more clearly, to love thee more dearly, and to follow thee more nearly, day by day.” (text from The Hymnal 1982, yet familiar to many from the musical, Godspell)

We find the same words as part of a prayer found in the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church:

MOST merciful Redeemer,
who gavest to thy Bishop Richard a love of learning,
a zeal for souls, and a devotion to the poor:
grant that, encouraged by his example,
and aided by his prayers,
we may know thee more clearly,
love thee more dearly,
and follow thee more nearly,
day by day;
who livest and reignest with the Father
in the unity of the Holy Spirit, ever one God,
world without end. Amen.

A stained glass window commemorating St. Richard of Chichester, found in the church of St. Saviour, Eastbourne, East Sussex, England

The Beauty of Objectivity

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William Blake, The Ancient of Days (one of numerous hand-colored prints)

 

I like to use a couple of throw-away lines: First, the world was here before we were here to notice it (or try to describe and evaluate its various facets). And, second, God was here before we were ever able to think the thought, much less give value to or try to describe this fundamental insight. And so, the world had God-given beauty and value before we were here to notice such things. To put this matter in the formal terms I propose that we recover, we were objects of God’s subjectivity before God ever became an object of ours. These insights ought to be primary in our outlook upon the world, and upon our lives within it.

The stark alternative to what these throw-away lines represent is the view that the world, its meaning and any purposes within it, and or God, came to have significance if not also actuality, when we chose to notice or imagine such things.

I have written before urging recognition of how beauty exists apart from the ‘eyes of the beholder.’ This is to say that the reality of beauty transcends the perception and apprehension processes of the one who beholds it. Another way to say this is to contend that beauty has objective reality. But what do we mean when we say something is objective?

Here, I would like to commend an insight regarding this word, ‘objective,’ and its pair, ‘subjective,’ terms we may use too casually. For we tend to employ these words most often to characterize two different aspects of how we perceive matters that come before us. One we regard as being oriented toward what is factual; we use the second to refer to that which is subject to the variability of emotions and sentiments that are particular to ourselves.

We need to recover a prior sense of what these two words, objective and subjective, can mean. We can return to using the word objective, not first to refer to the fact-oriented aspect of our consciousness of the world, but as referring primarily to the world itself and to the things within it. In this recovered use of these terms, the objective can best designate the objects of perception. And the second term, the subjective, can best represent the subject of our perceptions (us).

We can, of course, have ‘subjective’ notions about the objects of our perception, while we can also seek to be more accurate in our sense of those things that we perceive. Accurate description and evaluation of the objects of our perception are aided by comparative reference to the perceptions of those same things by others, and thus are aided by an effort to step beyond notions that are particular to ourselves and to our private experience of them.

In this respect, the practice of good science shares a basic property with the practice of good religion. Both seek to describe what is true, and what is in accord with reality.

God the Geometer (from a medieval manuscript)

In perhaps an overly simplistic summary, the choice between these two outlooks upon ‘what is,’ emerged with what we now call the Enlightenment, and the development of what we now call ‘natural science.’ And yet, the emergence of modern science, and the world view which it has come to nurture, lies in pre-modern theism, in the ancient and primal belief that before all things, was and is God. And that God was and is the author of what the medievals called the Book of Nature, who was also the author of the Book of Scripture. Two books with overlapping significance, by one Author, about all that was, and is, and ever shall be.

Among the works of this author, and behind or within them, are ideas, ideas latent in the mind of the Author. And preeminent among these ideas are Beauty, Goodness, and Truth. These ideas represent the highest things we cannot not know, especially if we seek to have our minds shaped by the mind of the Author of all things. Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, are therefore – as we like to say and think – objective. That is, they are among the highest, most valuable and excellent, objects of our perception. And whether we grasp their significance, and how we grasp their significance, as fellow-subjects of their perception, can of course be – as we like to say and think – subjective.

William Blake, Newton as A Divine Geometer

Nevertheless, the objects of our perception ought to govern and discipline our shared and comparative perception – as fellow-subjects – of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth. This is the beauty of human objectivity and of subjectivity.

 

 

Beauty in the Face of Jesus

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William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World (detail)

 

Since the earliest centuries of the Christian era, believers have found encouraging meaning in paintings of the imagined face of Jesus. Since no such images exist from his lifetime (as far as we know), but only written depictions of Jesus’ character as displayed in his words and actions, later artists have literally drawn upon acts of imagination in how best to present him. In so many of these paintings of Jesus, we find abiding images that convey an abiding love.

Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci

More than a few in our great Tradition have had an aversion to the making of these images, believing that such efforts to depict Jesus risk engaging in or promoting idolatry, a concern that is not difficult to appreciate. Yet painters, particularly in the Christian East, have believed that, in view of our Lord’s Incarnation, paintings of Jesus and of holy events in which he was involved are not only appropriate, they can be divinely inspired windows into eternity.

Christ Pantocrator, an icon in St. Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, Egypt

Modern Evangelicalism has played a parallel role to this in the belief that compelling contemporary images of a beautiful and winsome Jesus can aid the faithful by stirring devotion in Bible reading, prayer, and in daily living.

Warner Sallman’s 1940, Head of Christ, reprinted in many Protestant Bibles and devotionals

The face of Jesus, by R. Hook, a 1964 painting widely popular in the Jesus Movement of the 1970’s and among Evangelicals

How do we picture Jesus? Although though we may appropriately demur from referring to God by using personal pronouns or with gender-based associations, when hearing the Gospel reading on Sundays, or while reading devotional books, images of Jesus inevitably arise in our conscious awareness generated by acts of imagination.

Here we receive encouragement from C.S. Lewis, J.R. Tolkien, and other spiritually inclined writers, who have helped us recover confidence in the idea that the power of imagination can be a redeemed vehicle for conceiving holy images, both of biblical scenes and also of allegorical parallels based upon them.

Hieronymus Bosch, Christ Carrying the Cross (detail)

The popular pious suggestion that we ask ourselves, “what would Jesus do, or say about this matter,” can therefore be a helpful spiritual exercise, especially if pursued reverently and with a scripturally informed process of deliberate thought.

Christ and the Rich Young Ruler, Heinrich Hoffman

In my prior post, I shared detail of a compelling image of Jesus by the 19th century painter, Heinrich Hoffman. I love this painting, expressing the artist’s rendering of Jesus’ encounter with the so-called rich young ruler. Hoffman portrays well the love Jesus had for and showed to the man who asked him how he could enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The painter depicts how Jesus loved him and, we believe, continued to love him, both before and after this man turned away in discontent and confusion.

As we grow in our familiarity with images of Jesus, we can become sensitive to the way that Western art has tended to portray our Lord’s humanity, influenced by the European artistic tradition, which has not overlooked Jesus’ Semitic background. Nevertheless, how artists and others portray Jesus finds in him reflections of themselves, which is true to his known desire to identify with who we are. It has become more common in recent years for artists to portray Jesus in the form and appearance of other cultures, and the iconographic paintings of Brother Robert Lentz (some of which I have featured before) provide a good example. Among them is his image of Jesus set within the context of Japanese Buddhist spirituality, seen in the following image.

Turning again and again to such images can be most helpful to us in our spiritual journeys, especially when we choose well-conceived and well-executed paintings, drawings, or sculptures, that express to us facets of divine beauty, as well as the goodness and truth of God, found in the face of Jesus.

 

Note: Jaroslav Pelikan’s book, The Illustrated Jesus Through the Centuries, provides a ready and helpful way of finding images that can accompany our journey through Lent toward Easter living. Once again, I would like to thank Kathy Kane for my copy of this beautiful book.

In anticipation of this coming Sunday, Lent 2, Year C, I offer here a copy of a homily from a prior year, which may be accessed by clicking here.

The Beauty of Truth

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The Risen body of Christ bears the healed scars from the Crucifixion in Matthias Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece.

My commitment to writing about Beauty is evident in my ongoing posts. I have also written about the connection between Beauty and Goodness as well as Truth, the three so-called Transcendentals. To use a phrase from another context, these are three things we ‘cannot not know,’ at least in principle.

As I expressed in my most recent post, in Christ we find the icon of God. For he is the icon of God’s beauty, God’s goodness, and of God’s truth. In turn, and as we are reminded during Lent, we are all called to become icons of Christ, and to seek to embody in ourselves what we find revealed and embodied in him.

Yet, of these three Transcendentals, Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, the third may be the most difficult for us to realize in ourselves, much less to try to describe. This is one reason why since earlier times people have recognized a hierarchy among these three things that we cannot not know. Among the three, beauty tends to be most evident and accessible to us, followed by goodness. The first often leads to greater appreciation for the second, and both can lead us to search for truth, however and wherever we may find it.

It is nevertheless not uncommon for us to be unsure about the presence or the nature of beauty and goodness when viewing objects, actions, or events. And we are very capable of engaging in disputes regarding such evaluations. But here is a paradox: though we may be just as unsure about how best to characterize what is true, or how to evaluate that quality in relation to ourselves, we seem to have much less hesitancy when it comes to ascribing the apparent absence or deficiency of truth in the words and actions of others.

To paraphrase a successful nineteenth century aspirant to the Presidency, grand ideas outlive those who hold them. James Garfield expressed this view just months before his assassination. Frederick Douglas was so impressed with Garfield’s principles and potential for national leadership that he led the procession onto the rostrum for Garfield’s Inauguration. Among those abiding principles and ideals was Garfield’s voiced recognition of the truth within a difference between many white Confederate soldiers and their leaders, and the black men who served in the Union Army. The former had betrayed the flag and their country; the latter did not. Ideas that help us identify and articulate things we value, like beauty, goodness, and truth, abide.

Nevertheless, for many of us, what we reckon to be true – as compared to what is beautiful and or good – is not always so clear. And yet, we believe in Truth. Even when we despair about its instantiation in general human affairs, and in the more limited spheres of our daily involvements, we believe that what is true should guide our lives and our conduct with one another. And, when it comes to what we practice as compared to what we believe or hope for, truth seems to be a principle that we more often honor in the breach.

Another paradoxical aspect of our desire to know the truth has to do with how what is true can not only be uncomfortable but even painful. A mother waiting up for a teenage son who is hours late getting home, and a husband awaiting word from his spouse who has not returned from responding to a wildfire, are likely to have mixed emotions about what they might learn when answering a knock at the door. And yet, in these and in countless similar cases, we want to know what is true, and the truth we want to know is one that is unleavened with inaccuracy or falsehood even if it is painful to hear.

What is true can be beautiful and good, at least for those who believe in the Gospel of Redemption. This is because Christians believe that ‘facts are friendly,’ and that there is no person or situation that is outside the scope of God’s loving redemptive purposes. What personally can be hard to accept as true can still be beautiful and good. And if not so at the moment, then it can be so when we pass beyond the veil and see the embodied Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, for which we so yearn.

Heinrich Hoffman, Jesus and the Rich Young Ruler (detail)

For us, Beauty and Goodness, as the first Transcendentals, provide this experiential advantage: we find them more readily evident as they are instantiated in objects, events, and in others. Truth, by contrast, can seem more elusive and more subject to the variable preferences and uncertain powers of our apprehension. As a Transcendental, Truth – like Beauty and Goodness – has objective reality. Yet, like her sister “Graces,” Truth must sometimes, if not often, penetrate the fog of our subjectivity and experiential awareness for us to perceive it.

 

Additional note: I am publishing this post on Ash Wednesday, a day on which we are invited to reflect on the patterns of our lives in light of the truths we have come to know, and which have been revealed to us.

In anticipation of this coming First Sunday in Lent, I offer here a copy of a blog post with an attached homily (with related images) that I presented in a prior year, based on the Lectionary (which may be accessed by clicking here).

A Lost Rembrandt: Is Beauty Ephemeral?

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A lost painting: Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee

In 1990, in one of the most notable art thefts in modern history, two men disguised as police officers entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and stole Rembrandt’s famous painting, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, and 12 other significant works of art. When one considers the loss of this painting (for it has never been recovered), as well as the many significant works of art that have disappeared through history, two related questions may arise: Can beauty be lost? Is beauty ephemeral?

In the process of reckoning with the recent Los Angeles wildfires, people who are art-minded are beginning to wonder about a particular aspect of all that has been lost, which understandably has received less attention, works of art.

After fires and earthquakes, beautiful buildings can be rebuilt, sometimes even better than before given the learning that may have come with their destruction. But what about lost paintings, drawings, and sculptures?

The Adoration of the Magi, attributed to Rembrandt and long thought to be lost but recently re-discovered, known otherwise through copies made by others.

Clearly, and as many of the examples featured in this space attest, works of art may now sometimes be best (or even only) appreciated through photographic reproductions obtained through the internet. It has not always been so. In earlier times collectors relied upon expert advisors and buyers through which they obtained artworks for their collections, for which they may at times only have had descriptions or comparatively poor reproductions – as did Gardner with the assistance of the famed historian, Bernard Berenson. And yet, especially when the originals had yet to be seen “in person,” or are no longer available for personal viewing, works like Rembrandts Storm painting have a beauty that is not transitory, and these artworks continue to exist as they inhabit the memory and imaginations of many others, as has been true in my own experience.

Yet, whether or not examples of Beauty in art or in nature are available for personal perusal, Beauty itself abides.

Another lost painting attributed to Rembrandt, The Unconscious Patient, also recently rediscovered.

To be consistent with their faith claims, those who are Christian believers should be among the first to agree that Beauty is not ephemeral, not here in one moment and gone in the next, nor of passing significance. Beauty, like Goodness and Truth, has since ancient times been recognized as one of the three Transcendentals. In terms of Christian faith claims, we might consider the witness of an example like the prayer for the Feast of the Transfiguration of our Lord (August 6), found in The Book of Common Prayer:

O God, who on the holy mount revealed to chosen witnesses your well-beloved Son, wonderfully transfigured, in raiment white and glistening: Mercifully grant that we, being delivered from the disquietude of this world, may by faith behold the King in his beauty; who with you, O Father, and you, O Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Beauty of the King that is spoken of in this prayer, as with his divinity and his full participation in the Shekinah glory of the Father, is eternal rather than temporal. And so, in reference to God, to the divine nature as well as to the three persons of the Trinity who share it, we should properly speak of the source of Beauty, rather than as an example of Beauty.

Yet, as the recent Los Angeles wildfires remind us, while examples of Beauty can – at least in some respects – be ephemeral, the idea and reality of Beauty abides, continuing to inspire us even when examples of Beauty are no longer there before us to admire.

Plato, Aristotle’s teacher, continues to teach us!