AtonementOnline.com

ROME, MAY 2, 2005 (Zenit.org).- ZENIT is reprinting this message that
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI) sent to a meeting of the
ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation in August 2002. The group
was meeting in Rimini, Italy.

* * *

"The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty"
By Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger

Every year, in the Liturgy of the Hours for the Season of Lent, I am
struck
anew by a paradox in Vespers for Monday of the Second Week of the
Psalter.
Here, side by side, are two antiphons, one for the Season of Lent, the
other
for Holy Week. Both introduce Psalm 44 [45], but they present
strikingly
contradictory interpretations. The Psalm describes the wedding of the
King,
his beauty, his virtues, his mission, and then becomes an exaltation of
his
bride. In the Season of Lent, Psalm 44 is framed by the same antiphon
used
for the rest of the year. The third verse of the Psalm says: "You are
the
fairest of the children of men and grace is poured upon your lips."

Naturally, the Church reads this psalm as a poetic-prophetic
representation
of Christ's spousal relationship with his Church. She recognizes Christ
as
the fairest of men, the grace poured upon his lips points to the inner
beauty of his words, the glory of his proclamation. So it is not merely
the
external beauty of the Redeemer's appearance that is glorified: rather,
the
beauty of Truth appears in him, the beauty of God himself who draws us
to
himself and, at the same time captures us with the wound of Love, the
holy
passion ("eros"), that enables us to go forth together, with and in the
Church his Bride, to meet the Love who calls us.

On Monday of Holy Week, however, the Church changes the antiphon and
invites
us to interpret the Psalm in the light of Isaiah 53:2: "He had neither
beauty, no majesty, nothing to attract our eyes, no grace to make us
delight
in him." How can we reconcile this? The appearance of the "fairest of
the
children of men" is so wretched that no one desires to look at him.
Pilate
presented him to the crowd saying: "Behold the man!" to rouse sympathy
for
the crushed and battered Man, in whom no external beauty remained.

Augustine, who in his youth wrote a book on the Beautiful and the
Harmonious
["De pulchro et apto"] and who appreciated beauty in words, in music,
in the
figurative arts, had a keen appreciation of this paradox and realized
that
in this regard, the great Greek philosophy of the beautiful was not
simply
rejected but rather, dramatically called into question and what the
beautiful might be, what beauty might mean, would have to be debated
anew
and suffered. Referring to the paradox contained in these texts, he
spoke of
the contrasting blasts of "two trumpets," produced by the same breath,
the
same Spirit. He knew that a paradox is contrast and not contradiction.
Both
quotes come from the same Spirit who inspires all Scripture, but sounds
different notes in it. It is in this way that he sets us before the
totality
of true Beauty, of Truth itself.

In the first place, the text of Isaiah supplies the question that
interested
the Fathers of the Church, whether or not Christ was beautiful.
Implicit
here is the more radical question of whether beauty is true or whether
it is
not ugliness that leads us to the deepest truth of reality. Whoever
believes
in God, in the God who manifested himself, precisely in the altered
appearance of Christ crucified as love "to the end" (John 13:1), knows
that
beauty is truth and truth beauty; but in the suffering Christ he also
learns
that the beauty of truth also embraces offence, pain, and even the dark
mystery of death, and that this can only be found in accepting
suffering,
not in ignoring it.

Certainly, the consciousness that beauty has something to do with pain
was
also present in the Greek world. For example, let us take Plato's
"Phaedrus." Plato contemplates the encounter with beauty as the
salutary
emotional shock that makes man leave his shell and sparks his
"enthusiasm"
by attracting him to what is other than himself. Man, says Plato, has
lost
the original perfection that was conceived for him. He is now
perennially
searching for the healing primitive form. Nostalgia and longing impel
him to
pursue the quest; beauty prevents him from being content with just
daily
life. It causes him to suffer.

In a Platonic sense, we could say that the arrow of nostalgia pierces
man,
wounds him and in this way gives him wings, lifts him upwards toward
the
transcendent. In his discourse in the Symposium, Aristophanes says that
lovers do not know what they really want from each other. From the
search
for what is more than their pleasure, it is obvious that the souls of
both
are thirsting for something other than amorous pleasure. But the heart
cannot express this "other" thing, "it has only a vague perception of
what
it truly wants and wonders about it as an enigma."

In the 14th century, in the book "The Life in Christ" by the Byzantine
theologian, Nicholas Cabasilas, we rediscover Plato's experience in
which
the ultimate object of nostalgia, transformed by the new Christian
experience, continues to be nameless. Cabasilas says: "When men have a
longing so great that it surpasses human nature and eagerly desire and
are
able to accomplish things beyond human thought, it is the Bridegroom
who has
smitten them with this longing. It is he who has sent a ray of his
beauty
into their eyes. The greatness of the wound already shows the arrow
which
has struck home, the longing indicates who has inflicted the wound"
(cf.
"The Life in Christ," the Second Book, 15).

The beautiful wounds, but this is exactly how it summons man to his
final
destiny. What Plato said, and, more than 1,500 years later, Cabasilas,
has
nothing to do with superficial aestheticism and irrationalism or with
the
flight from clarity and the importance of reason. The beautiful is
knowledge
certainly, but, in a superior form, since it arouses man to the real
greatness of the truth. Here Cabasilas has remained entirely Greek,
since he
puts knowledge first when he says, "In fact it is knowing that causes
love
and gives birth to it. ... Since this knowledge is sometimes very ample
and
complete and at other times imperfect, it follows that the love potion
has
the same effect" (cf. ibid.).

He is not content to leave this assertion in general terms. In his
characteristically rigorous thought, he distinguishes between two kinds
of
knowledge: knowledge through instruction which remains, so to speak,
"second
hand" and does not imply any direct contact with reality itself. The
second
type of knowledge, on the other hand, is knowledge through personal
experience, through a direct relationship with the reality. "Therefore
we do
not love it to the extent that it is a worthy object of love, and since
we
have not perceived the very form itself we do not experience its proper
effect."

True knowledge is being struck by the arrow of Beauty that wounds man,
moved
by reality, "how it is Christ himself who is present and in an
ineffable way
disposes and forms the souls of men" (cf. ibid.).

Being struck and overcome by the beauty of Christ is a more real, more
profound knowledge than mere rational deduction. Of course we must not
underrate the importance of theological reflection, of exact and
precise
theological thought; it remains absolutely necessary. But to move from
here
to disdain or to reject the impact produced by the response of the
heart in
the encounter with beauty as a true form of knowledge would impoverish
us
and dry up our faith and our theology. We must rediscover this form of
knowledge; it is a pressing need of our time.

Starting with this concept, Hans Urs von Balthasar built his "Opus
magnum of
Theological Aesthetics." Many of its details have passed into
theological
work, while his fundamental approach, in truth the essential element of
the
whole work, has not been so readily accepted. Of course, this is not
just,
or principally, a theological problem, but a problem of pastoral life
that
has to foster the human person's encounter with the beauty of faith.

All too often arguments fall on deaf ears because in our world too many
contradictory arguments compete with one another, so much so that we
are
spontaneously reminded of the medieval theologians' description of
reason,
that it "has a wax nose": In other words, it can be pointed in any
direction, if one is clever enough. Everything makes sense, is so
convincing, whom should we trust?

The encounter with the beautiful can become the wound of the arrow that
strikes the heart and in this way opens our eyes, so that later, from
this
experience, we take the criteria for judgment and can correctly
evaluate the
arguments. For me an unforgettable experience was the Bach concert that
Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich after the sudden death of Karl
Richter. I was sitting next to the Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann. When the
last
note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor-Cantatas triumphantly faded
away, we
looked at each other spontaneously and right then we said: "Anyone who
has
heard this, knows that the faith is true."

The music had such an extraordinary force of reality that we realized,
no
longer by deduction, but by the impact on our hearts, that it could not
have
originated from nothingness, but could only have come to be through the
power of the Truth that became real in the composer's inspiration.
Isn't the
same thing evident when we allow ourselves to be moved by the icon of
the
Trinity of Rubl�v? In the art of the icons, as in the great Western
paintings of the Romanesque and Gothic period, the experience described
by
Cabasilas, starting with interiority, is visibly portrayed and can be
shared.

In a rich way Pavel Evdokimov has brought to light the interior pathway
that
an icon establishes. An icon does not simply reproduce what can be
perceived
by the senses, but rather it presupposes, as he says, "a fasting of
sight."
Inner perception must free itself from the impression of the merely
sensible, and in prayer and ascetical effort acquire a new and deeper
capacity to see, to perform the passage from what is merely external to
the
profundity of reality, in such a way that the artist can see what the
senses
as such do not see, and what actually appears in what can be perceived:
the
splendor of the glory of God, the "glory of God shining on the face of
Christ " (2 Corinthians 4:6).

To admire the icons and the great masterpieces of Christian art in
general,
leads us on an inner way, a way of overcoming ourselves; thus in this
purification of vision that is a purification of the heart, it reveals
the
beautiful to us, or at least a ray of it. In this way we are brought
into
contact with the power of the truth. I have often affirmed my
conviction
that the true apology of Christian faith, the most convincing
demonstration
of its truth against every denial, are the saints, and the beauty that
the
faith has generated. Today, for faith to grow, we must lead ourselves
and
the persons we meet to encounter the saints and to enter into contact
with
the Beautiful.

Now however, we still have to respond to an objection. We have already
rejected the assumption which claims that what has just been said is a
flight into the irrational, into mere aestheticism.

Rather, it is the opposite that is true: This is the very way in which
reason is freed from dullness and made ready to act.

Today another objection has even greater weight: the message of beauty
is
thrown into complete doubt by the power of falsehood, seduction,
violence
and evil. Can the beautiful be genuine, or, in the end, is it only an
illusion? Isn't reality perhaps basically evil? The fear that in the
end it
is not the arrow of the beautiful that leads us to the truth, but that
falsehood, all that is ugly and vulgar, may constitute the true
"reality"
has at all times caused people anguish.

At present this has been expressed in the assertion that after
Auschwitz it
was no longer possible to write poetry; after Auschwitz it is no longer
possible to speak of a God who is good. People wondered: Where was God
when
the gas chambers were operating? This objection, which seemed
reasonable
enough before Auschwitz when one realized all the atrocities of
history,
shows that in any case a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not
enough.
It cannot stand up to the confrontation with the gravity of the
questioning
about God, truth and beauty. Apollo, who for Plato's Socrates was "the
God"
and the guarantor of unruffled beauty as "the truly divine" is
absolutely no
longer sufficient.

In this way, we return to the "two trumpets" of the Bible with which we
started, to the paradox of being able to say of Christ: "You are the
fairest
of the children of men," and: "He had no beauty, no majesty to draw our
eyes, no grace to make us delight in him." In the passion of Christ the
Greek aesthetic that deserves admiration for its perceived contact with
the
Divine but which remained inexpressible for it, in Christ's passion is
not
removed but overcome.

The experience of the beautiful has received new depth and new realism.
The
One who is the Beauty itself let himself be slapped in the face, spat
upon,
crowned with thorns; the Shroud of Turin can help us imagine this in a
realistic way. However, in his Face that is so disfigured, there
appears the
genuine, extreme beauty: the beauty of love that goes "to the very
end"; for
this reason it is revealed as greater than falsehood and violence.
Whoever
has perceived this beauty knows that truth, and not falsehood, is the
real
aspiration of the world. It is not the false that is "true," but
indeed, the
Truth.

It is, as it were, a new trick of what is false to present itself as
"truth"
and to say to us: over and above me there is basically nothing, stop
seeking
or even loving the truth; in doing so you are on the wrong track. The
icon
of the crucified Christ sets us free from this deception that is so
widespread today. However it imposes a condition: that we let ourselves
be
wounded by him, and that we believe in the Love who can risk setting
aside
his external beauty to proclaim, in this way, the truth of the
beautiful.

Falsehood however has another strategem. A beauty that is deceptive and
false, a dazzling beauty that does not bring human beings out of
themselves
to open them to the ecstasy of rising to the heights, but indeed locks
them
entirely into themselves. Such beauty does not reawaken a longing for
the
Ineffable, readiness for sacrifice, the abandonment of self, but
instead
stirs up the desire, the will for power, possession and pleasure. It is
that
type of experience of beauty of which Genesis speaks in the account of
the
Original Sin. Eve saw that the fruit of the tree was "beautiful" to eat
and
was "delightful to the eyes."

The beautiful, as she experienced it, aroused in her a desire for
possession, making her, as it were, turn in upon herself. Who would not
recognize, for example, in advertising, the images made with supreme
skill
that are created to tempt the human being irresistibly, to make him
want to
grab everything and seek the passing satisfaction rather than be open
to
others.

So it is that Christian art today is caught between two fires (as
perhaps it
always has been): It must oppose the cult of the ugly, which says that
everything beautiful is a deception and only the representation of what
is
crude, low and vulgar is the truth, the true illumination of knowledge.
Or
it has to counter the deceptive beauty that makes the human being seem
diminished instead of making him great, and for this reason is false.

Is there anyone who does not know Dostoyevsky's often-quoted sentence:
"The
Beautiful will save us"? However, people usually forget that
Dostoyevsky is
referring here to the redeeming Beauty of Christ. We must learn to see
him.
If we know him, not only in words, but if we are struck by the arrow of
his
paradoxical beauty, then we will truly know him, and know him not only
because we have heard others speak about him. Then we will have found
the
beauty of Truth, of the Truth that redeems. Nothing can bring us into
close
contact with the beauty of Christ himself other than the world of
beauty
created by faith and light that shines out from the faces of the
saints,
through whom his own light becomes visible.