Austin Hall Library

Beauty as a Means to Truth

George Weigel notes that beauty is a means of communicating truth in his moving Letters to a Young Catholic: The Art of Mentoring. He says, "People know that they know what's beautiful. Thus beauty is one way we can introduce our doubting friends and colleagues to the mystery they often deny: the mystery that there is truth and we can know it."

I am convinced that Weigel is correct, and I have previously touched on the subject here and here. But the place of beauty in communicating truth may be highlighted in coming years as successive generations educated by the "new media", who have no interest in written and spoken propositions, dominate the societal landscape.

Beauty Beckons

My profession suffers under the burden of jadedness--the dimming of the soul's light. I realized some time ago that unremitting exposure to what my profession has to offer will suffocate wonder and joy. It has some apparently good things to offer, but, at best, they are conditional goods easily sought as ends in themselves--position, power, money--and when that occurs a jaded satiation appears on the horizon. Before long, despite having what the earth has to offer, one looks around and says: "Is this all there is?"

By contrast, the years have awakened me to the realization that the acute experience of great beauty evokes a yearning within me for something more than earth can offer. Splendor awakens the mysterious need for the transcendent, the infinite, a comforting hunger for more than matter can provide. Gazing at a gorgeous sunset, enjoying the tranquil allure of an English garden, listening to a Mozart concerto, being overwhelmed upon entering a Romanesque or Gothic cathedral, or looking upon Rembrandt's "Return of the Prodigal Son", or anything Michaelangelo has touched, all trigger the same responses in my mind--wonder, delight, humility, thrill, thanksgiving.

So, out of fear of the jadedness my profession has to offer, I have made it a conscious practice to try to stay alive to beauty. I began, as I do with most things, to read about it. Among the best books I can recommend are Josef Pieper's Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation, Thomas Dubay's compellingly magnificent The Evidential Power of Beauty, Umberto Eco's The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, and Robert Barron's light but very meaningful Heaven in Stone and Glass: Experiencing the Spirituality of the Great Cathedrals. There are others, but these are a good place to start sweeping the cobwebs from the soul.

The Importance of Place

I previously posted the following quote here: ". . . one need go no further than one's 'own dwelling or to a secluded corner of his own garden, or any other place where, by means of such accompaniments as suit retirement--books, flowers, music, meditation, prayer--a man may refresh his spirit and wash the dust from his soul, whether his retirement be for half an hour a day, or to a retreat for a week once a year, or, if he be so minded and his situation permits, for such proportion of his time as shall best prosper him upon his spiritual quest.'"

It seems appropriate to mention, after yesterday's post, that the "importance of place" is a significant theme in the intellectual/contemplative life. One doesn't need much of a space for one's place; it just needs to be one's own (View this photo).

Beauty and Boredom

In his excellent book, The Evidential Power of Beauty: Science and Theology Meet, Thomas Dubay has a perceptive chapter titled, "Alive to Beauty." When I first read this chapter, I believe it was the first time I ever reflected on the connection between being keenly alive and an appreciation of beauty. Dubay states that "normal people love life," but notes that "a moment's reflection makes clear that there is in the human family a continuum from the keenly alive and responsive individual to the colorless, insensitive, and uninspired one." At one end of the spectrum are those who experience beauty intensely, and at the other are those who are bored with life and all that they see. Of the latter, Dubay says they are "incapable of being thrilled."

Dubay, following Thomas Aquinas, makes the case that beauty is related to truth and that it is  objective. But, it is his insight that boredom is the result of excess and overindulgence that first gripped me when I read this book. He states, "[t]o be listless, dull, bored, and lifeless is not only a miserable condition, it is an illness, a fact obvious to anyone who is intellectually alive. To respond to reality and to appreciate it are normal; not to respond is abnormal." Thus, to be a normal human is to have a capacity to appreciate objective beauty. The loss of such capacity is the result of something a person does. According to Dubay, "the chief cause of jadedness is a satiaton, a surfeit born of a hedonistic immersion in sensual gratifications, together with avarice and pride. A lifestyle of selfish egoism and continuing dissipation progressively deadens an excitement with reality born of innocence and solid virtue, self-denial, and genuine love." In other words, while a life of creature comforts is not intrinsically evil, it is a threat to intellectual life and an aid to boredom.

Dubay's The Evidential Power of Beauty is a great book--the kind filled with scores of paragraphs you must pause and reflect on. It has long been a favorite of mine on the subject of aesthetics and truth. Another powerful and challenging read on the subject is David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. Hart's book is a deep and virtually complete treatment of "theological aesthetics" that is a potent rejoinder to postmodernism. On a much lighter, but positively delightful, note, there is Robert Barron's Heaven in Stone and Glass: Experiencing the Spirituality of the Great Cathedrals. It is a meditation on the architecture and mystical space created by Gothic cathedrals. After reading this book, I saw the great cathedrals in an entirely different light. Their architectural forms and lines came alive with deeper meaning. Read this book and then visit a medieval Gothic cathedral for a sense of the connection between objective beauty and truth.