Blog 2

Beauty and divine revelation are two topics intimately tied together primarily discussed through the works from Hans urs von Balthasar. His insightful knowledge links together these two abstract topics through an understanding centered around religion and faith.

First, divine revelation is defined as the way in which God has revealed himself to humanity through Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition. One cannot come to know God through the Bible alone, just as one cannot fully know God through Tradition alone. Both are necessary through the use of bodily senses to understand that God reveals himself as gift. This is an event which must be contemplated and embraced through love and faith.

Balthasar presents different aesthetics as they apply to divine revelation. First, however, he presents a problem with the aesthetic account of revelation. He presents a kind of cyclical paradox. “Art driven out by the fork of philosophical seriousness returns on a plane even high, as the holiness of the divine order of the world finds its embodiment” (Balthasar 101). Most essentially, in order to understand beauty with respect to divine revelation, one must rid themselves of all materiality. Any previous inclinations or knowledge has become irrelevant about beauty. Only through discarding the old sense of beauty to make way for the religious sense is true beauty understood. Naturally, the epitome of this beauty is understood through the revelation of Christ and physically through the senses.

Balthasar goes further with his religious art argument. “Created being would not be an image of the sovereign and living God if its transcendentals were static properties” (Balthasar 111). He expresses a sentiment that the present world is total gift, but in order to understand this one has to embrace the idea that creation is not finished. It is continually progressing forward with the passage of time, yet it is true beauty and goodness. Therefore, it is necessary to remain open to the created world because it points to the divine. Christ serves as the complete example of beauty through divine revelation because it is through His sacrifice that we can experience true beauty, and thus, salvation. Therefore, creation is ordered towards the beautiful act of revelation, and in this, one can find peace. Cecilia Gonzalez-Andrieu embraces the religious argument as well but presents this as centered towards Christ through wonder. She writes, “the experience of aesthetic encounter brings us to wonder is introspective and also oriented towards the other” (CGA 31). In other words, beauty as it relates to divine revelation is a distinctly personal experience but is ordered towards a higher being, God. Wonder, therefore, is important because it necessarily leads to contemplation.

As discussed with Pieper, contemplation allows one to fully embrace beauty in art and therefore wonder embraces divine revelation through Christ. Beauty enters a unique transformation in the ways previously discussed through Christ specifically by understanding beauty through divine revelation. The present world, creation, is not complete, but continually moving towards perfection. Yet, this is something that is wholly impossible without Christ. Understanding his self-sacrifice through the cross in order to utilize faith as an operator helps one to remain open to this concept. Balthasar argues in this way that the created world is already supernatural because it points to our final end. Naturally, since beauty is ordered towards God, the aesthetic does something that nothing else can possibly achieve. It is distinct and transformative through Christ.

Further, the only physical way to help one understand beauty and revelation is through the senses. They allow us to experience everything that we know as the human condition. Yet Balthasar raises a worry here regarding a “chasm” between the spiritual space and the physical space. Our purpose is naturally to ascend from the material into the spiritual to become united with True beauty. “The fundamental human sense of the eye and its act of seeing allows that another person becomes visible to oneself as person and is seen by one as person” (Balthasar 382). In essence, Balthasar explains that to recognize this beauty, we have to remain open to encounters because this is a way to engage with the spiritual. The human condition is mediated through the senses by which we can recognize the goodness and particularities of the material world. Moreover, one cannot separate body and soul, these are human experiences and God through materiality. Through God’s self-emptying love in Christ, we encounter beauty and use our senses to strengthen these encounters.

Moreover, Balthasar explains five different ways to attune the senses to things that can be seen. First, all images are ordered around Christ. This necessarily places Christ at the center of our encounter. Second, understand Christ made manifest in the church. Through the church, there is a communion of people gathered together celebrating in eucharistic worship and God. The Church is illuminated by Christ and thus radiates Christ onto the world, demonstrating the beauty of God revealed and able to encounter in a sensory way. Third, Christ made manifest in the Liturgy. During the mass itself, we can experience celebratory experiences that are not required, but enhance the sensory experience. Things like incense, fire, and garment colors help one to bow in faith and learn to perceive such that these encounters help attune the senses to recognize this beauty. Fourth, Christ made manifest in neighbor. Taking care of the least of our neighbors is a humbling experience and demonstrates that love is not a random act. The beatitudes are an excellent example of this because God calls us to care for the least of his creatures. In doing so, love creates the image and acknowledges the distinct encounters to perceive other people as persons and not as objects. Lastly, transforming sense to a greater sense. By elevating one’s perception that human life desires above all to see God in the flesh, to be embodied in the materiality of our nature, our senses are finer attuned to recognize beauty in a new and stronger way. This also helps bridge the gap between the chasm of physical and spiritual from Balthasar because it demonstrates a necessary link in the human condition, of having physical senses attuned to experience the spiritual and the divine.

The community is called to be beautiful because beauty is meant to save the world. Roberto Goizueta writes about human action and the aesthetic praxis. The latter he defines as “living itself” (93). Moreover, in order to fully live life, one must embrace the entirety of the human condition and enter into every encounter ordered towards God. Religion and religious practice is an example of how the community is called to become beautiful because our lives are necessarily ordered towards God as discussed earlier. “Celebration becomes possible only when we cease making a project of our lives and our world” (Goizueta 107). Goizueta points to the dangers of material obsession. Too many people give into societal pressures that ultimately do not make anyone happy. Actions are the most accurate reflection of one’s identity and to Goizueta, one’s identity is meant to be centered towards God. Similarly, identifying human experiences from many different backgrounds helps acknowledge beauty. We cannot simply have beauty without also staring evils of the world in the face. As a society, we are called to be beautiful. Therefore, beauty and more importantly, choosing to act selflessly, helps us to encounter God.