“Lord, you are the fullness of life, of holiness and of joy. Fill our days and nights with the love of your wisdom, that we may bear fruit in the beauty of holiness, like a tree watered by running streams.”
—Week I, Matins
Beauty pervades Pope Francis’ landmark Laudato Si’ (LS), bookending the encyclical’s message. Francis establishes it as a foundational concept from the get-go—“our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us” (§1)—and concludes with a sobering reminder: “At the end, we will find ourselves face to face with the infinite beauty of God”. Like Augustine’s reflection in Book X of the Confessions, beauty in LS is understood as an indicator of a greater reality, pointing beyond itself toward its creator: we are invited “to see nature as a magnificent book in which God speaks to us and grants us a glimpse of his infinite beauty and goodness”. And while it so undoubtedly functions, it is also an end in and of itself: bemoaning man’s autocratic and noxious imprint on creation, we are warned that we cannot “substitute an irreplaceable and irretrievable beauty with something which we have created ourselves”. Anything that, by its very nature, is worthy of contemplation can be seen as its own end.
In a publication concerned with elevating the classic transcendentals, I would be remiss in not honing in on §205: “No system can completely suppress our openness to what is good, true and beautiful, or our God-given ability to respond to his grace at work deep in our hearts.” So how does the exploration of beauty matter to us today, simultaneously stuck and adrift in the quagmire of the technocratic paradigm?
First, we can start with beauty’s function, with a bent toward considering its role in nature.
What does it mean to say that something is beautiful? John-Mark Miravalle, in his timely Beauty: What It Is and Why It Matters, defines it as “a spiritual reality expressed in a physical form.” We should also note that beauty is inseparable from truth and goodness, as Hans Urs von Balthasar famously asserts at the opening of The Glory of the Lord:
“It [beauty] dances as an uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. … Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past—whether he admits it or not—can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”
That truth is good should be self-evident. But when we consider the relationship truth and goodness have with beauty, we see the significance of this link. If all we want is a bastardized form of beauty unmoored from truth, we end up with a directionless and ultimately horizontal romanticism. If we merely want truth without beauty, we will miss the ecstatic effect beauty has upon us, which draws us out of ourselves and into communion. Then, we are left to roam a world of facts with a heart closed to wonder.
If beauty is a physical manifestation which stays true to the nature of a good reality, how is the natural world beautiful? While there are many ways, first among them seems to be that nature is ordered. If, as Paul tells us in his epistle to the Romans (1:18-20), we can glimpse the nature of its Author in beholding His creation, we can conclude that God is a being of reason and also, therefore, order: even in things we find, prima facie, ugly, the closer we look—especially at the atomic level—we find order.
So, insofar as nature is the physical manifestation of the goodness of order, it is beautiful. It is good to behold: a well-cultivated garden is, as Josh Hochschild says in A Mind at Peace “a place to rest in the presence of the beauty and intelligibility of nature.” And it is this aspect of beauty that has been hijacked by a modernity closed off to its innately transcendental orientation.
When we say that creation is ordered, the “point is,” as Miravalle says, “that nature is understandable—it behaves according to the consistent patterns that can be recognized and used for predictions and technology. If there were no consistent patterns in nature to be recognized, predictions and technology would be out of our reach, and all the benefits that come with physical science would be impossible.” Make no mistake: Francis lauds the advances of modernity that enable man to flourish in the created order. However, modernity’s sin is the taking of this underlying order and harnessing its power, aiming it at deeply dis-ordered ends. “The earth, our home, is beginning to look like an immense pile of filth”, as Francis puts it. Pollution is, objectively speaking, not beautiful: it is the manifestation of an evil reality, one that benefits the wealthy while poisoning its victims. If the earth is indeed becoming a pile of garbage, how might we counter this?
We would do well to take a look at the words of the Japanese philosopher-farmer Masanobu Fukuoka in his groundbreaking One-Straw Revolution: “Until the modern faith in big technological solutions can be overturned, pollution will only get worse.” Fukuoka argues vociferously that every successive attempt at solving a problem by dealing only with symptoms and neglecting the whole will only perpetuate the existing dilemmas—and these are, invariably and innately, the kinds of solutions offered by an absolutist faith in technology. Such a stance is the result of a world deeply anthropocentric and materialistic. Francis corroborates:
“We must be grateful for the praiseworthy efforts being made by scientists and engineers dedicated to finding solutions to man-made problems. But a sober look at our world shows that the degree of human intervention, often in the service of business interests and consumerism, is actually making our earth less rich and beautiful, ever more limited and gray, even as technological advances and consumer goods continue to abound limitlessly.”
The Catechism clearly and forcefully criticizes a distorted anthropocentrism: “Each creature possesses its own particular goodness and perfection… Each of the various creatures, willed in its own being, reflects in its own way a ray of God’s infinite wisdom and goodness. Man must therefore respect the particular goodness of every creature, to avoid any disordered use of things” (CCC 339).
C.S. Lewis puts it pithily in Mere Christianity, “Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.” Anthropocentrism is the latter: it is by the narcissistic, inward-looking stare during which mankind tramples upon the creation around him, like a man running over a deer because he’s too busy staring at a phone, texting. As a race marked by Original Sin and dwelling in a postlapsarian cosmos, this inward stare is bound to produce nothing beautiful—because his own, his soul is broken.
It is here that beauty is of incredible use: it is in the nature of beauty to direct the gaze of man out-ward (in this way it is profoundly communal). Beauty inspires ecstasy: “To suffer ecstasy means to be placed outside oneself”. It is first, however, that the reception of beauty into the soul is, according to St Thomas Aquinas, an act of love. Thus, we see that beauty is essential for any building up of a community seeking to counter the direction modernity is taking the earth.
And this is what Francis mentions what he calls “a good aesthetic education. … By learning to see and appreciate beauty, we learn to reject self-interested pragmatism. If someone has not learned to stop and admire something beautiful, we should not be surprised if he or she treats everything as an object to be used and abused without scruple”. Here we see Francis making a decidedly anthropological statement—indeed, the thesis of LS seems to be that any rightly-made statement about man must be made in an ecological context: if we get man wrong, we get nature wrong. So, if man can learn to love true beauty, we may begin to cultivate a posture of humility and reverence. As von Balthasar affirms, “whoever sneers [at beauty] … can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”
How do we, as members of Mount St Mary’s University, partake in this mission of aesthetic education Francis speaks of? Romano Guardini, a profound influence on Francis, has some provocative words on the subject:
“Yet there is a yes to what is happening historically that is a decision because it springs from a knowing heart. Such a yes has weight. Our place is in what is evolving. We must take our place, each at the right point, we must not oppose what is new and try to preserve a beautiful world that is inevitably perishing. Nor should we try to build a new world of the creative imagination that will show none of the damage of what is actually evolving. Rather, we must transform what is coming to be. But we can do this only if we say yes to it and yet with incorruptible hearts remain aware of all that is destructive and nonhuman about it. Our age has been given to us as the soil on which to stand and the task to master.”
It is hard to overstate the profundity of this argument. It is deeper than a mere acknowledgment that we cannot return to Eden—it is an affirmation of the present-day world in all its brokenness. It bids farewell to idealism and looks nonetheless to build something beautiful from the pieces. It does not refuse to look backward for advice but does refuse this backward gaze insofar as it tempts us to establish again what once was. The old order—even if it was good—is no longer possible. This does not mean saying “no” to Tradition: however, as we retrieve from the riches of Tradition that which gives aesthetic and, by extent, spiritual succor, we look to construct a radically new presentation of enduring Truth. Modernity has brought humanity to a point of no return that the Church and University has not escaped from. A beautiful Church or University residing on the quaky grounds of postmodernity will, therefore, look different than that which they were in Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance.
By definition, that which has been disintegrated cannot be fixed. But that does not mean that what is left over cannot be reconfigured in our aesthetic education.
In the Mount’s attempts to graduate ethical leaders in service to God and others, I don’t hesitate to say we are remiss if beauty is not made a core concern of the liberal arts education so earnestly provided. Leaders who cannot recognize beauty will—as von Balthasar warns— eventually be unable to love. While students are offered to study art in the Modern period, those who do not focus on the arts in their studies receive little chance to appreciate that which is inspired by a pre-Enlightenment worldview. As a Catholic university, getting the chance to study and bask in the uplifting and breathtaking acts of worship we might call sacred art surely would respond to Francis’ hopes of aesthetic education.
The Mount is making concrete strides to implement the hopes of LS as it joins Francis’ 7-Year Journey Towards Integral Ecology. The emphasis on the campus community’s ecological soul, landscape, and mindset are clearly essential; but perhaps what we as a university should strive for in undertaking this journey toward integral ecology is the aesthetic education Francis makes large-scale additions. Are these buildings merely utilitarian, or will they take into account the campus’s natural beauty and reflect the terrain which we call our Mountain Home? Among many lessons the Mount may draw from LS, I hope one will be such: that the man made structures which contribute to our campus must reflect the beauty with which God has always blessed us in bestowing Mary’s Mountain upon us.
