Benedict XVI’s decisive steps to renew divine worship will bear fruit in this field as well

A Chorus of Praise

AUTHENTIC BEAUTY IN SACRED ART

by Uwe Michael Lang,

• Art and the Crisis of Beauty.

At a recent occasion, Pope Benedict XVI has called artists “custodians of beauty,”1 as his predecessors Paul VI and Blessed John Paul II had done before him. This title is significant, not least because in the Catholic tradition beauty is understood as a philosophical and ultimately theological category. It was the Franciscan theologian Saint Bonaventure who first numbered beauty among the so-called transcendentals: beauty is considered a property of being itself, along with truth and goodness. This refers in the first place to God, who is being itself, and hence truth, goodness, and beauty itself.

Art, therefore, as the expression of the beautiful, is capable of revealing reality to us; sacred art in particular has the ability of manifesting to us the beauty of God. There is a remarkable passage in the Catechism of the Catholic Church that sums up this theological concept of beauty (nos. 2500-2503). Here I would like to refer to the very concise version found in the Compendium of the Catechism published in 2005. In the section on the eighth commandment, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor,” question no. 526 reads: “What relationship exists between Truth, Beauty and Sacred Art?” The response is: “The truth is beautiful carrying in itself the splendor of spiritual beauty. In addition to the expression of the truth in words there are other complementary expressions of truth, most specifically in the beauty of artistic works. These are the fruits both of talents given by God, and of human effort.” In this passage, the intrinsic relationship between truth and beauty is affirmed and particular attention is given to works of art, which are born from the divine gift of human creativity.

Modernity has contested precisely the transcendent dimension of beauty as expressing or revealing truth and goodness. Beauty has been detached from the order of being and, in a radical turn to subjectivity, has been reduced to an aesthetic experience or indeed to a matter of feeling. This has been part of an intellectual revolution, the consequences of which are not limited to the art world. The Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar has seen this very clearly. He dedicated several volumes to what he termed “theological aesthetics,” recalling the idea the Catholic tradition has taken up from classical Greek philosophy, especially from Plato, that truth and goodness attract us because they are beautiful. Thus, what is good, in other words, what ought to be done, becomes self-evident. However, Balthasar notes, when beauty is disconnected from this intrinsic link with truth and goodness, when it becomes totally autonomous, then the good loses its force of attraction and becomes simply a matter of choice, one possibility among others.2 We are not concerned here with the moral result of this intellectual revolution, but rather with its effect on art. One result of this isolation of beauty from being, or truth, has been a phenomenon described by the Italian philosopher Remo Bodei as the “apotheosis of the ugly.” .....

• A Theological Response ....
• Beauty and the Sacred ....
• Incarnation and the Image ....
• New Hope ....

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