Toward God, Starting from Beauty
Our journey dedicated to the theme of beauty has shown how it evokes the most profound dimensions of being. People recognize its importance, especially when absent, experiencing the nostalgia of having lost these dimensions, as well as one’s very existence in the sadness of not always being able to access it: “Perhaps therein lies the greatest mystery of a work of art: that an image of beauty created by humans immediately becomes an idol to be worshipped unconditionally […], reflecting the natural desire for a harmonious and serene world, and in beauty there is harmony and serenity.”[1]
This polarity also contains the distinctive characteristic of beauty as against its derivatives, bringing attention back to an original fidelity that has fallen into oblivion: “Ours is the century of the deepest infidelity; unfaithful is the one who forgets. Overcoming the twentieth century means overcoming infidelity and starting to remember again.”[2]
It is not possible to simply surrender to the lack of beauty, because it is closely linked to the attraction to life and its less programmable and mysterious aspects. For this reason, the road toward the recovery of beauty can also lead to living well, challenging a technocratic and possessive approach, in order to choose what is important and decisive. “In the time of disenchantment and weak reason […] only beauty can offer itself as a way of encountering what is worth living for and living together with what is capable of overcoming pain and death, giving hope to life.”[3] Letting oneself be captured by beauty reveals something distinctive about God’s presence in the world, about the right relationship we can have with him and, consequently, with ourselves and with others.
Von Balthasar, reflecting on artistic beauty, noted a connaturality between it and the religious dimension, a reminder of the Absolute to the point that it becomes arduous to separate religious and non-religious dimensions.[4] A work of art, which not surprisingly frequently has the sacred as its focus, can expresses well a degree of ineffability, a reference to a totality of meaning that tends to remain elusive, beyond what can be grasped, to the point of being considered a secular version of the transcendent.[5] For Balthasar, beauty remains the only real word available to the theologian in order to be able to speak about the mystery of God and God’s relation to humanity: “Our initial word is called beauty. Beauty is the last word that the thinking intellect can dare to utter, for it merely crowns, as a halo of elusive splendor, the double star of the true and the good and their indissoluble relationship. It is that disinterested beauty without which the old world was incapable of understanding itself, but which has taken tiptoeing leave of the modern world, to abandon it to its gloom and doom.”[6]
It is no coincidence that Balthasar is the one who was able to grasp the link between the manifestation of God in the world and aesthetic sensibility, where time and eternity come together. From this encounter we emerge transformed because we are able to taste and appreciate beauty: “Only the one who loves the revelation of the infinite in finite form is not just a ‘mystic,’ but also an ‘aesthete’.”[7] Hence there is also its eminently educational dimension. Beauty presents itself as an invitation, discreet but touching, inviting us to convert, to enter a world that remains other than the self and that requires the docility of allowing oneself to be led, as with Peter, “where one does not want to go.”
St. Thomas wrote of the attractive, pleasing aspect of the beautiful. By the term “pleasure” he means not only a subjective sensation, but a sign that fascinates and at the same time refers to a world, to a ratio, which is its constitutive reason.[8] Beauty is thus recognized as a property of being, capable of making it lovable.
Beauty belongs to the reality of things because it is communicated in various ways to all creatures, without identifying with any. Even its highest human expression, art, in its various forms (poetry, painting, sculpture, music) has the distinctive characteristic of referring back to something else, of alluding, thanks to symbol, metaphor and analogy, uniting the said and the unsaid, are the most appropriate ways to speak of God.[9]
The work of art itself communicates this mysterious union of the visible and the invisible. This is well expressed by the Eastern tradition of icons, according to which the artist does not paint, but rather “writes.” The icon is a sacred text that in the play of colors and forms refers to the world of God. It is a window to the Absolute, reminding and referring the viewer to the Beauty that became flesh.
Addressing artists, St. John Paul II recalled the great mission entrusted to them to speak of the Absolute. They have the task of tracing an aesthetic way to the mystery of God, whose works are the splendor of beauty (cf. Ps 110). This beauty shines with its own light even when the artist is not a believer, developing a work greater than the artist, which acquires its own value and dignity, capable of speaking to all: “Even beyond its typically religious expressions, true art has a close affinity with the world of faith, so that, even in situations where culture and the Church are far apart, art remains a kind of bridge to religious experience. In so far as it seeks the beautiful, fruit of an imagination which rises above the everyday, art is by its nature a kind of appeal to the mystery.”[10]
This reflection has great relevance in the context of the dialogue with those who are searching, confirmed by what was noted about artistic creativity, which brings one face to face, willingly or unwillingly, with the mystery of the Absolute: “The genius of the artist finds its way by the affinity of creative sympathy, or conaturality, into the living law that rules the universe. This law is nothing but the secret gravitation that draws all things toward God as to their center.”[11]
Liturgical Beauty, place of evangelization
Cardinal Ratzinger, speaking at the XXIII Italian National Eucharistic Congress, recalled that Prince Vladimir of Kiev was urged to introduce Christianity to Russia by his advisors, who had been fascinated by the solemn liturgy they had witnessed in the basilica of Sancta Sophia in Constantinople. They described what they experienced on that occasion in a few but significant words, “We do not know whether we have been in heaven or on earth […]; but we have experienced that there God dwells among men.” This comment, far more eloquent than in-depth studies and treatises, expresses the sublime fascination exercised by the liturgy, and its relevance to evangelization: “The inner power of the liturgy has undoubtedly played an essential role in the spread of Christianity. […] What convinced the Russian prince’s envoys of the truth of the faith celebrated in the Orthodox liturgy was not some kind of missionary argument, the reasons for which may have appeared to them more illuminating than those of other religions. Instead, what struck them was the mystery as such, which, by going beyond argumentation, allowed the power of truth to shine out to reason.”[12]
Indeed, one characteristic of the liturgy is to make such beauty visible, to witness it, to celebrate it, making it present, provided, however, that it is accessed with an attitude of awe and gratitude. Under these conditions, the artist’s contribution can become an effective aid in savoring the beauty of the relationship with God, offering an expression of the mystery of the supernatural: “High art, technically, innovatively, aesthetically high, does not automatically bring us closer to God, does not by definition exalt spiritual values, does not necessarily interpret the human religious essence. This can happen: and it happens when art itself is able to show that it does. Art must therefore come out of the dogmatic and corporate closet of self-referentiality, and return to becoming an open revelation of the spiritual senses.”[13]
When it is well prepared and cared for, the liturgy becomes a privileged place to experience Beauty, because the symbols that are found in it are not subject to the passage of time, but retain an unchanged freshness that speaks to the heart, as Vladimir of Kiev’s emissaries acknowledged in admiration. To celebrate beauty is to recognize its eternal aspect, the mysterious but real encounter between the present and eternity.
Augustine, in his period of searching for God, noted how his inner doubts were suddenly dissolved in the face of the wonder aroused by the hymns that he heard in the cathedral of Milan: “In those days I was not satiated with admirable sweetness considering your profound designs for the health of humanity. How many tears I shed as I listened to the sounds of your hymns and canticles, which softly rose in your church! A violent emotion: those sounds flowed into my ears and distilled truth into my heart, exciting a warm feeling of pity. The tears that flowed did me good. Not long ago the Church in Milan had introduced this consoling and encouraging practice of singing in brotherhood, in a unison of voices and hearts, with great fervor.”[14] He concluded his monumental work, The City of God, with the desire to be able to enjoy forever in the heavenly city that ecstasy glimpsed down here only for an instant: “In that city one will enjoy uninterruptedly the sweetness of eternal joys, forgetful of guilt, forgetful of sorrows, and yet not forgetful of the soul’s liberation so as to be ungrateful toward her Liberator […]. That will be the supreme Sabbath, the Sabbath that will have no evening. […] There, in rest, we shall see that He is God, that is, the one we would have liked to be when we fell away from Him for having listened to the seducer […]. By Him remade and made perfect by greater grace, we shall rest forever, seeing that He is God, of whom we shall be full when He is all in all […]. The seventh age will be our Sabbath, the end of which will not be the evening but the Lord’s Day, as an eternal eighth day, which was consecrated by Christ’s resurrection, prefiguring the eternal rest not only of the spirit but also of the body. There we shall rest and contemplate, contemplate and love, love and praise.”[15]
This experience was repeated throughout the centuries, and it never ceases to challenge and fascinate those who witness it. Romano Guardini, participating in the Easter Vigil in the splendid cathedral of Monreale, describes the celebration: “The liturgy was taking place in all its solemnity. Children were being baptized and priests were being ordained. After a few hours I was at the end of my receptive capacity, I confess. But the people were not at all. No one was holding a book or a rosary, but everyone was vividly present. At one point I turned and looked at all those eyes turned to the sacred service. The appearance of those wide-open eyes I never again forgot; I immediately turned away from them, as if it was not permitted to look at them. There was still the ancient ability to live by looking. Of course those people also thought and prayed, but they thought by looking, and their prayer was contemplative prayer, contemplation.”[16]
In this state of ecstatic awe, Beauty reveals its salvific component of effective communion with God, participation in his blessed life. This is the experience, this time in the Eastern context, of Pavel A. Florensky: “The reading of the canon pulsed rhythmically. Something in the half-light came back to mind, something reminiscent of Paradise, and the sadness at its loss was mysteriously transformed into the joy of its return […]. The mystery of the evening was united with the mystery of the morning and both were one.”[17]
In these testimonies emerges the celebration’s own role of connecting heaven and earth and involving the person completely: the spirit, the intellect, as well as the senses and emotions. The experience of God is complete and unifying, and the beauty that manifests it brings light and wholeness: hearing, sight, touch, taste, smell allow one to enter the embodied dimension of the mystery, which is made truly, effectively present through the senses.
The liturgy can thus be seen as an anticipated realization of bliss, the place where humans and the whole creation dance with God, cooperating in his plan of salvation. The celebration of the seventh day, the culmination of the first creation narrative, on to which the Christian celebration of Sunday is grafted, is a bridge between two worlds: time and eternity, God and humanity. In it freedom, creativity, rule, law, duty and joy, often experienced as opposites in the present time, find their original union and harmony, where the person can access the fullest dimension of being.
It is because of this essential conjunction of time and eternity that Genesis omits for the seventh day, the day of liturgical celebration, the annotation common to the previous days of creation, “And it was evening and it was morning.” The Sabbath has neither evening nor morning, it has no end, for it is a pledge of eternity given by God to humans: “There are two aspects of the Sabbath, as there are two aspects of the world. The Sabbath has meaning for humans and it has meaning for God. It is related to both, in that it is a sign of the covenant made between them […]. The Sabbath is God’s presence in the world, open to the human soul […]. Eternal life does not take place far from us, but “is planted in ourselves” and develops beyond us. The future world is therefore not only a posthumous condition, dawning in the soul in the aftermath of its detachment from the body: the essence of the future world is in the eternal Sabbath, and the seventh day provides in time a foretaste of eternity.”[18]
The rest of the seventh day, as well as its liturgical celebration, is an offer of refreshment, an anticipated participation in God’s rest, his blessing and bliss, according to distinctive cognitive, artistic and imaginative modes: “Amusement – recreation, relaxation, play – have a relationship with God. Just as human labor bears a resemblance to God’s creative activity, so seventh-day rest is related to divine life.”[19]
The text of Deut 5:15 significantly associates this rest with the memory of the liberation from slavery in Egypt, as if to say that in this celebration we regain dignity and freedom.
‘Becoming artists of one’s own life’ (Cardinal Martini)
The sense of beauty is also at the basis of any authentic religious conversion, in which two freedoms in love enter into relationship with each other: “The human person is overcome by Beauty more than by truth, by goodness. Truth overcomes us insofar as it is beautiful, and so does goodness, but truth and goodness do not convert. What converts and overcomes us is only Beauty, whose victory does not kill those who are overcome. […] Beauty is the splendor of being, of truth, of goodness. Being that manifests itself, that reveals itself: that is beauty. Truth that shines forth is beauty, goodness that captivates is beauty. […] If God were to impose himself on our spirit, if he were to compel us, we would defend ourselves. We always defend ourselves against others who want to prevail over us; but we do not defend ourselves when the other does not want to oppress, does not want to humiliate, but gives himself.”[20]
Indeed, this beauty presents itself gracefully, almost with a tinge of timidity and fragility. “If you want,” as Jesus says in the Gospel (Matt 19:21), without blackmail, coercion or force. When it touches the heart, beauty radically changes lives. This is what happened to Paul Claudel, who was converted by attending the Christmas liturgy at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris: “The children of the choir, dressed in white, and the junior seminary students from Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet were singing what I later learned was the Magnificat. I was standing in the crowd, near the second pillar from the entrance to the choir, on the right, on the side of the sacristy. At that moment the event happened that now dominates my whole life. In an instant my heart was touched and I believed […]. Trying, as I have often done, to reconstruct the moments that followed that extraordinary instant, I find the following elements that, nevertheless, formed a single flash, a single weapon that Divine Providence used to reach and finally open the heart of a poor, desperate son: How happy are the people who believe! But was it true? It was really true! God exists, He is here. He is someone, a personal being like me! He loves me, He calls me. Tears and sobs had sprung up, while the emotion was heightened even more by the tender melody of the Adeste fideles.”[21]
This has also been noted with regard to Augustine’s experience, who addresses God in the terms of a fresh Beauty, untouched by time that does not fade, a “Beauty always ancient and always new.”[22] The recognition of this specific divine characteristic also marks the culmination of his journey of conversion to the point of achieving an emotional relationship with God. It has been noted that Beauty’s splendid call shows the qualitative leap of Christianity from the classical, Greek and Latin concept of beauty. It is at the level of “vocational,” of call-response between Beauty and the person. Two elements in particular, unprecedented in classical culture, mark this passage: a confidential relationship with this Beauty – expressed by the “you” – and its personal and at the same time eternal character.[23]
Called To Be Witnesses Of Beauty
In these and in other experiences proper to religious conversion,[24] love is expressed in a distinctive language: on the one hand, it is linked to the ineffable idiom of poetry, to the song of beauty; on the other, it does not disdain the use of the imperative (“Love me!”), in a manner often antithetical to duty and obligation. Indeed, it is characteristic of the lover’s language to question, to ask, even to command to be loved: “Can one command love? […]. The commandment of love can only come from the mouth of the lover. Only the lover […] can say and in fact does say, ‘love me.’ In his mouth the commandment of love is not a foreign commandment, but is the very voice of love […]. If the beloved, in the eternal faithfulness of her love, does not open wide her arms to receive it, the declaration would fall on deaf ears.”[25]
Vocation is the response to this call of love, opening one’s arms wide to the Beloved who invites a response. Underlying this decision is not duty, or remorse, but the attraction to what presents itself as Beauty worthy of being loved. Taking up a Preface from the Christmas Mass,[26] we can say that a characteristic of this experience is the discovery or rediscovery of a taste for spiritual realities, accompanied by a discreet but profound transformation at the emotional level, which results in a stable and lasting peace.[27]
The raison d’être of beauty is to refer to the Other. Since classical antiquity, the assonance, peculiar to the Greek language, has been noted between beauty and the attraction to follow it (κάλλος/καίω), because one loves it and is inflamed by it.
Beauty is an essential dimension of those who, like the Christian and even more the priest, are called to bear witness to the invisible; they can do so only because they are conquered by the mystery that fascinates. Beauty has an attractive character because, like the good, it is naturally “diffusive,” wanting others to become sharers in it. As in the parables of the treasure discovered by chance in the field or the pearl of great price that one one stumbles on (cf. Matt 13:44-46), one decides for the kingdom of God because one is conquered by something beautiful and unexpected, which shows oneself and life itself in an entirely different light. It shows the quality of a proclamation that is credible because it is spoken with life.
Beauty thus remains a privileged path to the encounter with God. For Florensky, the “good works,” which shine as a testimony to the presence of the Father, are properly “‘beautiful works,’ luminous and harmonious revelations of the spiritual personality, especially of a luminous, beautiful face, of a beauty by which the ‘inner light’ of man expands outwardly, and then, overcome by the irresistibility of this light, ‘men’ praise the heavenly Father, Whose image on earth has thus shone forth.”[28]
It is not a matter of possessing a particular skill, but of allowing what has touched the heart to transpire and knowing how to give voice to that poetic vision of which Pope Francis also wrote in his letter on the formative dimension of literature: “The affinity between priest and poet thus shines forth in the mysterious and indissoluble sacramental union between the divine Word and our human words, giving rise to a ministry that becomes a service born of listening and compassion, a charism that becomes responsibility, a vision of the true and the good that discloses itself as beauty. How can we fail to reflect on the words left us by the poet Paul Celan: ‘Those who truly learn to see, draw close to what is unseen’.”[29]
Reproduced with permission by La Civilta Cattolica.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.32009/22072446.0425.2
[1]. F. Dostoevskij, “Il signor Bov e la questione dell’arte,” in Id., Saggi critici, vol. I, Milan, Mondadori, 1986, 182. Cf. G. Cucci, “The Characteristics of Beauty”, in Civ. Catt. English Edition November 2024, laciviltacattolica.com/the-characteristics-of-beauty/: Id., “Ugliness. A Creation of Modernity?”, in Civ. Catt. English Edition January 2025, https://www.laciviltacattolica.com/ugliness-a-creation-of-modernity/
[2]. S. Zecchi, La bellezza, Turin, Boringhieri, 1990, 4.
[3]. B. Forte, La via della bellezza. Un approccio al mistero di Dio, Brescia, Morcelliana, 2007, 14; 52 f.
[4]. Cf. H. U. von Balthasar, Gloria. 1. La percezione della forma, Milan, Jaca Book, 1975, 155-158.
[5]. “Art […] is the continuation of the sacred by other means. When the gods desert the world, when they cease to come and signify their otherness, it is the world itself that shows itself other to us, revealing an imaginative depth that becomes the object of a special demand” (M. Gauchet, Le désenchantement du monde, Paris, Gallimard, 1985, 297).
[6]. H. U. von Balthasar, Gloria. 1…, op. cit., 10.
[7]. Id., Gloria. 2. Stili ecclesiastici, Milan, Jaca Book, 1978, 98.
[8]. “The beautiful concerns the cognitive faculty: for those things are said to be beautiful which, when seen, arouse pleasure” (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 5, a. 4, ad 1).
[9]. “Beauty […] always has the character of an enigma: it neither says nor hides, but hints; I am aware that words and formulas fail to define its complexity, its life, its truth, but deception also, which in its name one wants to smuggle in” (S. Zecchi, La bellezza, op. cit., 10). Cf. G. Cucci, “Come parlare di Dio?”, in Id., Esperienza religiosa e psicologia, Leumann (To), Elledici, 2017, 293-339.
[10]. John Paul II, Letter to Artists, April 4, 1999, no. 10.
[11]. T. Merton, Nessun uomo è un’isola, Milan, Garzanti, 2002, 53.
[12]. J. Ratzinger, “Eucaristia come genesi della missione,” in Il Regno/Documenti 42 (1997/19) 588 f.
[13]. P. Sequeri, L’estro di Dio. Saggi di estetica, Milan, Glossa, 2000, 411 f.
[14]. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, IX, 6.14 – 7.15.
[15]. Id., City of God, XXII, 30.5.
[16]. R. Guardini, Scritti filosofici, vol. II, Milan, Fabbri, 1964, 169 f.
[17]. P. A. Florenskij, “Sulla collina Makovec, 20 maggio 1913”, in Id., Il cuore cherubico. Scritti teologici e mistici, Casale Monferrato (Al), Piemme, 1999, 261.
[18]. A. J. Heschel, Il sabato. Il suo significato per l’uomo moderno, Milan, Garzanti, 2001, 69; 77; 94 f.
[19]. L. Alonso Schökel, “Il valore del turismo e delle vacanze”, in Civ. Catt., 1987 III 5 f.
[20]. D. Barsotti, Meditazione sul Libro di Giuditta, Brescia, Queriniana, 1985, 97-99.
[21]. P. Claudel, “Ma conversion”, in Id., Oeuvres en prose, Paris, Gallimard, 1965, 1009.
[22]. “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new, late have I loved you! And behold you were within me and I was outside and there I sought you and I in my deformity threw myself on the well-made things you had created. You were with me and I was not with you. Those outward beauties kept me from you and yet if they had not been in you they would not have existed at all. You called me and shattered my deafness; you shone upon me and dispelled my blindness. You have emanated your fragrance and I have smelled you and now I crave you. I have tasted and now I hunger and thirst. You have touched me and I crave your peace” (Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, X, 27.38).
[23]. Cf. B. Forte, La via della bellezza…, op. cit., 34 f.
[24]. For a more in-depth discussion of the topic, cf. G. Cucci, “La conversione religiosa”, in Id., Esperienza religiosa e psicologia, op. cit., 188-236.
[25]. F. Rosenzweig, La stella della redenzione, Casale Monferrato (Al), Marietti, 1985, 188 f.
[26]. “For in the mystery of the Word made flesh a new light of your glory has shone upon the eyes of our mind, so that, as we recognize in him God made visible, we may be caught up through him in love of things invisible” (Roman Missal, Christmas Preface I).
[27]. These are elements constantly present in this kind of experience. J. Edwards presents the same elements when speaking of the inner change following his conversion: “After this, my sense of divine things gradually increased and became more and more vivid, gaining more and more measure of that inner sweetness. The appearance of everything had changed; there seemed to be an aspect of calmness, sweetness or the appearance of divine glory in almost all things. God’s excellence, his wisdom, purity and love seemed to shine through everything: from the sun, the moon, the stars; and from the clouds and the clear sky, from the grass, flowers and plants, from water and nature, from everything on which my mind used to dwell” (W. James, Le varie forme dell’esperienza religiosa, Brescia, Morcelliana, 1998, 221 f.).
[28]. P. A. Florenskij, Le porte regali. Saggio sull’icona, Milan, Adelphi, 1999, 50.
[29]. Francis, Letter on the role of literature in formation, July 17, 2024, no. 44.
