Pontifical Council for Culture

27-28 March 2006

Saint Thomas writes in the Summa Theologica that, in the Blessed Trinity, beauty is properly attributed (appropriated) to the Son because:

“beauty includes three conditions:

Each of these “agrees with the property of the Son” (convenit cum proprio Filii).

But there is a difficulty here. Our indifferent world is full of attractive images which are designed to be perfect, proportionate and bright. The images that appear in advertisements on television and in glossy magazines are beautiful, but their purpose is to persuade us that something passing and trivial is more important and desirable than it really is.

Jesus dying on Calvary obviously lacks these conditions – his Body is, impaired, distorted and surrounded by darkness ( Mt 27:45 ). He is the Suffering Servant who, “had no form or charm to attract us, no beauty to win our hearts” (Is 53:2).

In the light of this contrast, the saving beauty of Christ can be more clearly understood. The then Cardinal Ratzinger pointed out that this text of Isaiah raises the question, “whether beauty is true or whether it is not ugliness that leads us to the deepest truth of reality”.

A great deal of modern art sets out to be crude and shocking, even ugly. Is there something here which contains a valid protest against a shallow beauty designed to be an escape from reality rather than an insight into reality?

The world depicted in the advertisements is not the real world. William James discovered this in a holiday camp where his every need was met: “This order is too tame”, he said, “this culture too second rate, this goodness too uninspiring… Let me take my chances again in the big outside worldly wilderness with all its sins and sufferings. There are the heights and depths, the precipices and the steep slopes, the gleams of the awful and the infinite…”

The world of advertisements for detergents, fast food and cosmetics is unreal because it is a world in which the questions about ‘the awful and the infinite’ do not exist. That is why they cannot but portray and reflect a world indifferent to faith. The questions to which faith offers answers are never spoken. To a great extent we, at least in the West, live in that world.

In the most profound sense what refuses to face the truth cannot be beautiful. Beauty is one of what traditional philosophy called the transcendentals. Therefore, beauty, like unity, truth and goodness, is a quality of being itself. It contains no intrinsic limitation; it is found infinitely in God. What is beautiful in that sense must also be true and good; and carries within it a longing for the absolute, unlimited, undying beauty which we do not find in our experience on earth. Pope John Paul described the “creative restlessness” which we find what is most deeply human: “the search for truth, the insatiable need for the good… nostalgia for the beautiful”.

An Irish poet wrote:

“The beauty of the world hath made me sad,

This beauty that will pass.”

That poet was better known as a revolutionary than as a poet. His death by execution, and those of his fellow revolutionaries, provoked the poet Yeats to write:

“All changed, changed utterly,

A terrible beauty is born.”

‘The beauty that will pass’, risks becoming an illusion if it is not seen as pointing to the deeply human restlessness of our insatiable nostalgia for the Beautiful.

This is an important key to understanding how the saving beauty of Christ speaks to an indifferent world. In the Lord’s Passover we recognise a beauty which knows the heights and depths and which does not hide from truth. What it offers is not superficial attractiveness, but agony and need and longing; it reveals the search, the hunger, the nostalgia which is most deeply human. The beauty of Christ awakens our restlessness not for what we can possess but for what we can become through God’s love.

Three years before the events of 9/11 revealed the fragility of modern society and its goals, an American writer, Peggy Noonan, predicted that, within a few years, somebody would do what she called a “big terrible thing”, which would cause chaos and destruction, probably in New York or Washington. Like biblical prophecy, hers was more than a prediction of the future; it was an insight into the truth about the present – truth which is known by those who reflect honestly. In the culture of our time, not just in philosophy but in popular culture, she identified a sense of impending doom:

“Deep down where the body meets the soul, we are fearful. We fear… that with all our comforts and amusements… what we really have is… a first class stateroom on the Titanic. Everything is wonderful, but a world is ending and we sense it.”

The indifferent world is suspicious of shallow reassurances that all is well. But it remains reluctant to face the real question, afraid of “feeling the emptiness that asks about meaning”. The saving beauty of Christ faces the fear that a world is ending; it faces the fear that life might have no meaning. Evil, helplessness, fear and impermanence are conquered not by ignoring them but by God’s entry into them. In the extraordinary statement of the Holy Father’s encyclical, “God's passionate love for his people – for humanity – is at the same time a forgiving love. It is so great that it turns God against himself, his love against his justice”.

The saving beauty of Christ does not distract us from the pain and unpredictability and cruelty of life. It deepens our nostalgia and longing for beauty, truth and goodness without limit; longing for the perfection, proportion and brightness which will truly and eternally satisfy the human mind and heart. But it does more than that – it promises that Christ’s humanity is already radiant with that eternal Beauty. In Dante’s vision which inspired Pope Benedict in writing his encyclical, that glorious light is seen, ‘painted with our human likeness’, and recognised as ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars’.

In the ugliness of Calvary we find integrity and perfection: Jesus shows the love greater than which no one has, shows the true and full meaning of human life which is to be the sincere gift of oneself without reserve to God who has first loved us ( I Jn 4:7-12 ) and to our brothers and sisters. We find proportion and harmony because here and only here the inequity and injustice and evil of human life are overcome. This is the saving beauty which makes all things new ( Rev 21:4 ). We find brightness and clarity because this Passover opens the way towards the light and love that move the universe. The Book of Revelation tells us that, “The city did not need sun or moon for light since it was lit by the radiant glory of God and the Lamb was a lighted torch for it” ( Rev 21:23 ). The Lamb is the torch. It is not just that he possesses a radiant beauty; he is infinite Beauty, just as he is infinite Truth, Unity and Goodness – or, one might say, Integrity, Harmony and Brightness. Knowing and being one with him, is holiness, “the Beauty of the Christian Life”.

Only that vision, the fruit of acknowledging the greatness of our hunger and of God’s promise, can break through an indifferent, shallow world view and recognise the truth, goodness and beauty which are everywhere in our world – even in advertisements! Another Irish poet looked at insignificant wild flowers in ‘a backward place’ and recognised the truth,

“That beautiful, beautiful, beautiful God

Was breathing his love by a cut-away bog”.

Summa Theologiae, I, q39, a 8.

RATZINGER, J., Message to Meeting of Communione e Liberazione, Rimini, August 2002.

JAMES, W., ‘What makes a life significant?’ [1899], in Essays on Faith and Morals, Meridian Cleveland Ohio 1962, pp.288, 289.

JOHN PAUL II, Redemptor Hominis, 18.

YEATS, W. B., Easter 1916.

Reprinted in The Times, London, 16 October 2001.

JOHN PAUL II, Orientale Lumen, 16.

BENEDICT XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 10.

DANTE, Paradiso XXIII,145, 130, cf. BENEDICT XVI, Address to Cor Unum, 23 January 2006.

KAVANAGH, P., ‘The One’, in The Complete Poems, The Goldsmith Press 1984, p. 292

+Donal Murray
Bishop of Limerick