THE APOLOGETICS OF BEAUTY

Liturgy should be Enjoyable

Pope John Paul II

  I use the word "apologetics" in my title in an analogous sense. Normally apologetics means the craft of arguing effectively. Beauty doesn't argue, it doesn't have to.

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In both the old and the new manifestations of authoritarian pragmatism we succumb to the temptation to do good, that is to force people to be virtuous. In our desperate, frantic attempts to make people better we have no time for beauty. Beauty doesn't work. Therefore we must fall back on ideological indoctrination. One does not ask of a new church or painting or a statue or a story whether it is beautiful or not. One asks whether it is liturgically correct, politically correct, and doctrinally correct. Those questions appropriately answered, who cares whether it is beautiful. What indeed has changed since 1940? Not much it would seem. Where did this style come from? Perhaps it was adopted by the immigrant Church in the conviction that most Catholics were poor and unlettered - if not illiterate - and one had to defend them from the assaults of the hostile Protestant culture. You told them what to do and they did it. Whether in retrospect this was an accurate reading of the Catholic loyalty of the immigrants and their children is perhaps open to question. Now, most of our people are no longer immigrants. Yet we tend to treat them like they were. I am endlessly astonished at how much idiocy the Catholic laity endure from their clergy and quasi clergy and still keep coming back. Their resiliency certainly establishes their faith. Yet the pre-Council Authoritarian Pragmatism drove some people out of the Church and its more recent, New Class variety still does, especially it would seem the divorced and remarried. Someone has argued that one can judge the depth of a spirituality by the beauty of the art it produces. By that standard contemporary American Catholic spirituality, nervous, frenetic, compulsive, always searching for new gimmicks, is worth very little.

BEAUTY AS TRANSCENDENTAL

Contemporary Catholic theology whether it be of the Baltassarian or Rahnerian variety agrees that of the three transcendentals inherent in Being- Truth, Goodness, and Beauty -- the Beautiful is primary in that it is the one we encounter first. It overwhelms us, enchants us, fascinates us, calls us. As we ponder it, we see that it is good and we are attracted to the Goodness it represents. Finally, bemused by the appeal of goodness, we discover that it contains truth and we listen to the Truth we hear from it. This is not an inevitable process, nor one that involves logical deduction (though on our reflection after the experience we recognize a quasi-logic). Rather it is an existential tendency that seems to be built into the structure of the human condition.  We live surrounded by God's beauty. Sometimes we notice it. Sometimes, all too rarely perhaps, the beauty all around us invades us, stops us in our tracks, explodes within us - a stately cactus outlined against a rose gold sunset, the faint light of a winter sun on a smoothly frozen lake, the smell of mesquite in the air after a rainstorm, a goofy smile on a child's face as she tries her first brave steps, the touch of a friendly hand, the sun breaking through thick clouds after a storm, an erotically attractive human body, a meteor shower (or the aurora borealis) on a late summer night, tiger, tiger burning bright, an insect climbing the stalk of a plant, a chocolate malted milk with whip cream, monarch butterflies flying along a beach on their way home. All are grace and grace is everywhere, often not noticed but still there.   The human artist sees things more clearly than the rest of us. She penetrates into the illumination of being more intimately than do the rest of us. She wants us to see what she sees so that we can share in her illumination. She is driven to duplicate that beauty in her work. When Van Gogh painted his golden fields he was endeavoring to share with us his instinctive vision of the fields and to make us see them more fully, more clearly and more open to their illumination - as did the Japanese film maker Kurasowa when he had his tourist step into the world of Van Gogh fields in his film Colors. The artist is a sacrament maker, a creator of emphasized, clarified beauty designed to make us see, a person who invites us into the world she sees so that we can go forth from that world enchanted by the luminosity of her work and perhaps with enhanced awareness of the possibilities of life. Humanly created beauty which does not seem explicitly religious nonetheless is or can be religious in so far as it tricks us into enchantment and thus opens us up to the illumination of Being, stopping us in our tracks whether we want to be stopped in our tracks or not. The reconciliation arias at the end of the Marriage of Figaro. "New York Lights," in William Bolcom's View from the Bridge¸ American folk songs like "Shendandoah," a skyline viewed from a body of water in the moonlight, Roddy Doyle's The Snapper, Seamus Heany's love poem "The Otter," Rilke's protest that he needs no more spring times, because one is already too much for his blood, the joy of the drinking song in the first act of Traviata, the hope that ugliness and terror cannot exorcise from a Stephen King novel, the much delayed triumph of good over evil in the fantasy saga of your choice, Molly Bloom's celebration of life and love in Ulysses. If grace is everywhere, it is superabundant in the world of art, when one is open to seeing it.

There are also many works of beauty that are explicitly religious though not presented in church or produced under church auspices: such films as Babbette's Feast, All that Jazz, Always, Flatliners, Breaking the Waves, Dogma. Paul Murray's poem which tells us that "he who needs nothing, he who brings all the gifts we give, needs us so that if we should cease to exist he would die of sadness." Graham Greene's End of the Affair and The Power and the Glory, Jon Hassler's North of Hope, Heaney's. "We walk on air against our better judgement," the luminous ending of Alice McDermott's Charming Billy, the baptismal imagery in Bruce Springstein's music, the passionate desire for redemption of their characters (creatures!) in the fiction of William Kennedy and David Lodge, the not quite inarticulate Mystery at the end of Brian Friel's later plays, the God who dances in Dogma, as she does in the Book of Wisdom, the magic endings of the films of Eric Rohmer and Kyrstoff Kieslowski. Sometimes it is said that if God really wanted us to believe, he would speak to us. To which God might well reply that He shouts at us all the time through the beauty which surrounds us. We can hardly go anywhere without being inundated by beauty - except when we go to church. Even in the church there is beauty in the sacraments, though we seem determined to minimize the beauty so that we can emphasize the rules and regulations with which we have surrounded the sacraments - in violation of canon law. Not everyone will be stopped dead in his tracks and overcome with illumination (like St. Paul) by, for example, the pealing of the bells at the end of Breaking the Waves, by the Eucharistic image in Babbette's Feast, by Ms. McDermott's narrator saying that it really doesn't make much difference for faith whether St. Philomena existed or not, by Molly Bloom, by "Shenadoah," by Heaney's resolutely non-ecclesiastical poetry, by Roy Scheider walking down the long tunnel to the fair spouse at the end of All That Jazz. There is no need for anyone to be entranced, enchanted, much less seduced by the beauty in these or any of the other examples I have given. My point rather is that grace is everywhere for those who are able to sense its presence and are generous in their search for it in what might seem strange places.  David Tracy describes the phenomenon of an encounter with "a classic" work of art (think the Cathedral at Chartres) "When anyone of us is caught unawares by a genuine work of art, we find ourselves in the grip of an event, a happening, a disclosure, a claim to truth which we cannot deny and can only eliminate by our later controlled reflection." He adds: "We are shocked, surprised, challenged by its startling beauty and it recognizable truth, its instinct for the essential. In the actual experience of art we do not experience the artist behind the work of art. Rather we recognize the truth of the work's disclosure of a world of reality transforming. if only for the moment, ourselves, our lives, our sense of possibilities, and actuality, our destiny."

AN ARTLESS CHURCH

Beauty is the strongest asset of Catholicism. A number of surveys have recently indicated that the most powerful marks of Catholic identity among both the young and the old are service to the poor, the Eucharist, the presence of God in the Sacraments, and Mary the Mother of Jesus. We also have learned that frequent church attendance among Catholics correlates much more strongly with participation in both the fine and the lively arts than it does for Protestants. Liturgy, even badly done (as it usually is)opens Catholics up to the beautiful beyond the church building. When men and women return to the Church after a long time of trying to "fall away," the most important thing for them is to be able to go to Mass again. The sacraments are works of high beauty - the birth of a child, the consumption of a family meal, prayers at the bedside of the sick, the joining of the bodies and souls of two people in love, reconciliation after conflict. Small wonder that, even badly administered, they have a strong attraction for Catholics and are integral to the Catholic identity. It is the very beauty of the sacraments which disposes them to dispense grace. They give grace efficaciously because they are grace-full. Closely attached to the sacraments are the stories. All religions have stories. Religion is story before it's anything else and after it's everything else. Catholic stories are simply more beautiful - Christmas, Easter, Lent, May Crowning, Holy Thursday processions and feet washing, First Communion, the Madonna and child, the saints, the angels, the souls in purgatory. Even when the stories are badly told - as they usually are - they are integral to the Catholic identity. "The link between the good and the beautiful stirs fruitful reflection. It a certain sense, beauty is the visible form of the good, just as the good is the metaphysical condition of beauty." This writer is talking to "to all who are passionately dedicated to the search for new 'epiphanies' of beauty." Beauty and the art, which creates it, in his perspective become new "epiphanies" of God in the world. The writer is John Paul II in his Easter Address of 1999 to artists. The Pope also said in his Address that art is indispensable to the Church, a message which does not seem to have penetrated the frantic ideological posturing within American Catholicism. We are, with some happy exceptions, an "artless" Church, not because of Vatican II, but because we have no sense of the need for epiphanies, save those that are imposed on people by various projects of brain washing and other forms of manipulation.

Beauty serves goodness and truth not by indoctrinating, not by educating, not by imparting doctrinally orthodox propositions. The beautiful illumines, it does not teach. Its essence, according to St. Thomas (Aquinas) is its "luminosity". An experience of the beautiful will not automatically lead one either to volunteer service of the poor or to the acquisition of doctrinally orthodox truth. Therefore, much of American Catholicism demands, what good does it do? Why bother with it? There are two answers to this objection. The first is that nothing else produces instant effects and the second is that the sense of enhanced awareness of the possibilities of life which beauty causes, sometimes in most people and occasionally in all people, does incline them in the direction of goodness. That's not enough for you? That's all you're going to get in this less than perfect world and its more than you're going to get by pounding obligations into their heads.It does not follow that there is only a tenuous connection between beauty and goodness. As both Father Tracy and the Pope suggest, they are intimately linked to one another, so long as we don't force the link to fit our own preconceived demands. Elaine Scarry writes, "Something beautiful fills the mind yet invites the search for something beyond itself, something larger or some of the same scale with which it needs to be brought into relation . . .Beauty is bound up with the immortal, for it prompts a search for a precedent which in turn prompts a search for a still earlier precedent, and the mind keeps tripping backward until it as reaches something which has no precedent, which maybe very well be immortal . . . what is beautiful is in league with what is true because truth abides in the immortal sphere . . . The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own aquatints us with the mental event of conviction and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterwards one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction - to locate what is true." Beauty in other words leads to truth in its own good time and in its own subtle way and to truth which may not be perceived or expressed in precisely the terms that the eager religion teacher would want. Beauty by its very nature inclines us to both truth and goodness but only when one is willing to respect the subtle dynamics of this inclination - and to accept that the process is not by any means automatic.

EPIPHANIES AT WORK

Thus the magic ending of Rohmer's My Night At Maud's with its dramatic shift from the hill over Clermont to the Riviera beach is surely an epiphany about intense human love, just as is Kieslowski's Blue an epiphany about letting go of grief (as in much less distinguished way is Spielberg's Always though casting Audrey Hepburn as God was a stroke of pure genius). However, it requires time to absorb those epiphanies, to make them part of our personality. Some people will never be able to absorb them. Even those who finally "get it" will not necessarily change their attitudes or behavior because of such epiphanies. Is not the process too slow, too problematic, too uncertain? Why should we bother with such forms of "evangelization" when we have the teachings of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in neat catechetical formulations (which formulations depend of course on our own ideological predisposition) that we can simply impose on people as we run them through our programs? Yes indeed, if we are fundamentalists. But no, not if we're Catholics. For us there are no shortcuts. No matter how determined we might be to "convert" our people to being good and virtuous Catholics as quickly as possible, to win them quickly to the ways of virtue, we cannot give up on stories and beauty, especially beautiful stories, stories which - no matter how often repeated - stop us dead in our tracks and drench us with luminosity. Patently we should not abandon catechism nor the teaching of sound doctrine.  We should however insist that religious education emphasize the beauty in the church and its sacraments and the beauty of sound doctrine - as Mathias Scheeben proposed so long ago. Indeed one might well ask if the beauty of the doctrine does not appear in one's teaching whether the presentation has been sound, or even Catholic. At every step of the educational process, we must attend to beauty -- that small tear in the surface of the world, according to Simone Weil, that pulls us through to some vaster space. Beauty lifts us off the ground, spins us around, and then deposits us back on the ground perhaps only a few inches away. It is not that we no longer stand at the center of the world, we never did. We no longer stand at the center even of our own world. Rather we are still in the power of that which has happened to us in our encounter with beauty. Such events don't always happen and when they do they do not necessarily transform behavior as a weekend "encounter" of whatever kind is supposed to transform behavior (and does not and cannot because we are far too complex creatures to be brain-washed in such a short period of time). However, encounters with beauty do open us up to their own alchemy which gently guides us to goodness and truth. There is simply no other way because faith and ethics cannot be imposed from the outside. They can be embraced only as a consequence of an act of love. We continue to teach the catechism with the modest realization that our efforts will be effective only when grace intervenes, when the Spirit touches the pupil with her magic wand. We don't push, we don't threaten, we don't force compliance. The tragic flaw of Authoritarian Pragmatism is that is grimly determined to budget the Spirit's time, to force Her hand, to constrain Her to blow whither we will, not wither She will, to force epiphanies on demand.

EDUCATION FOR BEAUTY

The fundamental purpose of education therefore is to prepare the student for beauty. The purpose of Catholic education, among other things, is to help the student to be open to the Spirit as she manifests herself in the beautiful, to sensitize the student to beauty - in creation, in art, in the church, especially in its sacraments, it stories and its doctrine. That may be a hard saying. How does one go about doing it? Where are the textbooks, the syllabi, the visual aides which can enable us to teach in such a fashion? I have no answers to those questions. I merely note that religious and moral metanoia are likely to occur only under the impulse of a person's being stopped in his tracks and then drenched in the luminosity of an encounter with beauty. What can be done to introduce beauty into the life of American Catholicism? Into its education? Into its schools? Into its religious instruction? Into the administration of the Sacraments? Into its liturgy?

It will not be easy, Authoritarian Pragmatism which sees no need for Beauty has been around a long time. It will not die gracefully. I cannot outline a program for the restoration of beauty that one could implement tomorrow. There are however some suggestions which might help over the long term to promote the apologetics of beauty:

1.) Shut up and listen. This is a hard saying for our clergy and quasi-clergy. Having all the answers and being compelled to impose these answers, they see no need and certainly no time for listening. A pastor I know has the practice of asking his eighth graders to write him a brief letter in which they tell him why they want to receive Confirmation. It is not a condition for the sacrament but and attempt to discover what goes on in the spiritual lives of these early teens. Each year he is astonished by the religious depth these young people reveal in their letters and their subsequent ten minute discussions with him. Only if we really listen to the laity and resist the impulse to impose our corrections and clarifications on what they say will we begin to realize that Authoritarian Pragmatism does them an enormous injustice. They are far better Catholics than we are willing to admit and far better Catholics than many of us are - even if they don't always use "correct" language in talking about their graces and their spiritual needs.

2.) Abandon compulsion. Urge them to attend classes as preparation for the sacraments, but do not force them to do so. The advantage of this strategy is that it forces us to make these classes truly excellent, indeed enchanting: the sort of experience of which people will say afterwards, "That was really great! It was a wonderful experience! Am I glad I did it." Only when that sort of image of our sacramental classes seeps into the parish will people come willingly and eagerly. Such classes should celebrate the joy and the beauty of the sacrament. As Bishop John cCarthy has said, when you open the door of the rectory who someone seeking a sacrament, ask yourself how the Good Shepherd would great them. Or, I add, Mary the Mother of Jesus and Our Mother. Neither one, incidentally, would revel in the power of being able to deny a sacrament. I know of a priest who, when someone calls about a baptism, asks the parents to bring the kid over to the rectory because he'd like to meet the child. What a wonderful child he says excitedly. How God must love this perfect little being he has given them. He asks them some questions about how their family life is going and praises their generosity and offers subtle help if they are having troubles. If it the first child he asks how they met and when they first knew they were in love. Ten, fifteen minutes at the most.

3.) Make the administration of the Sacrament an experience of joy and of such luminous beauty that even the most hardened "fallen-away" Catholic will be tempted to return soon. The joy must be real, not the cute kind of joy in which we announce that now we're all going to be joyous. Obviously the minister of the sacrament must truly enjoy what he is doing, he must love the babies he is baptizing, the couples at whose marriage he is presiding, the kids receiving their first communion or confirmation. He should perhaps dote over each wondrous baby and celebrate their arrival. They are after all our future, indeed our future parishioners. Thank God they're here! At last! What wonderful little tykes! Baptism should be a high for the minister (even if he misses a quarter of a football game!), one of the high points of his week. If there are siblings present, they might be brought into the act - asked whether they think we ought to baptize the baby, invited to touch the baby's forehead as we welcome this new Catholic into the church, quizzed about whether they think the baby will cry. You can't go wrong if you're nice to the little ones, even if they are inclined some of the time to run around the Church while you're continuing with the Sacrament! How can the presiding priest not be filled with awe at the mystery of human passion which brings a young woman and a young man together to join body and soul in marriage. Even if they seem to be nerds, more interested in getting a hall than the marriage ceremony, even indeed if they have been living together, they still are brave and courageous young people, taking a huge risk with their lives. The priest should admire them and make patent his admiration and his pleasure in sharing their joy. Should he not in his own way love them as much as if not more than their families because they too are the future of our heritage! The film High Fidelity brilliantly illumines the agony of commitment as it is experienced by contemporary superannuated adolescents. One does not hassle them because only now are they ready to commit to one another, rather one seeks to understand how they have come to want commitment.

A joyous and beautiful sacramental ceremony is far more important than any pre-sacramental instruction because it permits the beauty of the sacramental experience to transform and radiate everyone who is present (though of course pre-sacramental instruction has its (optional) place). My friend's custom of asking junior high kids to write brief applications for the sacrament might also be usefully extended to other sacraments - as an option. I have presented a grim picture of Authoritarian Pragmatism which continues to dominate American Catholicism. Yet it does not preclude the possibility of beauty sneaking in the back door. In a parish I know of a group of teenagers act out the passion play on Good Friday. Dressed in garments that hint at the ancient near east and flawlessly trained, they recite their lines seriously, soberly, and without a hint of a smirk or a giggle. The experience is utterly compelling. The week after Easter the participants go off for volunteer work in Appalachia. I am sure that there are many similar incidents in the Church in this country. Men and women of taste and imagination and respect for the laity can always bring beauty in through the back door.

CONCLUSION

The Pope ends his address to artists with a quote from Prince Myshkin in Dostoievsky's The Idiot: "Beauty will save the world!" In the Authoritarian Pragmatism of American Catholic ministry it might well seem that only an idiot would make such an absurd statement. How is beauty going to raise concern for the environment, for the poor, for racial justice, for the right to life for gender equality? How indeed.In his Nobel Prize speech, Alexander Solzhenitsyn reflects on Prince Myshkin's indiocy: "Beauty will save the world." What does this mean? For a long time it seemed to me that it was merely a phrase. How could such a thing be possible? When in our bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone, and from what? It has ennobled, elevated, yes; but whom has it saved? . . ."A work of art contains its verification in itself. Artificial, strained con-cepts do not withstand the test of being turned into images; both concepts and images fall to pieces, they show themselves to be sickly and pale, they convince no one. But works which draw on truth and present it to us con-centrated and alive seize us, powerfully join us to themselves and no one ever, even centuries from now, will come forth to refute them . . . "And then it is not a mistake, but a prophecy that we find written in Dostoievsky: "Beauty will save the world."Yeah, well maybe. But then who is Dostoievsky? Who is Solzhenitsyn? What did Prince Myshkin know anyway? And who is the Pope, as far as that goes, to be writing letters to artists when there are so many more important things he should be doing? Like, for example, vindicating the rights of women, the poor, the oppressed, the non-white? In any event if beauty, instead of frantic energy and a passion for that which is correct, is going to save the world, then no one should look to American Catholicism for that salvation.