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by Andrew Greeley |
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"The world in which we live needs beauty in order not to sink into despair. Beauty, like truth, brings joy to the human heart and is that precious fruit which resists the erosion of time." --- Vatican II (cited by Pope John Paul II in his Easter Letter to Artists) "Liturgy should be Enjoyable" --- Pope John Paul II "The Church rejoices in human creativity and thanks God for the gift of artistic inspiration." --- Cardinal Francis George. "There comes a
moment to everyone when beauty stands staring into the soul with sad, sweet eyes that
sicken at the sound of words. And God help those who pass that moment by!" "Beauty will save the world!" --- Dostoievsky |
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.Introduction I should note that my remarks are from the perspective of "catechetics from below." I am not a theologian nor a catechetical theorist. I am a sociologist, hence I must take a worm’s eye view of religion education and focus especially on the reactions of those whom we are trying to teach. I will present today sociological reflections and leave to others, less empiricist than myself, reflections from other orders of knowledge. Two of my recent books deal with this subject though from another perspective– The Catholic Imagination and God in the Movies. My thesis is that the beauty of the Catholic heritage, flawed as it often is in practice especially in this country, attracts, enchants, and will not let people go no matter how hard they try to escape. To reshape this thesis, the question is not whether a Catholic catechesis can be beautiful but whether a catechesis which is not beautiful can possibly be Catholic. I do not suggest that we should abandon teaching doctrine. Catholics patently should know the doctrines of their religion. They should also experience the beauty in those doctrines. Beauty, by way of brief introductory description, is a dimension of an object, event, or person, which may, under proper circumstances hint at the transcendent, otherness, being. Beauty on occasion provides an opportunity for the transcendent to break through briefly into our lives and illumine them. Beauty illuminates: it overcomes us with brilliant light. As Cardinal George has said "Light, pure light seems to be the physical reality most often used to speak of God as beautiful." Thus to say that a wedding is beautiful (in this sense of the word) means that the love between the couple and the love for them of the priest and the community are so apparent and transparent that the dazzling God’s love transiently seems to fill the Church as it will be with them on their marriage bed for their first union as husband and wife. To say that a liturgy is beautiful means that the joy of the communal meal has so permeated the congregation that many sense that Jesus had indeed joined us at the table and is joyful with us. To say that a funeral ceremony (or whatever the liturgists call it these days) is beautiful is to say that the faith of the congregation in the triumph of life over death is so powerful that the Lord of the Resurrection seems temporarily to be among them, as he was with Lazarus’s mourners, promising that life is too important ever to be anything but life. To say that a Baptism is beautiful is to say that the celebration of priest and parents of people over this wondrous little bundle of human life is so delirious that we sense for a moment that the One who gives life and nurture is delirious with us. These moments when well done are exercises in the catechetics of beauty, the best advertisement, the best evangelization, the church could ever hope to have. In American Catholicism today beauty is mostly unimportant. Generally we begin with truth, usually of the propositional variety, beat it into the heads of our people so that we will be good (as we define good) and dispense with beauty as an expensive option, when we think about it at all. Indeed, when pressed, we tend to say that beauty is an luxury and possibly a dangerous one because it interferes with goodness and may even lead to temptation. As proof in a study of American congregations, my colleagues Peter Marsden and Mark Chaves have discovered that Catholic parishes are least likely to provide artistic activities within the parish community or to recommend artistic performances or exhibitions beyond the parish boundaries. If you’re a Catholic parish, who needs beauty? Rules are important epiphanies are not. 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. There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of beauty –that which God has created and that which humans create in what may seem to many an almost blasphemous attempt to improve on God’s work. 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, a well proportioned 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. Then why do we need human created beauty? Why do we need human artists? The 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. Beauty Everywhere? Is all created beauty implicitly religious? It is a complicated question on which art critics and theologians easily get hung up and are often unable to go beyond. For our purposes it suffices to say that much 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 Bridgež 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 and even more Violetta becoming a Christ figure, 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 subperabundant in the world of art, when one is open to seeing it. There are also works of beauty which abound 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, except 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 by 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. We who try to teach religion should always be on the lookout for it and unafraid to absorb it for our own uses. The experience of the beautiful can be depicted as an encounter with Being that stops us in our tracks and illumines us. 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 find ourselves caught up in its world. 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 assets 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 the fine 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. Some will argue that it is not the purpose of the sacraments to be beautiful but to dispense grace. Leaving aside the automatic, not to say superstitious, view of the sacraments in that objection, one may simply reply that it is the very beauty of the sacraments which disposes them to dispense grace. They give grace efficiently 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 Crownings, 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. An observer of beauty says: "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. 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 some 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. Artists have a creative intuition into what reality really is. It rises up from the depth of their personalities, a deep insight into the transcendent which illumines them. They are driven by the power of that illumination to share it with others, to make a sacrament, a beauty whose luminosity will enchant. They cannot, indeed they dare not, twist that creative intuition to fit other purposes without destroying it. This is not because of the selfishness of the artist as creator of beauty. It is rather because the intuition of beauty, never completely under the artist’s control, lays down its own conditions and demands respect under penalty of departing the scene. Thus Bernini’s " Ecstasy of St. Theresa" flows from the intuition that erotic love is a metaphor for mystical ecstasy (an intuition which patently he was not the first to discover). If he had tried to tame that intuition so that it would not offend those who would be shocked by the metaphor, it would have been lost completely. Those would tame the wild passion of creative intuition would deprive the sacrament maker of that which is essential to his vocation, an insight into Being, into the Really Real. The appropriate response is patient generosity in which one opens oneself to the intuition which has driven the artist to create. It took me for example a whole week to absorb what William Kennedy was about in his Ironweed. Salvation for the Myrel Strep character was a ten dollar bill found beneath the statue of St. Jospeh (the patron of a happy death, as some of you may remember)If I had written of that brilliant work before the process of absorption was complete, I would have desecrated it. 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. Father Richard Viladesau: writes "Art is an effective moral educator in that it portrays vice and virtue rather than legislating about them or explaining them in theoretical terms. Narrative art is particularly apt at teaching about human fallibility. The fundamental moral evil of "seeing the worse for the better," for example, "is more informatively (though of course less systematically) carried out by poets, playwrights, and novelists" than by moral philosophers and theologians. Likewise, virtue is more convincing and imitable when it is embodied concretely in art than when it is commanded or expounded theoretically. "Perhaps in general art proves more than philosophy can." Art need not be didactic in order to serve the good-although there is clearly also a place for beauty and art in preaching and teaching, as in every form of communication. Art as communication can have a transformative effect on the person because it can literally give us a new way of seeing, hearing, feeling. 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 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 soul. 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. Our heritage is not a series of doctrinal propositions or moral imperatives. It is primarily a story of God’s implacably forgiving love. Religion is that story before it’s anything else and after its everything else. Religion does not speak in abstract concepts, religion speaks in stories, in the language of images. Human knowledge is primarily the knowledge of story. We tell one another stories to explain ourselves and the world in which we live. Story, the understanding of one event by a similar event, according to some scholars came into our evolutionary development, even before language and made language both possible and necessary. Story – narrative metaphor – tells us that something is like something else. Because we are reflective as well as narrating animals, we must reflect on our stories and derive rational and propositional formulations from them. Religion is primarily a story of grace. Doctrinal and moral codes are derivatives from that story, necessary derivatives indeed but still derivatives. When we separate them from the story of grace, they lose their raw energy and power. Beauty is in the final analysis grace intervening spectacularly in our lives to enhance and confirm our existing stories of grace. Or to look at it from metaphysical viewpoint, Beauty is Being breaking through to assure us of Its benignity. Or to put it religiously, beauty is the Holy Spirit dancing through the universe like a cosmic Tinkerbell, sparking off from Her magic wand countless signs of the Presence of Grace, a Presence which we are likely to encounter anywhere and everywhere, save in the church or the various obligatory religious instruction classes. Patently I am not saying that the formal catechism – in whatever form – should be abandoned. It is still important. I am rather saying that we should attend also to beauty -- a 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. It is the ethical alchemy of 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 of 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 His magic wand. We don’t push, we don’t threaten, we don’t force compliance. Beauty and the Artist Beauty is created by artists, natural beauty by the divine artists, humanly constructed beauty by the human artist. The Pope tells us "the divine artist passes on to the human artist a spark of his own surpassing wisdom, calling him to share in his creative power. If you don’t have artists or if you don’t want to have them hanging around, you won’t have beauty. I include among artists not only the painters, sculptors, poets, architects, musicians, and writers who do what is considered art (fine as well as lively)but also folk arts, and personal artists and family artists. The Pope begins his address to artists by telling them that artists are metaphors for God. God creates the great sacrament of the universe to respond to his conception of the universe, the artist creates her own sacrament of beauty in response to the artistic insight which has captured her imagination and to the service of which she dedicates her skills. He also insists that those who feel this divine spark must "put at the service of their neighbor and humanity as a whole." American Catholicism does not much care for artists. They tend to be a little odd and not to understand the need to indoctrinate the Catholic laity by art which drives home important doctrinal points. They also want to be paid for their work, sometimes demanding exorbitant prices. It is much easier to work with "artists" who do what they are told and do it cheaply. Is there work beautiful? Who cares! Education for Beauty The fundamental purpose of education 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 he manifests herself in the beautiful. That may be a hard saying. How does one go about doing that? Where are the textbooks, the syllabi, the visual aides which can enable us to do that? I have no answers to those questions. I merely note that the 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 luminosity by an encounter with beauty. Won’t too much concern for beauty turn people into sensualists? Won’t their passions be aroused by beauty ? Won’t they get dirty thoughts? Humans, being bodily creatures, are by definition sensualists. If God had thought that human sensations were evil, he should not have given us bodies. Grace enters our personalities through bodily experiences. The Sacraments are sensual experiences, including especially matrimony in which bodies are, as it were, freely exchanged for the purpose of pleasure and love. Doubtless some of those who pursue beauty do so for pleasure and nothing else. But there is no human activity that is without danger of distortion and abuse. Sense experiences usually do not produce dedicated sensualists who lay on their chaises in the sunshine eating bonbons and listening to Mozart. 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? The perspective 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 take home and implement. 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, it sees no need and certainly no time for listening. We are now busy evangelizing for the year of the Great Jubilee. No one is listening to the lay people on the subject, because everyone knows what the lay people should hear. Same old story. If we did stop to listen to the laity, really listen, we would find how deeply (albeit not perfectly) spiritual they really are. It would have been wise to have dedicated this Great Jubilee Year to asking the laity to evangelize us. That will be the year, won’t it when we are willing to risk the possibility that the laity are better Catholics than we are! 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 we do 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, 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 McCarthy 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 him. 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 cutsey 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 the seem to be nerds, more interested in getting a hall than the marriage ceremony, they still are brave and courageous young people, taking a huge risk with their lives. The presider 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! Those are but hints. Doubtless many of you here do it much better than I do. My only point is that 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. 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. In one 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. At another parish this last Christmas the pastor lead the congregation outside of church (it’s in a clement climatic zone) for the end of the Eucharist. Then he distributed eight day Great Jubilee candles to them. I wasn’t there, but everyone who was told me what a beautiful and powerful experience it was. Perhaps as much because of the quality of the priest as the nature of the gift. 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!" Many American Catholics would ask 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? "Only there is something so peculiar at the core of beauty, a peculiarity in the position of art: the conviction carried by a genuine work of art is absolute and conquers even a resisting heart. A work of art contains its verification in itself. Artificial, strained concepts 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 concentrated and alive seize us, powerfully join us to themselves and no one ever, even centuries from now, will come forth to refute them. "Then perhaps the old tri-unity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty is not simply a showy, worn-out formula as we thought in the time of our selfconfident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees meet, as scholars have declared, but the too obvious, too straight sprouts of Truth and Goodness have been knocked down, cut off, and do not grow-then perhaps the capricious, unpredictable, unexpected sprouts of Beauty will force their way through and rise to that very same place, and thus carry out the work for all three? "And then it is not a mistake, but a prophecy that we find written in Dostoievsky: "Beauty will save the world." So says Dostoievsky, so says Solzhenitsyn, so says John Paul II. And what then do we say?
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