Pope Benedict XVI

Can the beautiful be genuine, or, in the end, is it only an illusion? Isn’t reality perhaps basically evil? The fear that in the end it is not the arrow of the beautiful that leads us to the truth, but that falsehood, all that is ugly and vulgar, may constitute the true “reality” has at all times caused people anguish. At present this has been expressed in the assertion that after Auschwitz it was no longer possible to write poetry; after Auschwitz it is no longer possible to speak of a God who is good. People wondered: Where was God when the gas chambers were operating? This objection, which seemed reasonable enough before Auschwitz when one realized all the atrocities of history, shows that in any case a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not enough. It cannot stand up to the confrontation with the gravity of the questioning about God, truth, and beauty. Apollo, who for Plato’s Socrates was “the God” and the guarantor of unruffled beauty as “the truly divine” is absolutely no longer sufficient.

In this way, we return to the paradox of being able to say of Christ: “You are the fairest of the children of men” (Psalm 45:2) and: “He had no beauty, no majesty to draw our eyes, no grace to make us delight in him” (Isa. 53:2). In the Passion of Christ, the experience of the beautiful has received new depth and new realism. The One who is beauty itself let himself be slapped in the face, spat upon, crowned with thorns. However, in his face that is so disfigured, there appears the genuine, extreme beauty: the beauty of love that goes “to the very end”; for this reason it is revealed as greater than falsehood and violence.

Is there anyone who does not know Dostoyevsky’s often quoted sentence: “Beauty will save the world”? However, people usually forget that Dostoyevsky is referring here to the redeeming beauty of Christ. We must learn to see Him. If we are struck by the arrow of his paradoxical beauty, then we will truly know him, and know him not only because we have heard others speak about him. Then we will have found the beauty of Truth, of the Truth that redeems.

Selections from Pope Benedict XVI, “The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty,” 2002. Lightly abridged. Copyright © Dicastero per la Comunicazione – Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

Augustine of Hippo

Too late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new, too late I have loved you! Behold, you were within me, while I was outside: it was there that I sought you, and, a deformed creature, rushed headlong upon these things of beauty which you have made. You were with me, but I was not with you. They kept me far from you, those fair things which, if they were not in you, would not exist at all. You have called to me, and have cried out, and have shattered my deafness. You have blazed forth with light, and have shone upon me, and you have put my blindness to flight! You have sent forth fragrance, and I have drawn in my breath, and I pant after you. I have tasted you, and I hunger and thirst after you. You have touched me, and I have burned for your peace.

Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, translated by John K. Ryan (Image Classics, 1960), 220. Used by permission.

Photograph by David Zumpe. Used by permission.