The Pastoral Relevance of Beauty
By Dr Tracey Rowland
In his Aquinas
lecture at Marquette University in 1988, Walter Kasper, now a Cardinal, remarked
that the "naïve strategies of accommodation in the last two decades of the
Church’s life have been more harmful than useful". The culture of
modernity, far from being neutral in its stance toward Christianity, is now
judged by sociologists and intellectual historians to represent an heretical
reconstruction of the principles upon which the former classical-Christian
culture was based. Ironically, the
Protestant theologian Karl Barth could see the dangers inherent in the
accommodationist stance as early as the mid-1960’s. In an interview with Paul
VI in 1966, Barth asked, "what does aggiornamento mean, accommodation to
what?”
The very worst elements of this culture of
modernity are plainly visible. The rejection of the principle of the
sanctity of human life has given rise to what John Paul II calls "a culture
of death". Scientists now wish to clone human beings and use developing
babies as sources of "spare parts" for aging adults. Couples expecting twins or triplets are
routinely asked whether they would like to abort the twin or two of the
triplets. Euthanasia is legal in some jurisdictions. Catholic women in ostensibly Catholic
hospitals are advised by social workers of the varieties of contraceptive
devices available for nursing mothers. The encyclicals Evangelium Vitae and Veritatis
Splendor were addressed directly to these elements.
The consequentialist methodologies which were condemned in these encyclicals
have also been condemned in the social teachings of John Paul II, where he makes
it clear that the economy ought to exist for the common good of workers, rather
than workers existing for the good of the market. In all of these pathological
elements there is a denial of truth and a consequent lack of goodness. There is
also, however, a rejection of beauty, and with this rejection, there falls a
kind nihilistic greyness over social life.
Splendour
In his lecture to the Linacre Conference in Cambridge in 2000, Archbishop George Pell painted a picture of a very bleak world in which children and babies are rarely ever seen because they don’t exist. In the culture of death there is not merely a high rate of abortion and contraception, but there is, correspondingly, an absence of children with their laughter, smiles and funny questions. A Catholic culture or what John Paul II calls a "civilisation of love" is not merely more moral, but it is also more beautiful. This fact struck me rather strongly when I attended a classical rite Mass in the Church of St. Eugene in Paris, in the Summer of 1999. The Church was filled with young couples with numerous children and the priest looked as if he was no older than 30. The children were beautifully dressed. The girls were in summer dresses with bows and ribbons and cotton socks – not jeans, shorts, leggings and tank tops. There was a kind of beauty or splendour which radiated from their goodness and innocence. The Mass was utterly solemn. If a martian had dropped in from outer space, or a neo-pagan sociologist from a university faculty, they would have had no trouble working out that the moment of consecration was the high point of the ritual. The choir continued to sing the Sanctus as the priest silently said the beginning of the Eucharistic Prayer and the Sanctus ended in a kind of fugue at the moment of consecration. As the priest held up the Host the choir fell silent, altar servers fell prostrate on the floor of the sanctuary, and the Church bells began to toll. The mundane had fused with the eternal. The Church militant was united with the choirs of the Church triumphant. Here in the heartland of modernity, in the very city of the Enlightenment philosophes, there remained a defiantly Catholic corner.
One commonly hears criticisms of those who prefer the classical Rite along the lines that such persons are "mere aesthetes", as if a love of beauty has nothing to do with being a Catholic. After 30 years of "accommodationist" practices, even Catholics who are loyal to the magisterium are starting to think like Calvinists. The general attitude is: form and substance are two different things, and we only care about substance. Anyone who cares about form is labelled an "aesthete" and "aesthetes" should be contained in places like Oxbridge common rooms and Anglican country vicarages. The logic of this position is that Catholics must be, by definition, tone deaf philistines whose levels of intellectual life are sufficiently low to exclude the ability to see a relationship between form and substance.
Moreover, to question the whole project of
fostering "accommodationist” practices is viewed by many clergy of the
Conciliar generation as a sign of disloyalty, and in particular, as a sign of
dissent from the pastoral programmes of the Second Vatican Council. However
given that even Princes of the Church such as Cardinal Kasper have acknowledged
that those strategies did not work, and further, given that such strategies were
not based upon any theological or philosophical foundation, but were merely
"pastoral experiments", it is perhaps time that we stopped flogging a
dead horse and re-focused our intellectual energies on gaining a deeper
understanding of the ways in which the substance of the faith can take a visible
and attractive form within our culture.
At the basis of any such project for the
re-evangelisation of the culture of modernity there must lie an understanding
that it is not desirable to have a Catholic substance tied to a form which is,
in a philosophical sense, "modern". This disjunction between form and
substance creates cognitive confusion and as such is fatal to catechetics. In
particular it must be understood that the realm of aesthetics is not
theologically or philosophically neutral.
These ideas can be found in the works of
contemporary scholars, including members of the high profile Cambridge
"radical orthodoxy" circle. However much of this intellectual
territory was understood and well mapped by Hans Urs von Balthasar and other
lesser-name scholars who, for various reasons, did not have an influence over
the pastoral strategies which were adopted in the aftermath of the Council. For
example, in the 1960s von Balthasar was in something of an ecclesiastical limbo
having left the Society of Jesus, though he remained a priest.
Truth, goodness and beauty
Whereas other scholars have traced the development of the culture of modernity along the lines of its denial of truth and moral absolutes, which in itself is a very valuable exercise, von Balthasar has filled out the picture by demonstrating that the culture can be characterised by a severance of the trinitarian relationship between the true, the good and the beautiful. The project of re-evangelisation thus requires that the three be brought back together. Those who only care about the purity of doctrine have got as far as understanding the nexus between the true and the good, but an understanding of the significance of the beautiful in the formation of the soul and the soul’s ability to grasp the truth of the Christian faith, alludes them.
Various explanations are offered around the
dinner tables of Catholic scholars for the failure of the Conciliar generation
to appreciate the pastoral significance of beauty. Some talk of the influence of
Jansenism on Irish Catholicism, others talk of the influence of decades of
poverty endured by Catholics, others of the fear that a "probeauty” position is inconsistent with a
preferential option for the poor and so on. While all of these arguments have merit, I
also think that the American Franciscan Benedict Groeschel has offered a good
theological explanation of the problem.
Groeschel argues that it is part of the
spiritual make-up of people that they have a primary attraction or aptitude for
one of the transcendentals, and that the role of a spiritual director is to lead
individual souls to a deeper appreciation of the others. For example, he argues
that St. Thomas Aquinas had a very strong love of truth, that St. Francis of
Assisi was passionate about goodness, and that St. Augustine loved and
understood beauty. This is not to say that Aquinas was not good or that
Augustine was uninterested in truth but merely that different souls have a
tendency to be intoxicated with the pursuit of a particular transcendental
property which then leads them to the others.
Groeschel also makes the point that of the
transcendentals it is beauty which is, in a sense, the most dangerous. For
example, a love of beauty without truth and goodness can give rise to the kind
of Nazi who listened to Wagner while organising genocide. However, if the Church
abandons beauty, she not only rejects a divine gift, but she effectively
marginalises those members of the faithful for whom a flourishing spiritual life
is strongly dependent on a rich liturgical life, and she makes herself
unattractive to those for whom the relationship between form and substance is
clearly obvious and thus pastorally significant.
