I’m slogging through Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s The Glory of the Lord, Vol. I., Seeing the Form – it’s a Theological Aesthetics (not a theology of aesthetics… Von would want that to be clear – I like call him Von as if we are old friends, it helps me to not become frustrated). Let’s not kid ourselves, Von Balthasar has some serious game and reading his work is a bitch. I’m reasonably well read in theology, but I don’t have the theological or especially the philosophical erudition to hang with him without serious effort… the guy read everything and everyone. Plus it’s no small thing he’s doing. Nevertheless, I’m working hard to read him and he is having a deep impact on me.
We should not only care about the true and the good. We should care about the beautiful. Beauty is where it’s at; beauty can do what words could never do; beauty can inspire the good like nothing else; beauty can…
The true: what is logical & can be said with words without lying.
The good: what is ethical & virtuous in thought & deed.
The beautiful: this is where aesthetics comes into play. HUVB took 7 volumes of 5-800 pages to try and describe this one so I’m not even going to try, but here are a few quotes:
“No longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man. We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it… whoever sneers at her name as if whe were the ornament of a bourgeois past – whether he admits it or not – can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”
“In a world without beauty – even if people cannot dispense with the word and constantly have it on the tip of their tongues in order to abuse it – in a world which is perhaps not wholly without beauty, but which can no longer see it or reckon with it: in such a world the good also loses its attractiveness… the proofs of truth will have lost their cogency.”
“Works of art can die as a result of being looked at by too many dull (geistlos) eyes, and even the radiance of holiness can, in a way, become blunted when it encounters nothing but hollow indifference.”
“‘God needs prophets in order to make himself known, and all prophets are necessarily artists. What a prophet has to say can never be said in prose.’ But if all prophets are artists, then surely not all artists are prophets.”
One of the times I’ve been touched deeply by something beautiful in the past few years was this song and this scene from the movie “Once.” This was a moment of pure beauty that took me completely off guard. I cried through the rest of the movie & it took me days to feel normal again. The scene shows us the intimacy of sharing your own song with another person, the vulnerability, and pure joy of the moment. Watch this – it will be really good for your soul.
Falling Slowly – Once (2006) from spedkey on Vimeo.
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