{"id":109,"date":"2012-01-18T20:37:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-19T03:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/egregioustwaddle\/2012\/01\/the-holiness-of-beauty\/"},"modified":"2016-05-02T10:47:58","modified_gmt":"2016-05-02T16:47:58","slug":"the-holiness-of-beauty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/egregioustwaddle\/2012\/01\/the-holiness-of-beauty.html","title":{"rendered":"The Holiness of Beauty?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
Two recent posts by friends have me revisiting a philosophical equation that troubles me even more than the ones I struggled with in Algebra I (both times): the original Grecian Formula, placed in the mouth of Sophocles by Plato, that Beauty = Goodness. When I first encountered the Symposium<\/i>, as a (very, very) late-life Humanities major in the Antioch degree-completion program thencalled The McGregor School, I had already been as infused with, even pickled in, the Beauty Equals Goodness trope as a hard-boiled pub egg in brine.<\/div>\n

We all are. Society reinforces it. Commerce lives by it. Even evolutionarily speaking, we are hardwired to choose the species-perpetuating pragmatics of symmetry. But that didn\u2019t stop me from throwing the book across the room as the corollary sunk in for the first time.\u00a0I am not beautiful. Did that mean I could not be good?<\/i><\/p>\n

Scholarly discussion was no help. We were burning through the classics at the rate of two or three Harvard Five-Foot Bookshelves a week, so the leisure of our own symposium on the Symposium<\/i> was not to be had. Poetry was my go-to spiritual director at the time\u2013I was in my Episcopalian phase, and if there\u2019s one thing you can say for sure about the Via Media<\/i>, it\u2019s that it\u2019s no use asking them to say anything for sure\u2013but Keats just met my question with a \u201cThere-there, old girl, don\u2019t wrinkle that ugly brow\u201d pat on the head:<\/p>\n

\u2018Beauty is truth, truth beauty,\u2013that is all<\/i>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.\u2019<\/i><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Well, OK. Keats was in his own pickle, echoing the aesthetic of perfection. And hey, I can go there. I\u2019m as appreciative of the beautiful\u2013in creation, in art, in the glorious human\u2013as anyone. (Maybe more so, since I see so little of it in the mirror.). To say that beauty stands for a kind of original harmony, unity, and balance that we in this vale of tears long for will not get any argument from me. Nobody knows which Grecian urn stirred Keats to his reflection, but I can tell you that five minutes in front of a Roman urn\u2013the Portland vase, in the British Museum\u2013utterly undid me with beauty and sent me weeping out into the street.<\/p>\n

So beauty\u2019s good in lots of ways. But is beauty goodness in the moral sense? And are only the beautiful capable of goodness? You\u2019d think the Church would have something to say about this, and of course it has and does, but teasing out what that message might be is even tougher than close-reading Keats or getting out of Algebra I. Just skimming the surface, we find Augustine using Beauty as a term of endearment in a love letter to God (<\/i>\u201cLate have I loved you<\/span>, <\/span>O Beauty ever ancient, ever new<\/span> . . .\u201d)<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>Aquinas applying the Grecian Formula to his own tonsured locks (\u201cDionysius says that because the beautiful is the cause of things in so\u00a0<\/i>many ways, it follows that the good and the beautiful are the same thing\u201d)<\/i><\/span>,<\/span> and even the 17th century Silesian Jesuit hymn, \u201cFairest Lord Jesus\u201d (Schonster Herr Jesu)<\/i>. Some pretty heavy hitters come down on the side of the holiness of beauty.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

The Lives of the Saints aren\u2019t much better. Those virgins who earned extra holiness credit for making themselves ugly for the Kingdom\u2013scratching their faces with thorns, picking at their own smallpox scars, poking out their own eyes to discourage pagan suitors\u2013would go unremembered if they hadn\u2019t started out as pretty hot babes in the first place. And there are countless examples of saints who, though ugly as sin in the world, were revealed in the true beauty of their holiness after death.<\/p>\n

Of course, there is always Mother Teresa, who did, rather than was, something beautiful for God. But I need more.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

That\u2019s why I was intrigued by Max Lindenman\u2019s recent post<\/a>, in which he\u00a0finds some measure of freedom\u00a0in contemporary Catholic culture\u00a0from the Beauty = Goodness trap. \u201cIf you want to quit worrying about your looks, there are worse places to be than the Catholic Church,\u201d he says, and cites the \u201cblissfully dowdy\u201d parishioners he found himself surrounded by on his conversion. <\/span>But I think what he\u2019s experiencing is more relief than countercultural challenge, because on this particular sliding scale he started out with the advantage of beauty. That he, like Rosa de Lima with her crown of thorns tucked in place, can now relax into a less high-maintenance form of daily beauty-of-holiness ritual doesn\u2019t make it any less of a puzzle for the rest of us.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not the first person to wrestle with this. Most recently and readably, Toni Raiten-D\u2019Antonio\u2019s <\/span>Ugly as Sin: The Truth About How We Look and Finding Freedom from Self-Hatred<\/i><\/a> (HCI, 2010), offers much food for thought. Here\u2019s her triggering reflection, sitting in the Sistine Chapel as the guards shout <\/span>Silenzio!<\/i>:<\/span><\/p>\n

The sad foreboding in the voices of the guards feels appropriate as I sit on one of the benches that line the chapel walls and gaze at Michelangelo\u2019s astounding depictions of the essential Christian stories. My eyes move from Adam and Eve\u2019s \u201cfall,\u201d which shows them transformed from luminous beauty into jaundiced and hunched figures, to the images of Hell at the base of the Last Judgment fresco painted on the wall behind the altar. In this enormous painting, the souls Christ brings near to his place at the center glow with beauty, while those denied his grace fall into darkness. The further a figure is placed from the Lord, the uglier she appears.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Raiten-D\u2019Antonio is a sociologist, and she comes at her topic from a particular stance that indicts religion. So in the end, while her observations strike a real chord, she can\u2019t answer my question either. I want to know there are people exploring\u2013and questioning, and challenging, and even upending\u2013the Beauty = Goodness equation from inside the Church, from among the followers of the One who, in the words of Isaiah\u2019s prophecy,<\/p>\n

. . . had no majestic bearing to catch our eye,<\/span><\/b><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
no beauty to draw us to him.<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
He was spurned and avoided by men,<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
a man of suffering, knowing pain,<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
Like one from whom you turn your face,<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n

spurned, and we held him in no esteem.<\/i>\u00a0<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

So I was heartened, yesterday, when this tantalizing bit jumped out at me from Elizabeth Scalia\u2019s First Things<\/i> column<\/a> on the perils of materialism. Vaguely irritated by her husband\u2019s suggestion that a broken Christmas lantern was worth saving (and adding to the family clutter) because \u201cit\u2019s pretty,\u201d she ponders:<\/p>\n

Theologically, my husband was on solid ground: a thing needn\u2019t be perfect in order to be valued, but then did the lantern\u2019s \u201cprettiness\u201d assign to it a false value which has played him for a sucker? And was that not reflective of our whole society\u2019s willingness to excuse a great many faults in individuals, because they are good-looking, or in institutions because they are powerful?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Does applying the Grecian Formula unquestioningly\u2013as a society, as a Church\u2013lead us into the temptation of assigning false value to the beautiful, and denying the unbeautiful the chance to be good? That\u2019s a riddle with consequences much larger than my own nagging curiosity. Are there other voices asking?<\/p>\n

How about it? Is it time to convene a symposium?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two recent posts by friends have me revisiting a philosophical equation that troubles me even more than the ones I struggled with in Algebra I (both times): the original Grecian Formula, placed in the mouth of Sophocles by Plato, that Beauty = Goodness. 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