Via
Pulchritudinis, “the way of beauty” is a
favourite theme of Pope Benedict XVI.
He speaks and writes on beauty and its
significance in Christian spirituality with
great conviction and enthusiasm. According
to him, beauty can lead us to prayer and
contemplation and it is our way to God.
Via
Pulchritudinis is the rediscovery of a
spiritual tradition which was forgotten in
the Church, especially in the western
tradition, for a long time. Pope Paul VI
initiated the movement to reinstate beauty
and art in the life of the Catholic Church
after centuries of negligence caused by
different historical circumstances. He
confessed in moving words the failure of the
Church to understand artists and regretted
the loss caused by mutual suspicion and
alienation. Pope John Paul II
continued the efforts to bring artists back
to their spiritual function as interpreters
of divine mystery.
What is the
role of beauty in our spiritual search?
Religion can stagnate and degenerate into
lifeless formalism, habitual ritualism,
blind dogmatism and merciless fundamentalism
if it seeks to serve truth without beauty.
It is the cause of all conflicts and
divisions in the name of God who, as all
religions believe, is Love and Love alone.
Unfortunately all the religions have the
temptation to possess and monopolize God in
the form of a definable truth which is
conformed to their own fixed notions of God.
But what is always forgotten is the fact
that the experience of the Truth of God is
inseparably the experience of the Beauty of
God.
The truth
which we often hold as God’s truth is but
the dry, lifeless and skeletal human
construct of God. It falls short of the
divine mystery which is manifest in the
myriads of wonders happening in and around
us, surpassing all the boundaries of our
concepts and imaginations. God reveals
himself to us not as a truth which we know,
define, profess and confess but as the
Beauty which we see, praise and worship with
our whole being. The realization of the
divine truth in its glorious manifestation
brings us to our knees in admiration and
love. Thus we can say that the experience of
God’s Truth is inseparable from the
experience of God’s Beauty.
Our search for
God has to proceed not from the intellect
but from the heart. The knowledge that comes
from the heart is motivated by love and
admiration. In such knowledge the knower is
overcome by the known and the ensuing
expressions of this experience are
necessarily poetic and artistic. The
historical and practical understanding of
truth and its exposition in logical premises
cannot be considered valid for such a
theological or spiritual discourse. It is in
this sense that we can say that the way to
God is the way of beauty – the way of art
and poetry, the way of creative imagination.
In the eastern
Christian tradition the spiritual
significance of beauty has got greater
recognition than in the western tradition.
The two traditions had to take divergent
ways due to some historical conditions. The
principle of lex orandi, lex credenti
which means “the law of prayer is the law of
faith” is the accepted norm of the Eastern
Church when it comes to theology and
spirituality. According to the eastern
tradition, worship is the way that leads to
faith and to the knowledge of God. It is not
a discursive process of the intellect but an
affective attitude of the heart at the
perception of the glory of God.
We come to a
closer and deeper experience of God, when we
see God’s Truth adorned with Beauty and we
are overwhelmed by admiration and love. The
way to God is beset with the marvels of
God's great deeds which evoke in the
beholder faith and love and ruptures of
praise. Seeing the glory of God is the
luminous way to the knowledge of God. The
great mystics are visionaries of God’s
beauty which is manifested in multifarious
forms but united by the inner web of the
Spirit in a miraculous manner. They are
overwhelmed at the perception of the inner
harmony, rhythm and design of the universe
which is inaccessible to those theologians
who trust their practical sense and logical
acumen and fail at the same time to abandon
themselves in worshipping the ineffable
mystery.
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