Beauty as both Means and End

Bishop Robert Baron, auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, recently gave a talk on “Beauty,” one of the finest talks I’ve heard in quite some time (see below--it's worth a listen).  In a relativistic culture that is hardened or hostile to any claims of "Truth," Baron argues that introducing people to the beautiful softens the soil.  Beauty works its “alchemy” on the soul, opening that person to new possibilities, and ultimately, to the transcendent beauty of God. 

Lead with the beautiful.  Baron remembers the first major league baseball game he attended when he was a young boy. It was a night game, and the green grass, the gleaming white uniforms of the home team, the fluidity and grace of the players, all had a profound effect on him, so much that he began playing  baseball,  something he continued until his older teenage years. As he played more, he became more interested in the nuances of the game, including arcane rules such as the “in-field fly rule.”

What would have happened, Baron asks, if his first exposure to the game as a boy was that the coach sat him down to explain the in-field fly rule? Would he have fallen in love with the game? Of course not.  It was the beauty of the game that first drew him to learning how to play, and as he played, he deepened in his knowledge and love of the game, prompting his desire to understand the rules. 

I was thinking about this during my recent trip with my wife to the “South Rim” of the Grand Canyon. Though it’s a national park, there were swarms of people there from other nations, all speaking their own language, reminding me of the  time I spent in Times Square in Manhattan. But all of us, regardless of our nationality or religious persuasion, had a similarly profound experience, mesmerized by the beauty of it all. We walked up and down the rim, so that we could view the expanse from different angles. We took pictures and panoramic videos.  We stood there, looking out,  breathing it in, silently. Words couldn’t really do it justice.

Beauty is not, Baron reminds us, “in the eye of the beholder.” True beauty, objective beauty, is more than a subjective experience; rather, when we come across something that is truly beautiful, it  re-arranges and redirects our subjective sensibilities toward something greater, something more. Be it the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, a musical masterpiece, a work of art, what is truly beautiful reaches out and grabs us, shakes us, forces us to think beyond ourselves, giving us a “taste” of something which is even more beautiful, almost impossible to imagine in the abstract. 

C.S. Lewis says it this way: “We do not want merely to see beauty... we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses, and nymphs and elves.”

Arguing theology or creed is something that may be of interest down the line, but it’s not theology that prompts us to draw closer to God. No one cares about the infield fly rule until he’s fallen in love with baseball. 

God, as Creator,  has given us the Grand Canyon. Our Church must do its part, through its architecture, religious iconography, music, rituals and sacraments, so that what is implicitly attractive becomes, over time, an explicit assent to He who is Ultimate Beauty. 

Awe-Inspiring

There are three times I can remember being overcome with awe and wonder. The first time, I was about eight years old, when my aunt took me to Niagara Falls. The intense power of the water pouring over the falls left such an emotional impression on me that I can almost feel it 50 years later. The second time was in Rome, at St. Peter’s Cathedral.  I had been chosen to do a brief lecture for the group I was with, but when I walked inside the Cathedral for the first time—the size of it, the beauty of it, the significance of it—I was rendered speechless.

The third time was last week, when my wife and I traveled to see the Grand Canyon for the first time. I’d seen a lot of pictures, watched a number of T.V. shows, heard many people talk about it. But walking to the edge of the “rim,” and looking outward at the vast expanse, stopped me in my tracks. Perhaps it was the three dimensional perspective that no book or description can convey, perhaps it was the sheer beauty of the cliffs and rocks, or maybe it was the vertigo I felt as I looked straight down, almost a mile below, but I was overwhelmed with awe in a way that’s only happened to me twice before. 

My take-away from these three very different but  similar experiences is the same: It’s almost impossible, confronted with absolute beauty of such magnitude, to be an atheist.  

“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the skies proclaim the work of his hands,” says the Psalmist (Psalm 19:1). 

Amen!