Balthasar on Beauty

In framing my talks on “Beauty” for this year’s conference season, I’ve profited from the wise and provocative words of the Swiss theologian Hans Ur von Balthasar (1905-1988). Balthasar wrote copiously about beauty in his bountiful output, including a massive seven-part work known as The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics (Die Herrlichkeit Gottes). The first volume of this work overflows with quotes that I’m grateful to have discovered, starting with this one:

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. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and be banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.

Take a minute to let that sink in. Wow, yes? Well, Balthasar says it even more strongly. In fact, this is the sentence that initially shook me to the core:

We can be sure that whoever sneers at [Beauty’s] name as if she 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.

three-pillars
Three Pillars, Amritamitraghosh (CC BY-SA 3.0)

When presenting such quotes about Beauty in a talk, I hear a palpable sigh in the room. We all feel the problem. Despite our society’s dismissive attitude towards Beauty, we suffer from its absence. Helplessly, we watch our modern world confuse Beauty with fashion or a grooming concept. Or, we mistakenly decide it refers primarily to a bygone era when people had time for such frills or elegance. In the world of iPhones and telecommuting, we find Beauty impractical.

But what if Balthasar is correct? What if Beauty, when devalued and discarded, affects the potency of those other two spiritual qualities of Truth and Goodness—qualities to which we in Judeo-Christian culture have long aspired?

Truth, Goodness, and Beauty have long been known in philosophy as the Three Transcendentals. They establish the spiritual and moral quality of our lives in ways both practical and transcendental. When pursued and cherished, they ensure spiritual strength and discernment. They guide a person through the challenges of this murky world. Using biblical language, they restore our souls.

Yet, too many modern folk seem convinced that only the first two—Truth and Goodness—are worth trying to teach and attain. Even that can be pretty difficult, yes? Beauty is just . . . well . . . an expendable afterthought that doesn’t seem equally important upon first glance. After all, what does Beauty really do?

Here’s what it does: When the third leg (Beauty) of that three-legged stool of virtues is weakened or chopped off, the stool falters and collapses. Truth and Goodness, no matter how strong, cannot hold Western Culture up without Beauty. Our lives, both individual and corporate, cannot function as we intend without Beauty. If Balthasar’s assessment is correct, our ability to love or pray is diminished or destroyed.

Strong words, yes? That’s why we need to read them. But what does it mean to restore Beauty? Does it mean we try to notice more pretty sunsets? Or stop to admire the decorative carving in an old staircase’s banister?

Well, noticing Beauty is an important part of the solution, but not the principal part. The main solution is to fight back. Yes. We’ve developed (individually and corporately) a passive, yet ingrained, acceptance of Beauty’s opposite. We can label Beauty’s absence many ways. I choose ugliness for lack of a better term in English but other words present themselves: crudeness, rudeness, disdain, garishness, hideousness . . . feel free to add your own nouns. In fact, the act of identifying and labeling these things gives us a good place to start as we teach ourselves and our children how to restore Beauty.

You may find that recovering our connection to Beauty is easier than you think. Why? Because it’s a guiding power given us by God. Yes, there are human steps we must take, but the energy and creativity required are freely given and divinely ordained. They flow outward as a continual inspiration, once we open the “font of every blessing” to do so.

Uh-oh. Once I start rolling out the old hymns (Come thou Font of Every Blessing, 1757), it’s probably time to stop for the day. But when I write again on this topic, I’ll share several steps that many have found helpful as we all work to glue that Beauty-leg back on and sit more solidly on the power the Three Transcendentals.