The revealed, the beautiful, and the community
The beauty in Christ can be considered most significant through his crucifixion. He sacrificed himself for us. He simultaneously revealed himself as flesh and blood so that we may believe in him through our wonder and senses, and follow his beautiful example to help and to love those in our community so that we may save them.
Divine revelation can occur through art, which is rich in beauty. Someone, touched by God in a particular way, cannot explicitly define “the mystery of God”.¹ But, as an artist, she can express her own wonder in her art. That art will, in turn, “engender wonder” and beauty, and serve as “witness to [her] state of wonder”.² In the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe coming to Juan Diego, beauty also brought divine revelation. The “music, the singing of the birds, […and] the roses” are symbols of beauty that made the Lady’s self-identification as Mary believable to him.³
More than anything else, the image of Jesus’ crucifixion — his sacrifice for us — demonstrates the infinite love God has for humans. This divine love is beyond our understanding. This compels us to “simple discipleship”, which still overwhelms us, but “at a deeper level”.⁴ In images of Christ, “God’s greatest work of art”,⁵ I see beauty in its fullest as he suffers and bleeds in love for all of humanity.⁶ This act of giving himself is how God is revealed to us as the “eternal two-and-one”, and as the expression of both the “perfect creature” and the “Son of Man’s humiliation”.⁷ But the revelation and beauty lies in the materiality, the flesh and blood, of Christ. There is nothing abstract here, as it must be concrete for it to resonate with us.
The beauty of Christ lies both in his perfect image and in his humiliation by God’s will. Because of this, our sense of the beautiful is changed by the crucified Christ, through the flesh and blood. This materiality is necessary for our revelation; we cannot contemplate beauty as a form of escapism from the material world. We experience the beauty of Christ through our senses “that perceive God’s humility sensually” and can receive the word made flesh.⁸
Similarly, beauty is present in the popular religious practices of those who (like Christ) suffer. The poor, marginalized like Christ, have a beautiful, greater understanding of life as an end in itself, not bogged down by materialistic ends. They trust in Him: “it is among the poor, in parishes like San Fernando, that one will find the most vibrant and vital communities of celebration and worship”.⁹ The poor are beautiful because their lives have intrinsic value and they remain devoted both to their everyday struggles and to their love of God.
The senses recognize the beauty of the Christian life through faith — not through extraordinary events, but rather through the everyday and mundane. Christ brings together all images under himself to be perceived with our senses, so these images (albeit mundane) carry powerful meaning.
Our senses are attuned in a number of ways. Images are shaped christologically. All of our sensations are attuned towards Christ,¹⁰ because everyone is to know Christ as “wholly real and corporeal sense-experiences bring him into contact with that central point”.¹¹
Christ is also made manifest through the Church as a “community of faith” both as we gather in worship and as a “historical reality”.¹² Our Lady of Guadalupe’s appearance before Juan Diego attuned our senses through the beautiful imagery of natives and God’s humility. Liturgy is a further manifestation of Christ. In church, incense, to be smelled, and candles, whose light is to be seen, carry Christ’s beauty that we must perceive.
Our senses are also attuned for the beauty of Christ through the neighbor. She, hungry and in need, compels us to encounter Christ as we offer love and help.¹³ Lastly, our own senses must be rejected as we attune ourselves to God’s love and realize we cannot see, with our eyes, anything else but God in flesh and blood.¹⁴
As we see Christ manifest through our neighbor, we as a community become beautiful through interpersonal love. Beauty should not be grounded in the aesthete and cult of the pretty. It must consider ethics and the interpersonal so we follow in Christ’s image and help those in need. The community must redefine human action as praxis, through “interpersonal action”, and this will strengthen the “relationality between God and the world”.¹⁵ God’s love for us is beautiful, and our love for others propagates that beauty throughout the community. Love for others implies the desire to make their lives better. As such, a beautiful community, driven by love of God and others, will save the world.
Wonder also plays a role in the beautiful community. Events of evil can spark feelings of asombro, or radically ambiguous wonder. This is beautiful because it awakens us to action and calls on us to love. Christ as crucified inspires asombro: “Christ on the cross is the ultimate expression of this most frightening — and because of its redemptive character, also most beautiful — encounter”.¹⁶ We love Christ, and see pain and wonder in his suffering. We share in this wonder continually as we love those suffering in our community. We are fueled to then “face the difficult questions [brought up by wonder in evil], and answer these in ways that give us life”.¹⁷ In loving our neighbors and relieving them of suffering, our community becomes beautiful.
Cited Works:
[1] Cecilia González-Andrieu, Bridge to Wonder: Art as a Gospel of Beauty (Baylor University Press, 2012), 26.
[2] González-Andrieu, 26.
[3] Roberto Goizueta, Caminemos con Jesús: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment (Orbis Books, 1995), 106.
[4] Hans urs von Balthasar, Explorations in Theology, Volume I: The Word Made Flesh (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 115.
[5] Balthasar, Explorations in Theology, 117.
[6] Tim O’Malley, PhD, January 7, 2021 lecture: “-”.
[7] Balthasar, Explorations in Theology, 117.
[8] Hans urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 406.
[9] Goizueta, 131.
[10] Tim O’Malley, PhD, January 7, 2021 lecture: “-”.
[11] Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, 420.
[12] Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, 420.
[13] Tim O’Malley, PhD, January 7, 2021 lecture: “-”.
[14] Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, 425.
[15] Goizueta, 105.
[16] González-Andrieu, 37.
[17] González-Andrieu, 37.
