O Beauty Itself!
[“(God) brought things into being in order that (God’s) goodness might be communicated to creatures, and be represented by them; and because (God’s) goodness could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, (God) produced many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another. For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided and hence the whole universe together participates in the divine goodness more perfectly, and represents it better than any single creature whatever” (Thomas Aquinas, OP [1225-74], Summa Theologiae, I, q.47, EA).]
O Lover,
Like Thomas I have pondered this question: why are there so many things? Why trillions of stars? Why estimates of the number of living plant and animal species ranging into eight figures? Why more than eight billion humans presently live on Earth? If You are one, O Lover, why not a single perfect exemplar of star, flora, fauna, and human to communicate and represent You? Again, why are there so many things?
I paraphrase the Doctor Angélicus response to his own query thus: insofar as You create things to communicate Your loving and lavish largesse; and since no one creature can do this adequately; and since a tsunami of omnidiversity—innumerable, differentiated, varied—can in the aggregate convey this message a little less inadequately; You create(d) promiscuously, plethorically, with abandon, so as to share less inadequately with creatures Your very Self-outpouring (kenósis [Phil 2:7]). In short, the plentitude, differentiation, and variedness are all Your amour-talk to us of the finite portals.
Thomas’s response was just below the surface of my consciousness Sunday last before and during Mass in the Basilica of Your Sacred Heart. More specifically, I was being enveloped by the multiple expressions of beauty surrounding me: autumnal slants of sunlight entering via the variegated clerestory windows and igniting all below; depictions of the “cloud of witnesses” (Heb 12:1) between those windows and in both the vaulting and the dome; corporate prayers, given wings by the incense, leaving olfactory traces in our nostrils; the liturgical choir’s singing of Maurice Duruflé’s Ubi Caritas et Amour; both the intro (prelude) and outro (postlude) of the Mass, performed on the grand Fritts organ for which I always come early and stay late; Your imágo-bearers, each inimitable in hue, narrative and preciousness, beggars all climbing the aisle to where there is bread; You via Your Anointed One entering tactile and gustatory portals and Self-incorporating into us; the pageantry of liturgy at its best ever escorting beyond rather than eliciting attention. Indeed, Your Incarnátio “plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his,” in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Yes, in my pew the query was narrowing, its mode shifting from interrogative to exclamatory and rhetorical: why are there so many BEAUTIFUL things!
Awareness of being awash in beauty, whether unmediatedly from Your hand or via our co-creatorship with You, is a splendiferous experience, especially when all five portals are complementarily engaged. But there is much more, for beauty invariably slips the bonds of sense and intellect segueing into its translucent depth, the playground of a trans-perception the Vedantic tradition images as the “third eye.” And this polyphony of beauty is seemingly intrinsic to be-ing as such, emanating as it does from You its Grunt (“Ground”). How is it that this is so? How astonishing, how inexorable, how nurturing and transformative to the core of human life! Across the entire arc of my life, admittedly with varying degrees of attentiveness, I have marveled, drop-jawed, that it is so, this long before the Eucharist initiated me into pan-sacramentality. Thus while I respect my plain Mennonite origins (and that of unprogrammed Quaker kin), I often enter the Basilica eager for the sensorium’s polyphony resounding there.
But I must confess, O Lover, that such pan-beauty challenges me in varied ways. On the one hand, my apophatic and iconoclastic sides find much popular religious aesthetics to be distracting, busy, sentimental, even kitschy, and I’m quite capable of responding snootily. On the other hand, I can readily get stuck on beauty’s surface sheen as terminus. Granted, beauty invites me to give myself to it attentively and authentically, whether the context be cathedral, concert hall, vista, or human intimacy. But to absolutize the objects, personages, and experiences of beauty, and to do so to the neglect of its translucent depth in You, this can be the antechamber to idolatry. The author of Wisdom in the Apocrypha is quite aware of this hazard: “[F]rom the greatness and the beauty of created things their original author, by analogy, is seen. . . .[However, some] search busily among [Your] works, but are distracted by what they see, because the things seen are fair” (13:5,7, EA). Very fair! There is indeed a teasing, seducing, almost baiting quality to that “fairness” which enthralls and solicits our attention and passion at all levels. But to enlarge the musical metaphor, our central human thirst is for the opera, not merely one of its overtures however they may dazzle.
I delight in being part of the Christ tradition in which You, O Lover, are Beauty Itself, both encompassing the reach of sense and intellect, and ever coursing out beyond into precincts of the Ineffable.
