Beauty in the Catholic Tradition

ladies and gentlemen it is my pleasure to invite to the stage Bishop Robert Barron [Applause] thank you all [Applause] thank you thank you thank you everybody well we fill the room didn't we pretty good pretty good no congratulations to all the um organized this great event you know we started it last year and it was it was very successful but now even more so this year so I love the fact that we're building momentum it's just good for us Catholics to get together it lifts us up [Applause] and I'm especially glad that we have this topic that we have for the conference namely Beauty uh most of my life you know I've been focused on the word as a student as a teacher as a writer as an evangelist a lot of my life's been about the spoken word the written word and the Catholic tradition reverences the word obviously the word of God and the words of all the great thinkers and Poets and theologians and all of that but we also have reverenced the beautiful and the Beautiful is a means of evangelization I think it's very important that we claim that part of our tradition I've railed against as you know a dumbed down Catholicism I hate it because we're a smart religion and we dumbed ourselves down no one told us we had to do it but we did it and it's been a pastoral disaster but we also uglified our tradition we we dropped a lot of the beauty of our tradition and decided somehow that you know just uh flattening things out would be more appealing well on the contrary we should reclaim the beauty of our tradition so delighted that that's our topic for today can I start I think uh Devin is running the slides here I'd be hopeless I've tried to do this before I give a talk and there we go he's he knows how to do it I'm beginning with this figure depicted appropriately on an icon that's Saint John of Damascus also called Saint John damascine sometimes if you read Thomas Aquinas he cites him all the time very pivotal figure even though not all that well known born around the year 675 dies around the year 750 A.D so he spans the seventh and eighth centuries well-educated Syrian Monk most famous for his role in the iconoclast controversy maybe a little known but it's a very important moment in the history of the church the iconic class of course for those who wanted to break icons to destroy icons and they had a certain biblical warrant you know don't make Raven images and it was seen as quasi-idolatrous keep in mind too that right around the time of John of Damascus Islam is emerging and Islam has got a very sort of anti-imagry tradition so the iconoclass emerged but they were countered by the iconophiles Those Who Loved icons and John of Damascus was their best Advocate thank God he won because without John of Damascus there'd be no short Cathedral without John of Damascus there'd be no Sistine Chapel without John Damascus there be no San Chappelle there'd be no history of the visual within Catholicism mind you too move forward several centuries namely the 16th century the time of the Reformation you've got another outbreak of iconoclasm but you know a lot of people in this room myself included lived through a third which is a period right after the council when there was also a great destruction I think of the beauty of the church I don't know if you know the work of Malcolm Miller I think he's still alive but for decades he was the dean of of tour guides at shark Cathedral I used to take his tours all the time when I was a student in France but I heard him one time actually not in France but in Chicago he gave a talk and he said I reverence the principle Ecclesia semper Ray fromanda right the church must always be reformed and there's always you know corruption that needs to be addressed and all of that but he said the clearest sign that a reformed movement has gone bad is when people start destroying beautiful things and that's always stayed in my mind as dead right so I stand with the great Catholic tradition that goes back to John of Damascus that loves icons now what was John's argument it's very interesting very simple it was based on Saint Paul Paul refers to Jesus as the icon in his Greek the icon of the invisible God so yes God is beyond representation of course God's beyond anything that we could create to depict him of course he is however however in the Incarnation God made an icon of himself namely in the humanity of Jesus therefore it gives a warrant to Christian artists up and down the centuries to participate in this move as we continue the incarnational impulse it was a good argument in the 8th Century it's still a good argument if Christ is the icon of the invisible God we can continue making icons as well um I think uh I'm a little reluctant to put him up here but uh but Woody Allen there he is the reason I chose that picture um that's my favorite Woody Allen movie It's called Hannah and Her Sisters came out the year I was ordained 1986. and remember in this film uh Woody thinks he has a brain tumor but then he doesn't but it throws him into an existential crisis no great surprise in Woody Allen movies but then his character goes on this Quest To Find meaning and he goes to church after church and what that scene was was he he comes to a Catholic priest and says I I think I might want to become a Catholic and the priest says well what What attracted you to Catholicism and he said well first of all it's such a beautiful religion and I remember thinking even as I saw the movie 36 years ago hey that's right and B notice the Evangelical power of our Beauty so here in the movie is a religious seeker and he wasn't attracted by arguments first of all I wasn't attracted by the Liturgy first of all he was attracted by the beauty of our tradition I think it was right in his time it's still right if I go from Woody Allen to another great Jewish figure namely Cardinals DJ of Paris I wonder how many remember him um do you Jean Marie lustige he was the Archbishop of Paris in the 80s and 90s of the last century and he was the Archbishop when I was a student in Paris I'm especially Proud by the way that he signed my my doctoral diploma because he was the Archbishop during that time but Lucy J was a Jew his given name was Aaron and his parents died in the showa and during that awful period they sent this young kid to a Catholic Family to protect him during the Nazi period And while he's with this Catholic Family he began reading the Bible in its entirety Old Testament and New but what really moved him to convert to the Catholic faith was a journey to one of the gothic churches and this young Jewish kid walks into the uh it wasn't one of the better known Cathedrals but a Gothic Cathedral and it converted them now I mean he was a man of words in fact one of my favorite memories of my Parisian years was going on Sunday night at 6 30 to Notre Dame in Paris where Cardinal Lucy Jay a master of the French language would hold forth the French don't hesitate by the way to give you know 30-minute homilies well I didn't mind when he was preaching so my point there is he was a man of words but it was imagery it was Art it was beauty that moved him to conversion another figure here uh the great Paul Claudel the French playwright one of the greatest French playwrights of the 20th century Claudel like a lot of moderns it kind of wandered away from the faith of his youth into sort of a vague agnosticism but then one day he finds himself indeed in Notre Dame cathedral in Paris Vespers was being sung and he was looking up at the North Rose window and my judgment the finest Rose window in the world and at that moment his faith was awakened at that moment he came to believe was it words wasn't arguments it was beauty that converted him now look I'm uh no Lucy Jay I'm no Paul Claudel but I had a similar experience and I've written about it maybe you've read in some of the things I've written it happened to me June the 12th 1989. it was the day I arrived in Paris to commence my doctoral studies and um it might in some ways it was like the worst day of my life if you've been through the experience of leaving home and starting something new how how difficult that is but nothing's more difficult than leaving your country and leaving your own language behind and I was in this house the French was the only language spoken this is pre-sell phone all I had in my wallet was in a little piece of paper the address of the house and I got there I dropped my bags off I was I was hungry I was tired I was jet lagged but I knew where Notre Dame was from studying maps of Paris and so I just made my way down the the bull Mitchell and I came to the ild of the city and there was Notre Dame I entered I walked up the main aisle and I came to the transept and I turned left and that's what I saw that's the North Rose that converted Paul Claudel well I stood there roughly where he stood they have a marker on the ground there at Nostradamus roughly where he stood I didn't know Paul Claudel at the time never even knew the name but I stood there and we keep it up there uh there we go um I don't know 20 minutes half hour um despite the jet lag despite everything I stood there and stared at that window and no kidding I went back to that spot every single day this would be June I came home at Christmas time every single day I came to that spot and stared at that window what was going on well in the course of the talk I might be able to articulate some of it I didn't know at the time I just knew it had this sort of mesmeric impact on me now it wasn't conversion I was I was a young priest doing my doctoral studies but it affected some alchemy in me it did something to my mind and my heart and my soul that's the power of the beautiful and I want to in the course of this talk kind of explore that I mean one way to put it is is the extraordinary Harmony of that window was placing some kind of Harmony in me but we'll say much more about them I want to cut through to Pope Francis here next um when I was with the California Bishops on my ad limina visit right before covet hit we were all there and we spent three hours with him he just responds to any question you ask and in the course of that he said if you want to know the key to my pontificate it's evangeli gaudium right the joy of the Gospel his letter on evangelization and he told us this is the way when you're writing Church documents you think it's a combination of evangeli nunciondi of Paul VI and gaudium at spez hence the evangeli gaudium and he said that's the key to everything that I do and say is how to evangelize well in that document what do you find you find his stress on what he called the Via pulchritudinous the way of beauty now I'll say something about Von Balthazar who was a big influence on on the young uh bergoglio and so I think that's where he got the the stress on the beautiful I think one place you see it with Francis is he's a master of the beautiful gesture isn't he from the time he was elected we saw that his Outreach to you know the the deeply that profoundly deformed man is paying his own bill at the at the clergy hotel and and his public gestures I think reminiscent of John Paul II he had that gift too didn't he but the beautiful gesture the Beau jest as the friends say as a way of evangelization now here's the question as we continue this analysis so you say okay I get it jonath Damascus and the Beautiful and it seems to be part of our tradition and you know Paul Claudel and okay I get all that but isn't it a little bit vague and ephemeral to talk about the beautiful I mean isn't that kind of subjective Beauties in the eye of the beholder and you know who am I to tell you what's beautiful et cetera Etc can we get a more substantive sense of it and here I do want to draw attention to Hans rizvan baltazar um the favorite Theologian of both John Paul II and Benedict XVI there he is with the two of them that's good um Army de lubach who is no slouch himself in this regard referred to baltzar as the most cultivated man in Europe at pretty High Praise looking across all of European culture he thought balzar was the most cultivated person well you know bolts are let me lay a little philosophy on you um Emmanuel Kant the great German philosopher articulated the move from the um the the true to the good to the Beautiful the critique and pure reason the critique and practical reason the critique of judgment he took the three transcendentals so-called in that order from the true to the good to the beautiful boltas are very consciously turned that around so he writes his hairless kite it means the glory of the Lord his first move was the Beautiful his second move he calls it the Theo dramatique that's the good that's how does finite Freedom relate to infinite freedom and then finally his third volume is called deol logic which means theologic the true he moved from the beautiful to the good to the true now you say okay that's a little bit of you know philosophical Arcana but I think it's very important in our culture today in our post-modern culture a lot of people are uneasy with claims of Truth aren't they truth you know your truth my truth but there's no real truth don't lay your you know truth on me who are you to tell me what to think even more so we talk about the good here's how you should behave well come on don't lay your value trip on me that's just a power move on your part people are very suspicious of the true and the good I think baltazar's Instinct was especially in our world today beginning with the beautiful is less threatening to people fewer hackles go up when you start with the beautiful because all you have to do is say look just look at this thing show someone the North Rose window bring them into shark Cathedral show them Dante's Divine Comedy just look at is that a better way perhaps to evangelize to begin with the beautiful and then to move toward the good and the true um I know a lot of detroiters here right as you probably know I've got a strong Detroit connection as a little kid I lived in in Birmingham and Troy and um my first baseball team was the Tigers and I was there for the 1968 World Series right so that's the first baseball team that I really have in my mind and um the first game that my father took me and my brother who's here there he is uh the first game he took me to was in 1967 at the old Tiger Stadium some detroiters remember that the old Tiger Stadium and I was what I was seven years old and um it's a long time ago but I remember it vividly coming up out of the kind of bowels of the stadium and then you suddenly see the bright green it was a night game so the lights the bright green field and the tigers with the white white uniforms and I I don't remember the tales of the game but I remember the experience of the game well I started playing little league right after that it was the beauty of that experience it was the beauty of the game that led me to want to play the game I moved from the beautiful to the good and then I played baseball for many years I was pretty good as a kid I played for many years and having played I then came to understand baseball from the inside right I understood the rules and why they existed Etc from the beautiful to the good to the true if you're teaching a kid baseball I would suggest that's not a bad way to do it what wouldn't you do if you're teaching a kid baseball brand new never played before all right let's begin with the infield fly rule well no I mean baseball people know the infield fly rule is cool is I'm glad there is an infield fly rule makes perfect sense you know um but you start with that you'd start with look at the look at the field you maybe would show them a professional game look at how that guy runs look at how he made that catch look at how that that hitter gets the full extension through the ball and show them the game and then chances are they're going to want to play the game and then having played for a while they're going to understand the truth of it from the inside well can I suggest you that might be a good way to think about evangelization if we're evangelizing how shouldn't we begin with rules rules are great I mean precious things in life we surround by rules that's a basic thing if something is is worth nothing to us we have no rules about it can I pick up that rock in the alley well yeah who cares there's no rule about that but you know can I take the Mona Lisa off the wall please and bring it home well no if something is precious to us we surround it with rules right so I get it but beginning with how Splendid something is and then drawing someone into the playing of the game then they get the truth the rules from the inside so that's I think might be a path evangelically I'll give you one more example I think we got some pictures from uh brideshead Revisited which is I think um there we go I think the greatest Catholic novel of the 20th century and I remember watching it as a as a young guy that wonderful PBS series with there's the young with the Jeremy Irons right on the right playing Charles Ryder but Lawrence Olivier is in that and John gilgood of the cream of and Claire Bloom these great Shakespearean actors are in it and it's a beautiful representation of of the novel so get it uh revisit Brides had Revisited maybe but it better yet read the book but the reason I bring it up is is bride's head the manor house you can see there uh evil and War the the Catholic author of this novel I think wants us to see that as the church so bride's had the sense of the church as as the Virgin bride of Christ uh Christ whose head of his bride the church all of that so bride's head is the church what first attracts Charles there on the right Charles is a cool agnostic as The Story begins like a lot of people today what first attracts him is the beauty of bridesho so he's an artist he's a painter and he goes into that manor house and he's just overwhelmed by the architectural Beauty by the paintings within it it's overwhelming to him been in the course of the novel it was a complex story but in the course of the novel he begins to feel the moral demand that's coming from living in that house and then finally at the very end of the story he comes to appreciate the truth that's embodied within the house it's the journey into the church beginning with the beautiful leading to the good and finally coming to the truth fix that same bolt as our Rhythm that the reversal of our usual Instinct beginning with truth or with rules maybe begin with the Winsome attractiveness the Splendor of the church as a way in there's a there's a I want to quote this lovely uh line at one point um Charles is at the house and and Sebastian his friend who's a practicing Catholic comes back from Mass and Charles begins to ask him some Curious questions about religion and and um Sebastian's like oh come on don't bore me he doesn't want to talk about it but Charles keeps pressing him and and um Sebastian says how how lovely the story of Christmas is and Charles says well you can't believe something just because it's a lovely idea and Sebastian says but but I do that's how I believe and it's sort of a tossed off line in the story it was a very telling that's how I believe I'm drawn into the truth through the Beautiful okay so you're still with me and you're saying all right all right I get that but I'm still struggling with what does it mean to call Something Beautiful is there something objective about it or are we just still in kind of a subjective uh Realm well can I draw attention here to um Dietrich Von Hildebrand who's one of the great that's that's the very young Von Hildebrand um one of the great Catholic philosophers of the 20th century both John Paul II and Benedict XVI were deeply enamored of his uh thought and he makes a distinction that by the way Hildebrand to his infinite credit was one of Hitler's number one enemies so he was writing a journal editing a journal in Austria during the 30s and was a fiercely anti-nazi one of the people that saw very early on that there was something seriously the matter with Hitler and Nazism so he was so outspoken that Hitler was had him like on his on his enemies list number one and Von Hildebrand barely got out of the country after the Angelus and all that uh barely got out of the country eventually ended up here and taught at Fordham in New York I had the great privilege I never of course met him he died in the 70s but I met a couple of his students who were deeply impacted by him and then had an impact on me but here's a distinction he makes it's very simple but it's helpful it's telling between what he calls the merely subjectively satisfying and the objectively valuable let me let that just sink in so the merely subjectively satisfying and the objectively valuable so what's that his his example he uses a lot is a baseless compliment is merely subjectively satisfying so someone gives pays you a compliment but you know it's false you know that you don't deserve that compliment it's subjectively satisfying it might flatter you but it has no objective value um mine is is I'm a big fan of spaghetti and meatballs I have the The Culinary Taste of an eight-year-old basically uh it's really true people that you studied in France you know yeah I know I know I never liked French food that much um but anyway but I would never I find it subjectively satisfying that's my point I find spaghetti meatballs subjectively satisfying it would never occur to me in a million years to become an evangelist for spaghetti and meatballs like I I want all of you to be of course not I I realize that's a subjective matter of my private taste right but the objectively valuable and I trust now as I start describing this you'll know what I'm talking about when something's objectively valuable it's not received by your subjectivity or corralled by your subjective uh expectations rather it breaks through it shatters your receptivity it rearranges your subjectivity it makes you think about the world in a different way you're not corralling it it's corralling you you know what I'm talking about um I don't have a picture of her but one of the this one of my heroes Iris murdick the wonderful Irish novelist and and philosopher he talked about the objectivity of the French language and and I get this having studied languages you know you're studying a language and you're just struggling with it like it doesn't make it and so I can't get my mind around that or why do they say it that way and I remember I had a professor years ago and I said well that's just not logical you say it's it's French it's French is not there to please you that's the point it's there in all of its objective integrity and beauty and it's meant to rearrange you um my secretary in Santa Barbara a good friend Sylvia Morgan and Sylvia's from Argentina and uh so she was also a Spanish tutor for me and anyone that's well there's Spanish speakers here but people have studied Spanish the Ser estar distinction is deeply annoying to anglophones you know I mean that's the verb to be but there are two ways to do it in Spanish and it's like massively confusing which one you should use and so regularly with Sylvia I would complain about that I say for Pete's sake why can't the king of Spain just come get a little committee together and say we're going to have it there or a star it's one of the two and she'd always give me this look like when are you gonna grow up you know and look it's the Spanish language pale it's not there to satisfy you there's something objectively integral about it or like if you you will hear from Liz love about the Sistine Chapel if you walked in the city Chapel looked up and you said yeah I don't like it well see that's exactly the right reaction because you're treating it as something that's either subjectively satisfying or not yeah I'm not really into that well see that's a judgment on you not on the Sistine ceiling right best telling you that your subjectivity is off-kilter or you listen to Beethoven's seventh Symphony to go like yeah it's all right well I've that's just completely inappropriate the the objectively valuable changes you now my example to go um from uh from the Sistine Chapel and Beethoven to my rock and roll hero Bob Dylan do we have Bob Dylan coming up yeah now I'm from his state by the way it's home state of Minnesota uh uh I visited Hibbing his hometown a couple months ago the Minnesota people God bless you anyway um Rolling Stone magazine which I've been reading since I was 18. it's in Decline now I'll tell you the truth it used to be much better but uh they had a cover story many years ago and it was what's the first song that rocked your world and they asked a group of rock stars themselves name the first song that rocked your world and it was a good question and I got it right away what that meant they did not ask what's the first song you liked what's the first song that that rocked you that changed you well see I knew exactly how I would answer that because the first song I remember liking was Sugar Sugar by The Arches do you remember some these are the old folks like me remember you know sugar sugar is a really catchy song and if it comes on the radio today I turn the radio up and listen to it I like that song but it didn't rock my world you know I was it's a silly little ditty um but the first song that rocked my world was Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone that I listened to for the first time probably when I was in college and I listened to it over and over and over again and it's in one way a simple song maybe four or five chords it doesn't have a bridge it's not like that complicated song but it's it's a song that rearranged my Consciousness it rearranged my thinking it made me look at life in a different way do you know Patty Smith of The Rocker had a very simple experience with that same song she said she was in college I don't know what age she was but she heard it for the first time and she said she pulled over to the side of the road got out of the car sat on the curb and just tried to take it in was it sugar sugar won't do that to you but but a song like Like a Rolling Stone will do that to you see and that's fun hildebrand's distinction I think between the subjectively satisfying and the objectively valuable can I suggest to you that the truly beautiful is like that see it's not it's not superficial decoration oh what isn't that nice what a nice song or what a pretty picture or oh look at no no the truly beautiful knocks you down baltzar says it it elects you first it stops you you know we talk about aesthetic arrest that's Patty Smith by the way getting out of the car and just sitting on the curb that was aesthetic arrest you're stopped by the beautiful but then Baltimore says it it elects you it chooses you and then it sends you like what I'm doing right now many many many years later I'm telling you about this experience of hearing that song I was arrested I was elected I was set on Mission that should start sounding familiar now with the one we think is the most beautiful imaginable right but we'll get there okay let's go now provide Balthazar to Von Hildebrand now to my intellectual hero St Thomas Aquinas who says some very interesting things about the Beautiful his first is is um there he is um quadvisor in his very pithy Latin the beautiful is quadvisum plachette that which having been seen pleases cool to cool definition you know pithy that which having been seen pleases think of me at the at the North Rose window Paul Claudel with the same window that which having been seen pleases but now what are you seeing what's the Visa and his famous answer you see it up there in his Latin and the English the beautiful occurs Thomas says at the intersection of integritas consonancia and claritas and I'm rendering them that's James Joyce's rendering by the way wholeness Harmony and Radiance when those three things come together we say Ah that's beautiful so integritas means wholeness that it hangs together as one do you know when something's kind of at war with itself whether it's a it's a painting or it's a it's a golf swing why do we also we also bad golf swings you can tell in an instant when it's an amateur swing in an instant you can tell because it's at war with itself it's not about one thing by the way Kierkegaard the philosopher said a saint is someone whose life is about one thing it's a one wonderful definition it has Integrity tasks it holds together secondly Khan sonancia that means all the elements that make it up are harmonious Khan sonari to sound with think of our Sistine Chapel choir today when you hear those many voices continue the many voices blending clearly into one song into one that had Integrity toss that had consonancia right um again think of a golf swing all the elements that make it up and when you see like a Rory McIlroy or something like that swing it's gorgeous to watch if if you're a golfer you're admiring oh boy hit that thing a mile but but the aesthetic quality when it like a slow motion of a golf swing there's hardly anything in sports more beautiful than a really well executed harmonious golf swing it's got integrity consonancia and then the final one claritas in some texts of Aquinas indeed he says claritas refers to brightness of color uh and that's true I think when something's really colorful and bright it catches our eye and we we find it pleasing but you know if that's the case then most of Rembrandt's paintings wouldn't be beautiful right the things that are somber in color so what Thomas usually means by claritas is not bright color what he means is the radiance of form it's when the form of something becomes radiant when you say like ah not that's a golf swing you know that's that's what it's supposed to look like that's it it becomes radiant it shines when those three things come together you have the Beautiful now I'm going to give another kind of silly example here um do you remember the um do we have it there we go um do you remember John Madden the commentator he just died didn't he John Madden or is he still anyway for years and years John Madden you know he used to be the coach of the of the Oakland Raiders right and then he becomes a really popular uh football announcer and Madden loved the tough down in the trenches players he didn't like the fancy schmancy wide receivers and quarterbacks he liked the down on the in the you know front lines the trenches and so I was watching the game one time with him and uh the the play had ended the camera was kind of scanning the sidelines and it caught not this very guy but a guy liked that they caught this guy and he was standing like this and he had the black stuff under his eyes and his jersey was ripped and his hair is all sweaty and and he's standing like this and man goes ah there's a beauty you know and I remember thinking he I doubt had read a lot of Thomas Aquinas but uh but you got it is what he he saw in that player integritas like he was a he was about one thing that he was he was about one thing and then he looked at all the elements that made him up and found them harmonious and then the form became radiant to him like yeah that's it that's what a football player ought to look like um you know like this occurred to me uh with Father Paul Murray here from the north of Ireland and again with golf in mind any golf fans watched David Feherty the commentator from Northern Ireland everything he says goes up at the end you know and um he was this is a few years ago he was commenting on a game and and Craig Stadler do you remember that name called The Walrus right because he's a big heavy guy and he had stringy hair and his big big kind of walrus mustache and you know not some of you say is like a classic you know Beauty but he's he's striding across the green and David Faraday goes uh he's a thing of beauty yeah I think he was just uh playing ironically on Integrity to us councilmania and Clarita um see I think here to everybody you know oh beauty is subjective no it's not it's as objective as the true and the good you know if we're tempted to say oh all all value moral values just relative no it's not the whole society falls apart If We Hold that or you say as people today sadly are saying all truth is relative and culturally determined and just plays a power well God help us God help us and we can't say anything true anymore so just as the true and the good are objective so is the beautiful objective and God help us the Catholic church right now in the western world is one of the last great Defenders I think of the objectivity of the true and the good and the Beautiful so [Applause] don't let them bully us I mean there's a bullying going on in the culture big time and they're they're they're completely caught on the horns of a dilemma because the minute you say hey there is no objective truth will you actively true don't you you know so the whole thing is is ridiculous and we should stand with our great tradition okay let's do a couple more things with you so now we've been trying to fill out the picture of what makes the beautiful beautiful but now I want to make this move toward um the link between the particular beautiful thing and the source of beauty topping point is with Plato and this marvelous dialogue the Symposium which we probably all read in philosophy 101 uh this this dialogue and the nature of love but the most famous speech in it is um given by a woman named diotima and she's talking about the progress by which we move from our appreciation of the particular beautiful toward the source of beauty itself and I'm just going to read you some passages from her famous speech just to give the idea he says first of all if his teacher instructs him as he should he he here is like a student is a somebody's trying to train he will fall in love with the beauty of one individual body so it's someone falling in love with the beauty of one individual body but then next he must consider how nearly related the beauty of any one body is to the beauty of any other and then he must grasp that the beauties of the body are as nothing compared to the beauties of the Soul so now we move from one level of beauty to another and from this he'll be led to contemplate the beauty of laws and institutions so now we go beyond the human realm into this more abstract form of beauty next his attention should be diverted from institutions to The Sciences so that he may know the beauty of every kind of knowledge here's that moment when you know it's wonderful you when you begin to understand philosophy and history and science and the beauty of these disciplines opens up to you and finally turning his eye toward the Open Sea of beauty he will find in such contemplation the seed of the most fruitful discourse and the loftiest thought so I'll just give you a couple little passes there from the diotima speech but look how it moves from a very particular beautiful thing then to ever wider Horizons of the beautiful until now watch this metaphor because it's going to be repeated a lot in the tradition turning his eyes toward the Open Sea of beauty that means the infinite source of the beautiful itself did this speech have an impact on the western tradition yeah time and I'm going to give you just two famous examples of it this platonic move has mimicked many centuries later by the great Dante I mean with Aquinas probably the great Mastermind of our tradition you know Dante even though it's a little bit you know foggy how much is true and how much is is a poetic collaboration but it seems pretty clear that when he was a very young kid he spied this girl just a year younger than he um named Beatrice and he was immediately absolutely completely in love with her nine years went by without his really seeing or speaking to her and then he has that famous experience crossing the Arnold um in Florence he spies Beatrice and this time she gazes at him and even exchanges a few words with him but it's enough utterly to change his life her beauty was such that he began living a new life and he writes this famous poem called La Vita Nueva the new life that was opened up to him by this beautiful girl and at the conclusion of that he says I will write a poem to her more beautiful than any poem ever written well by God he did is called The Divine Comedy in which he plays a key role Beatrice right which is what to lead him finally to the vision of God well we go right from the dotema speech of Plato right to Dante and as a straight lion is this particular beautiful who leads him by Steady steps to the beautiful itself the source of beauty I'll give you one more example uh now fast forward almost to our own time the great James Joyce um what can you say about James Joyce it hasn't been said but um a Catholic in many ways to his bones even though he repudiates the church and and announces his hostility to it but I don't think you can read anything of Joyce without seeing Catholicism all over the place but one of the most famous examples is in his portrait of the Artist as a Young Man his autobiographical novel when he was like around that age um it's about many things that book but there's a famous uh scene and it reflects a real event in Joyce's life when he actually saw the woman who'd become his wife for the first time but in light of everything I've been telling you and I'm going to close this don't get don't worry I don't go out much longer um in light of everything I've been saying see what's going on here so Joyce is walking on the Strand he always calls it the beach at Dublin and he's he's struggling you know with what to do with his life and what's it all about and he thought he might want to be a priest but now that's over and and he's wondering what to do and then suddenly this a girl stood before him in Midstream alone and still gazing out to sea ah Joyce who read everything right right away were thinking the Dio team of speech is turning toward the Open Sea of the beautiful itself so a girl stood before him alone and still gazing out the sea like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird her long slender legs were delicate as the cranes and pure saved were an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh her her slate blue skirts were Kilted boldly about her waist and dovetail behind her her bosom was as a bird soft and slight slight and soft as the breast of some dark plumage Dove but her long Fair hair was girlish and girlish and touched with the Wonder of mortal Beauty her face well now notice something here and and Joyce is very clear about this earlier in the book he's a student of Scholastic philosophy and he had spent time in this very book explaining integrita's consonancia and claritas to one of his friends but what do you see a girl stood before a Midstream alone and still gazing out to sea integritas he's isolated her he's seen her as whole and what I've read to you is a little bit of the passage is the consonancia of all the elements that make up this this beautiful girl than this she was alone and still gazing out to sea so again lest we missed the deotima he says it again and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze without shame or wantonness this is beautiful it's very much like a Von Hildebrand Joyce distinguishes between the pornographic gays which is a gays that wants to possess it's the Gaze that wants subjective satisfaction as opposed to this gaze which is a worshipful gaze it doesn't want to dominate the one that's seen but it is drawn by the power of what's seen into something uh greater that's exactly this distinction the first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence low and faint and Whispering faint as the Bellows of sleep hither and thither hither and thither and a faint flame trembled on her cheek and then here's how the passage ends o Heavenly God cried Stephen's soul in an outburst of joy was he that's how it works isn't it is the beautiful particular leads by Steady steps if we allow its power to work on us to the very source of Beauty in Joyce's example here o Heavenly God in a burst of of joy from Dio teamo through Dante to James Joyce it's the same move I would argue that's a deeply Catholic instinct that the particular beautiful window or Cathedral or ceiling or painting or sculpture can lead us to this moment oh Heavenly God hey Demi can we just go and I'll close with this to the Rose window again I want to just meditate a bit more on that can we get the North Rose up there again at the very center of the Rose this is true of all the great roses is always Christ so you see it's his mother it's Notre Dame Cathedral after all but on her lap is the Christ child Christ is the center and then the window is organized in ordered harmonies around that Center and then all of it connected by spokes to the center well can we show the big picture again Devin to get the whole thing there we go you see how how the harmonic Arrangement is such that all the parts relate to every other part and all of them are drawn toward the center can you see and by the way this is B is right when Thomas Aquinas is in Paris writing about integrity test Council announcing claritas I can't help but there's no better of exemplification of it the window is one right it hangs together as one it has integritas wholeness and then the consonancia of the parts and then if you want claritas Radiance the light pouring through that window the Splendor of form it's all there but see what that's meant to be is a picture of the well-ordered Soul if Christ is the center of your life then all the elements that make you up will tend to find their place harmoniously around that Center so think of the French call those Medallion medallions each of the things um think of all those as representative of parts of your life it's your private life your public life your emotions your intellect your friendships everything are they all connected to Christ then they will tend to fall into harmonic relationship around him here's something else that you might not be able to see too clearly but right around the central window there are eight little circles you see them now go the next row out it's twice 8 16. next row out it's twice 16 32 and then another row of 32. add together 32 32 16 and 8 and you will get I will tell you 88 . so the the North Rose is a meditation on the number eight which stands for eternity because it stands outside the seven which is the completed cycle of time the seven days of the week that's why we speak of the Octave of Christmas or the Octave of Easter right the Eternal Dimension and then the spinning of the wheel the circle is evocative of a perfect shape therefore it's it's a meditation on what your soul should look like if it's centered on Christ it'll be as beautiful as that and it's also in anticipation of the oh Heavenly God how that beautiful thing leads you by Steady steps to the very source of the beautiful that we'll look at Forever in eternity isn't that wonderful by the way that the beatific vision is offered to us as the image of Heaven it's looking at something quadvisum plotchet that which having been seen pleases beautiful things here below ultimately are anticipations of the beauty we'll see forever in heaven and that's why it matters so much in our Catholic tradition blessings everybody thanks for listening tonight [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

Views: 169,249

Keywords: bishop barron, bishop robert barron, word on fire, word on fire catholic ministries, bishop barron's word on fire, good news conference, corporate travel, good news conference 2022, what is beauty, beauty in the arts, morality, good news, catholic speaker, catholic talk, catholic conference, talk on christian morals, speech on christian morals, catholic, tradition of beauty, catholic tradition, beauty, the way of beauty, the transcendentals, beauty goodness truth

Id: gbfWTlPt8mU

Length: 52min 38sec (3158 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 28 2023