Can Beauty Save the World? Thomas Aquinas on Beauty and its Role in the Church

[Music] let me just say a little prayer the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus Holy Mary Mother of God pray for us sinners now at the so my name is father Thomas Joseph white and it's a great honor to be here at the Napa Institute and to talk to you all today about the topic can Beauty save the world Thomas Aquinas on beauty and evangelization I'm from Washington DC from the two mystic Institute their father Dominic lag who is here is the director of that Institute and we put on intellectual events of Catholic philosophy and theology primarily on secular campuses and I'm taking that project also now to the Angelica mat Rome so we're gonna as it were create a branch of the two mystic Institute's work in the Eternal City and so we're happy to talk to you it's sort of in a way that we talked to our students on campus about the perennial wisdom of the Catholic Church and the gift of Thomas Aquinas has thought which helps the lumen contemporary issues so the phrase can beauty save the world that short question is a riff on a phrase from dusty s keys book the idiot in which in which you hear this phrase which is posed to the main character Prince Myshkin is it true Prince that you once said it is beauty that will save the world what kind of beauty will save the world you are a diligent Christian aren't you Koya asserts to me that you appear as a Christian and so dosia ski's skeptical character is posing the question of whether Beauty can save the world can the world be saved as Christianity have something to do with this is beauty a sort of trace of mystery in reality and I'm going to come back to that kind of interesting modern question at the end of the talk but what I want to do to get there is briefly give you Thomas Aquinas is definition of beauty which is something that is deceptively simple and which I've been myself very imperfectly trying to think about for about 20 years and have realized is incredibly profound like a lot of ideas of Aquinas it looks very simple it's utterly profound you can think about it for your lifetime and then I want to look at notes of beauty well I'll give you examples from natural beauty so that we make sure we see the principle a little bit Allah Thomas Aquinas and then I'm gonna talk a little bit about artistic beauty and then finish with talking about beauty and evangelization so when Aquinas writes about the three properties of beauty that he uses to define it he gives three fundamental words in Latin which translated effectively directly into our English integrity toss proportionally toss and Clara toss integrity or wholeness proportionality sometimes he calls it consonants also sort of fitting this harmony and the third is Clara toss we you could talk about it in English as splendor but also kind of a clarity a brightness a shining kind of quality or but it's used analogically so these three features of beauty Aquinas says enter into all things that insofar things exist they are in some way beautiful and so they in some sense have these three properties are notes of beauty and it's true not only of natural realities which I'm about to talk about but also of artifacts art of artefactual realities especially artistic creations okay so that sounds may be very abstract let's use a concrete example and you know see if we can track where this is going and then I'll expand the examples and the key thing is that this concept of beauty for Aquinas is analogical meaning it doesn't just fit into one specific definition of thing like you know all that is beautiful is in accord with being a lion therefore only lions are beautiful well I mean lions are one noble species of thing and they are in their own way but human beings a beautiful trees or beautiful poems are beautiful even even clothing can be beautiful so forth and so on so it just goes into every register that's kind of what we mean by analogical it has a kind of a range a transcendent range of expression okay so just in your mind's eye take a tree that you think is very beautiful and very noble I think and I'm saying this mate to make the president of Thomas Aquinas College happy but I think often of the tree that's in the main quad of Thomas Aquinas College in front of their Chapel if you it's a tolkien-esque tree it's just glorious and so if you think about like integrity AHS wholeness for a form any kind of reality to be beautiful it has to have a kind of holistic composition so think about like a beautiful oak tree in say you have a very large front lawn at lawn and you have a very beautiful noble oak tree and and then the power line company comes they they cut a limb off to put in the power lines and it makes the tree less beautiful why well they've mutilated the integrity of the tree they've like taken off a major branch and now the wholeness of the form has been ruptured or you know I think you could think about someone who's a vet who I lived near the you know the the hospital in DC where they have a lot of the vets who come back from Afghanistan or Iraq and they you know sometimes because of a mind have lost a limb and you know it's not beautiful it is there's a dis integrity to the human body like that's a kind of violence to the the beautiful form of the body okay so then the tree doesn't just have this wholeness of all its branches and parts but because it's whole there's this composite parts and that's the proportionality so so there's quantity and quality so the quantity is like you've got multiple branches like sort of extended and they're proportionately extended in spatial ways regarding each other that there's a kind of beauty that emerges as the tree limbs are proportionately distant from each other proportionately close to one another so there's a kind of like dance that your eye does looking at all the kind of beautiful integrity of the proportion quantitative expressions of the ranches but then there's also qualities like the color of the tree the tree is gray but it has green leaves and if it's a dogwood tree is white flowers so you've got the gray and the green and you've got the white and they're all proportionally spaced quantitatively so you've got the quantitative spacing of the trees the branches the flowers you got the qualitative differences of the colors that's proportionality and so proportionality you might say is the kind of expression of integrity the integral form of the tree is expressed through the proportionate quantities and qualities all right and then out of that you get the last property which is splendor or or clara thoughts it's the hardest to talk about but it's something like the the gloriousness or of the form of the thing when it reaches its perfect expression so when you look at the tree you know you're looking at its magnificent tree it has this wholeness this integrity there's this proportionality of all the branches and parts and how they're kind of magnificent and then there's the colors and the qualities of those that are proportioned to each other and you think that is a splendid tree there's a beauty there's a sort of you know a Clara toss or a glory to that tree in the way that it just dominates the the the horizon okay it's a simple illustration but it's one that I think everyone can identify with now what I want to do is having just giving you a fundamental definition when I expand you so why say it's deceptively simple definition is because you can now you can now move with it and like use it to look at other things so let's just go up and down the art well actually up the hierarchy of being so let's take nonliving things then let's look at plants or that kind of you know I just gave an illustration but maybe we'll come back to something like plants and then we'll go up to living animals that are non rational then we'll go up to rational animals and then maybe we'll say a brief word about God the author of all things okay so take just let's just take an example something it's kind of evidently beautiful at the nonliving level and this is a place where actually modern microscopes and the computer make this illustration more interesting and that's the interesting interesting example of the snowflake so if you go online and look at high-resolution microscopic photos of snowflakes maybe that's not what you do with your spare time maybe you're you're probably watching cat videos like everybody else in America but we'll come to cats in a minute but but but look at look at the National Geographic pictures of the snowflake and I mean it is amazing I mean in terms of like the detail of symmetry in them okay so the first thing is that's obvious but you know every one of them is crystallized a little differently and I don't know the science of that but the fact that matters they're all kind of very individual so you look at the snowflake and the first thing that's obvious is the integrity of the form they have these incredible coherent holistic geometrical forms just on a visual level there's an integrity a holistic character and then of course proportionality there's all this beautiful proportionality of the parts and these are natural formations they're microscopic but they're they're magnificent and because they have this wholeness and proportionality when you can see them at scale that's proportion to our eye for example through modern technology means they're splendid you know so there's a kind of clarity to them there's other ways you might think about something like the Grand Canyon which is an that's more like that's the kind of experience of beauty that has a certain sublimity to it I think sublimity has to do with vastness of scale and so like the ocean is sublime or a mountain that's magnificent is sublime the Grand Canyon is sublime that's where you see just like a magnitude there's an integrity the Grand Canyon it's hard to see it you know you go to special places to try to see to get a glimpse of something of the integrity of it you can't see all of it at once because it's just too big but you can see a large portion of the Grand Canyon from the right angles in the right places and you can get a sense of the scale and then you can see all the different colors and the different sort of has it we're rock formations and get a sense of the depth of it and the parts of it and that gives you a sense of the kind of vast sublime splendor of of that natural rock formation so you can use the definition a little bit in a plastic way in flexible way to talk about nonliving things well I did talk about already the vegetative example of the tree but we could just take another example like The Rose people give these to each other as expressions of affection well of course but but why actually well because of their beauty now there's a lot of aspects to them that I mean clearly there's the integrity of the the many petals that hold together and then there's the proportionality of how they're all kind of related to one another and the sort of splendid nosov the rosebuds form and you know you could also say they have perfumed odor so there's a sort of beauty of to the odor of them as well as the sort of sublimity of their of their appearance okay let's move to animal life and I'm giving just brief examples to sort of show you why I think this is a great definition of Aquinas take an animal that most human beings would consider a beautiful animal like a horse I think some you could talk about I mean you know there's interesting questions hear people talking about Beauty being subjective I actually think it's it's not so much this objective is that we don't have we've lost the tradition of analysis of it and thinking about the canons of beauty and analysis I think we probably could talk about why when one animal is more beautiful than another like why do we think that horses have a kind of more noble form then I don't know what rats or what why is the I mean the Pug is an the Pug is a very you know absolutely cute animal but it's not as noble as the golden retriever and this so there's interesting questions there about the beauty of the Pug limited beauty the Pug versus the beauty of the golden retriever but if you take a kind of non-controversial example at least on an intuitive level we want to say horses are beautiful well okay there's an integrity to them right we want them to not break their legs and you can there's movies made that make children cry about where horse breaks at leg and you have to shoot it in this kind of thing you know it's it's grave and it's tragic because people sense there's a kind of nobility to this animal and that requires it to have its totality its integrity of bodily form and in the case of the animal unlike the plant or the nonliving thing it really expresses that to the vitality of movement and since life so I mean really the horse where do we acknowledge its beauty most is when the horse is charging when it's running and we watch films about that or we people go and watch them run against each other in like you know or maybe just own them to watch them run it's it's partly because the living form the power of the animal its capacity to run the elegance the beauty what you have there's not just the integrity the bodily form but the proportionality of the limbs the rapidity of the of the pace of the animal just the incredible vitality that's exude 'add when it's Chuck when it's galloping and you know you also there's things about horses that are connected to this like the refinement of their senses they're actually emotionally delicate animals so they you know can have a kind of connection to their riders or to their owners that's peculiar an individual through the habituation there's since life and their memory so there's something you know really interestingly complex about how these animals work in the midst of that terrific integrity and unity and we can talk about it for about the kind of splendid Nisour the nobility of this horse and that and that's just a you know one example from a living physical form we could talk about you know human beauty and the beauty of the face and the integrity symmetry proportions of the face and things like that but let me turn with human beings to spiritual beauty there's that movie that it's called a beautiful mind we can talk about a person having a beautiful argument or beautiful thoughts so what would it mean to say that well did you read that article that academic article yeah I did what'd you think it was boring oh did you read this one yeah I did what do you think that's beautiful Oh why'd you think that article is beautiful well first of all the argument is so sound like he starts from very sound premises and he argues from you know a to B to C to D really fluidly so there's an integrity to the argument there's like a wholeness right so that it could be a wholeness to a spiritual thing like to the truth like he gave us the whole truth and there was an integrity to it he didn't give us a part he gave us the whole truth and it was so beautiful I can see all the parts and how they fit together and they're all proportion to one another right so that you see you see how harmonies we can't begin to be evinced in the way people make arguments or express the truth there's wholeness there's proportionality and so then you sense splendor you know what we kept asking him the hard questions and he kept answering the hard questions and you just you got this sense of a continual truth in it it just fit together there was this integrity to it this proportionality that all the parts fit together and it was sort of splendid why was it because you perceived the truth in the argument your mind perceives a form of the truth like your eyes see the form of the tree your mind perceive the form of the truth you know or like more so that's like intellectual beauty and there's other ways we could illustrate intellectual beauty but this was like moral Beauty moral beauty is when there's like so you say like well he his honesty is really impeccable I work with this lawyer his honesty is impeccable you think well why is that exceptional well I live in Washington DC you know it's really it's difficult it's a difficult place from lawyers are under lots of pressure and duress and there's lots of you know political or economic pressures on them and they could compromise on the truth or they could be come ruthless but what's so amazing is about that is no matter how exacting the circumstance is this guy's always honest he shows a certain zeal for the truths and integrity okay there's an in we talk about characters integrity often what we mean is that a virtue like the person follows through like they're not just honest when it's convenient or honest most the time they're like perpetually and consistently honest there's a wholeness there like so I see the virtue of honesty because they're like holistically honest in all these different circumstances you see it in somebody you say gosh that person's really got an integrity of the virtue of honesty and that means what's the proportionality well that's a it's usually its quantitative and qualitative they do it habitually frequently easily they're easily honest they don't struggle they don't like suffer temptation they're just they have a fight vital honesty but also they're honest in the right way in the right circumstance you know they're gentle in this circumstance they're they're forceful in that one they're just in this circumstance they're merciful in that one so that the way they tell the way you tell the truth is humane if you tell the truth in the right way in the right time to the right person you know so there's a judgments of prudence of you don't ever lie but how do you tell the truth in the right way the right person the right time and that if you have that habit that's the kind of there's a kind of beauty to that like the way he found a way to tell him that hard truth and that context House Beautiful it's hard to do okay so then you admire the virtue the beauty of that person's honesty okay I'll just say a last word here about the the beauty of God we don't see God we don't have an image of the divine nature at least as a philosopher as philosophers we can say we have no natural access to the beauty of God what we see are the works of God that are manifold and themselves beautiful and because they are all coming from one source we can conclude or divine that the effects must in some way resemble the cause so God is not a physical body the divine essence God in his very nature and life is not a physical body and God isn't like a didactic mind that works through stages God doesn't read articles to figure out what he thinks during the day and he's not going through moral training exercises to become honest he doesn't develop the way we do but he's created world of physical things that are beautiful and living things that are beautiful and intellectual creatures that have intellectual Beauty and moral creatures that have moral beauty and so in some higher way God is himself beautiful in its very being in his life in his divine knowledge of himself in his creation and in his divine goodness and we don't know what that is we know Aquinas would say we know that God is beautiful but we have no direct experience of it we you might say we infer it we can reason constructively and coherently and conclusively that we know God is beautiful but we don't have an intuitive immediate experience of God's beauty and so part of what revelation claims is that God has crossed the bridge toward us so that we don't just remain philosophers who know that God is beautiful but don't know God's beauty but he's taking on our human form in becoming human to manifest divine beauty in the human life of Christ so that in Christ's divine and human beauty we see who God is are something of more perfectly who God is and we could talk and I won't but you could talk about the beauty of Christ's teaching the beauty of Christ's miracles the beauty of Christ's death the beauty of Christ's resurrection from the dead the beauty of Christ's life in the church in the sacraments and the preaching of the church and we could go on and on and that's beauty on a theological register and we could use that definition of integrity proportionality and splendor and go through all those things you could talk about this the integrity of Christ's body in the resurrection and the proportionality of his body and the glorified body why why is it beautiful the resurrection but so let me just turn now in this third part of the talk to talk a little bit about the arts now I'm just proposing something here that I'm not going to justify and that is that the different arts if you don't like the classical arts you know the seven classical arts things like painting music poetry architecture statuary dance drama that in these classical arts they're telling us something about what it is to be human so I'm just presupposing that and I have little ideas about that and they'll come out but I'm just gonna allude to them my point will be to illustrate the definition of beauty in each case I'm just gonna tell you what I think some of these not all seven I think but some of these arts manifest about what it is to be human and then I'm gonna talk about how they manifest it through that threefold definition so let me take the first example which is probably the most intuitive for all of us I think if you think about beauty and that would be painting so painting is of course a visual medium that usually is on a limited frame of a canvas and it involves the medium sometimes a drawing but more typically paint at least in classical painting modern European painting paint expressing form and so there's like a visual form typically human not always but typically human beings appear as central protect protagonists and then you've got some kind of background it may be more abstract or maybe more realists it could be a landscape but it also could be a room but it also could just be abstract colors and through color then you manifest through qualities of color both form and a certain kind of perspective so painting is sometimes called the most intellectual of the arts because it's directly connected to getting a perspective I mean it's literally you're like looking visually you know non metaphorically you're looking it's as if you're looking visually at something and getting a perspective on it but of course it's symbolic precisely so that in and through the visual experience of symbolism you're also getting a perspective on reality so you know if you think about something poignant like a van Gogh painting an elderly Dutch woman and often she looks like worn out by her manual laborer and slightly sad you know he's incredibly saddening melancholic works the emotion is just vibrant so you're not just looking at some person in her room but you're getting kind of perspective on her her personhood it's a kind of depth perspective at least or maybe you're looking more how Foucault how Van Gogh feels about the subject in his subjectivity okay so the point is does the definition and my question is does the definition work well yeah of course it does because integrity toss what are you showing in the painting you've got the integrity to say of the human form and then the way it relates to all the other painting moments in the painting like is the background matching the foreground so if you're like a painting instructor and somebody paints a beautiful realist painting of a person and they try to an abstract background but like the colors are completely discordant and they say well that's part of the idea he said no no listen the colors you need some kind of integrity to the way the whole thing fits together and a proportionality between the color scheme right so if you were designing your own apartment by metaphor if you're designing your own apartment you put like one wall will be orange one will be purple one will be white and one will be you know sharp green that's it's discordant you know so in painting you want to have that kind of integrity and then the proportionality between the different colors but out of that an integrity and proportionality of the human form so that you can manifest through that kind of intellectual and emotional ideas about the human person so for example in icons of Christ they're not necessarily realistic you're kind of trying to show the spiritual eyes form of the reality of God among us they're not Buber realistic I mean Michael and Jose goober realistic but Frangelico who is somewhat in the middle Giotto is very abstract but in a kind of Neoplatonic way should I show like the splendor of the of the human being of God's grace in and through the human form just to take a couple more examples say music okay so music is temporal that's the firt I mean that's a totally different painting painting is like a temporal it's like a perspective it just remains they these paintings hang for example the National Gallery and they're just there for centuries and people come and look at them and it's like this this perspective the artist is just preserved music exists in time not just in time for composition but it's expressed in time and what does it show you it was a very it's much more linked to emotion and it's it shows you how human beings its integrity exist through a temporal sequence so like say a friend of yours is playing the organ in church after and he's playing a Bach solo like ferociously and he just stops maybe he stops because he decided it was time to pray and he was gonna stop platforming for us I mean you'd be offended because he's disrupted the integrity of the piece like finished the piece and people sit around in church and they wait and they all clap because like there's an integrity it's finished right so there's an integrity to the music and then of course there's proportions of the I mean that's what the notes show you all the proportions of the scales of music the different qualities of music and the tempo the quantitative measure of how fast you play the notes and the qualitative measure of where the notes go and out of that integrity of that sequence of notes its quantitative rhythm and it's qualitative diversity of notes you have like the splendor of music and it tells you something about human beings existing in time and as Plato noted good music forms the emotions in view of kinds of virtues so like religious music it's like forming you in the virtue of piety how do I pray in time and there's times in the mass we have beautiful music to teach us how to give thanks to God or to venerate God okay but there's also like if you're running you might listen a growing chant but you might listen to something like with drums and electric guitars because you're trying to get your irascible passions elevated to like jog to the music you know so music has different kind of educational properties of your emotions so I should talk about architecture and just because that also affects you know Catholics architecture it could be said in a brief definition teaches us how to inhabit a human space meaningfully like what what is the space for and what is our common life together so the kinds of buildings we build and how we design them interiorly teaches us a lot about what we believe about ourselves and about our common life together so like you go into an academic building I spend all the time in at universities and you go in different kinds of classrooms well a classroom tells you a lot about the architecture of the classroom tells you a lot about how the school or at least the architect the school hired thinks about that space rooms are terribly functionary cinder blocks you know Lodge together just like you're here to make sure you learn the equations and it's a kind of ruthless efficiency then there's there's you know rooms that have vistas that you look out at some scene and you know it's it's more ponderous and it gives you a sense that truth is to be explored here and pondered okay so we can apply this to churches right I mean there's a lot of churches where the point seems to be we're modern too we can do modern architecture just as well as you all can we're gonna do we're gonna be more modern than you we're gonna build like bunker houses and we're gonna gray monument to like modern imprisonment and you know normal like the sameness you know and I there's famous cases of these you know these kinds of a brutalist modernist you know poured concrete architecture that is supposed to like you know wake us all up the fact that we can be Catholic in modernity but it seems like it's more like captive to modernity you know the point isn't really about making sure we stay in the Middle Ages although there's a lot to be said for the Gothic or Roman s styles he says the guy from the medieval order who praised in a baroque Chapel in Washington DC but but but actually I mean the point is that a sack a sacred space opens you to a sense of the transcendence of God that's one thing for sure but also intimacy with God you know that this is a place where you can find intimacy with God in prayer and that God's transcendence is acknowledged you know so there's a lot of that could be said about this but the point is how do we inhabit meaningfully a space what do we think it is to live together as persons in the presence of God in a church or in the in the search for the truth in the university and so forth all right let me just finish then by talking about beauty and evangelization I started with the question can Beauty save the world and I think the answer is no I think the right answer or maybe a more a more perfect answer would say well what saves the world is the grace of Christ but the grace of Christ is expressed primarily in the truth of the gospel and in the moral goodness of evangelical living so it's more like the truth of Christ and the goodness of Christ in His Church through grace that's what saves the world that's that's fundamental okay but the truth of Christ and the goodness of Christ are beautiful so some of the kinds of manifestations of beauty we do have control over can strongly Express the beauty of Christ's truth and goodness and dispose people to receive the truth and goodness of Christ so I want to talk about that just a little bit here briefly so I want to go back to this idea of the beauty of the truth I talked about people having like a beautiful argument or you could say a person has a beautiful mind well when you talk about the is the Catholic truth beautiful well what's the integrity of it well there's a lot of ways to talk about that but just briefly first of all yeah there's a coherence to it in itself I mean there's a certain kind of beauty to the mysteries of the faith so when you understand Christ's sacrifice and you understand the mass and then you understand the life of the Saints like these things hold together in a in a beautiful integral way but I think more to our age we live in an age of deep fragmentation of learning I mean the modern university is in grave crisis in part because it's become a technical but kind of high grade technical school where you learn different discourses and forms of expertise that are not unified like you know a lot about engineering or you know a lot about history or you know something about geography but how do you put it all together and understand the world in a deeper perspective about what's real well that's obviously about like ultimate philosophical questions how do you put that together with major religious questions what the Catholic tradition and Thomas Aquinas particularly give us is this kind of sense of the unity of all truths the unity of what we learned mathematically or scientifically with what we can learn about the human being and what we can study in poetry and literature with what we can learn philosophically with what we can learn by faith in examine theologically and the mysteries of the faith that unity that whole stick integrity the proportionality between all the parts of learning the splendor of the truth according to faith and reason that is something that is really sublime and wonderful that's in our tradition quite rightly that we can use to evangelize you know so I do think Aquinas plays a major role for us today and speaking to brilliant young people who are in academic formation systems where they don't have a sense of the integrity and unity of the truth they have a deep sense of fragmentation and frustration and so when we approach them with the integrity and proportionality and splendor of the Catholic truth it disposes them to believe that something but behind all this and perhaps that they really can't encounter the truth and God in the Catholic faith the second thing is moral beauty obviously to have a life that is integrally integrally meaning holistically committed to Christ is one of the most important sound sort of signs of the presence of the grace of God okay so I don't think it's enough to be like holy and not also have a way to present the truth you know the truth matters at least as much as personal holiness but personal holiness matters as much as the truth you'd say well personally meant this matters more for like heaven and being with God yes that's true but for evangelization actually the truth matters a lot and so it's the truth and holiness but holiness sort of moral beauty that's a lot of that's about the integrity of a life that your life is holistically can sort of committed to God and to Christ that all the parts of your life proportionately come under the reign of God including the things that where you're weak and you're sinful and you integrally offer your sins to God in confession and and in penance and in like hope you become a being of hopeful joyful repentance and and and there's a certain splendor then in like you know when Malcolm Muggeridge converted to Christianity it was from meeting Mother Teresa and what was the book he wrote called something beautiful for God it was the integrity of her life that kind of the into the sort of beauty of charity lived out in in integral honesty and and humility and piety that was manifest in her holiness and that integrity spoke to him and through him it spoke to thousands of people in his writing and so and then I finally I would say you know aesthetic beauty matters because if you if you really believe it you manifest it in in what you build how you worship what you images and music you use and don't use in holy lit in the Sacred Liturgy to dispose people to the virtues of piety and and a sense of the truth you know God is a very sublime but early sublime truth and so when we approach and we need to approach him in ways that manifest his beauty and His goodness in aesthetically true ways that that give us a sense of his transcendence and His goodness and that's why sacred art is so difficult sacred art is really challenging one of the reasons Dante is a giant is because there's so much theological truth in Dante and there's so much moral depth Dante's you know understanding of the human condition he's like a moral genius that's so rare of course it's rare you know that's why he's a giant but it's you know you can take the one of the one of the most perfect examples and his little cousins you know Mozart and Michelangelo and these are the people Giotto and Frangelico and you can then say well that that's the kind of thing we aim for you know modestly to create sort of places where we really manifest the goodness in truth of God so that is the kind of basic idea I want to give you and if I leave you with something its integrity proportionality and clarity and clarity or splendor that's a powerful definition it goes very far you can use it for a lot of things and it's just a kind of a example of why do you think Aquinas remains a very powerful resource for the New Evangelization for contemporary intellectual evangelization to present the faith to our secular colleagues and to try to win them over to the deep truth about human person about creation about God and about Christ so with that I'll finish and I'll open the floor to questions thanks that was awesome I wanted to just begin the question with a like small illustration from my own life so my father is a he's a theologian so I grew up like understanding the truth of the faith very intimately like I would go out and my favorite thing was to like on apologetics forums and argue with Protestants but that didn't actually keep me from wandering away from my faith and it was actually experiencing God in in the music at a youth group that really like transformed my life and began to to change it so I returned to the church in a lot of ways because of experiencing beauty and so when I kind of came back I I looked at it it was like wow the Catholic Church used to be at the forefront of all architecture it used to be at the forefront of art and music and sciences but it seems like there's so little effort put into that now in the church and I'm just wondering like from your perspective why did that happen yeah you know I I do think it's somewhat culturally relative what you say about like how much work is put into it so I've visited France and Italy enough to know that even in modern times there have been some success stories and some preservation of traditional forms of beauty and I would say also in the United States actually one thing you do find is through the generosity of a lot of people who are invested in in this issue there are people willing to actually build new cathedrals or churches that have a sort of noble architectural form so I mean I mean I do think that if you go and if you this the simple answer though to your question is modernism as a as a movement across the board you could look at it in which by the way I don't demonize I think there's a lot of interesting things in sort of especially modern music and I don't mean you know popular music I mean like modern classical music but I mean if you look at what like you just take the era of Picasso and you look at I think about what Picasso is doing visually and deconstructing classical forms with cubism and hyper subjective izing painting as a perspective of a subject not really bringing out the integral form of a thing and I think it's very interesting actually Picasso but it's a very strong move away from realism and certainly there's no transcendence it's not a move toward God it's it's the imminence of the subject interpreting reality very subject you know very kind of a through the prism of his perspective I think that happened in a lot of ways in architecture and music and it meant that we turned towards the I would call it a kind of imminent ism you know looking at Beauty through a human community without an openness to God's I do actually think the secularization of Europe led to a lot of the modern architectural trends and a lot of the music and visual arts trends and post-modernism has even made that more acute and Catholics find themselves in a very difficult position because if we stay with our own traditional canons of medieval beauty or even Renaissance or Baroque beauty we can we can seem to be purely resistant to modernity and if we engage we might miss translate the mystery into something that's too benign and so I think that's where we're trying to negotiate you started mentioning that you have experience doing these in different universities and after you have thought I was thinking how amazing is if Catholic universities we have the opportunity to make these synthesis of knowledge Beauty different try to break that different systems of departments right isolated we can bring it together through this idea which are some idea suggestions that you may have for a cattle university to bring beauty into this idea that you have that quite that's a great question again it's that pretty straightforwardly I mean I think the unity of the university I agree with both Aquinas and John Henry Newman Don the unity of the University is not assured through theology primarily although that has an important role but through philosophy and principally through metaphysics because it's through the intellectual discipline that tells us our human nature how all our learning is united that we understand how all our learning is even united and that's metaphysics and the church is rightly has insisted since the crisis of nominalism and Protestantism in the 14th through 16th century it's on the centrality of metaphysics that's the key but the next step is to have a philosophical metaphysics that examines what beauty is and then to try to have interdepartmental or inner you know subject conversations about that which I think that one of the reasons we've invested the MOPP the modern philosophical trends in metaphysics and morals are extremely strong but in aesthetics weak in the sense that there are very few professors of aesthetics in universities and even fewer who are like grounded in the classical metaphysical tradition so there are Catholic universities out of excellent departments devoted to traditional philosophy and metaphysics and they have often a strong moral component it it's it's where we could have more like dedication to like the wing of aesthetics and beauty in its sort of aptitude for conversation that's we could develop that more I yes Father father Thomas first of all I want to say I appreciate very much the lucidity of your presentation on a deeply deep difficult philosophical topic of beauty to get to contain and to present so thank you thank you and the reason why I'm asking it's more not so much a question as an observation but I have a close friend who has moved away from the church and recently he's been on extended sabbatical in Spain and finished the Portuguese El Camino to Santiago and I've been overwhelmed by the number of pictures he has sent either of processions or of churches or of altars or of presentations of thing religious and so for me there is some stirring that is going on there is an allure meant and I I think the attract ability that is happening is through beauty and so the the three qualities and the the frameworks that you have given have been very helpful for me to enter into a new form of dialogue with them yeah thank you you know I think pilgrimage is very powerful it's not an American custom but it's it's very powerful partly because it's so useless from the point of view of like art are our notions of American efficiency like you just leave everything behind and you go like walking trying to find God for like weeks or months and the mementos the esthetic mementos of centuries of that in the Camino are expressions of the kind of depth of moral commitment and spiritual seeking for the truth so it's like a perfect kind of expression of you know people's I don't know what you want to call it almost agonizing desires for today we might say nostalgia for the truth or transcendent truth and that there's a kind of moral beauty in the pilgrimage that is something very alien to our culture but actually we very sort of profound for our humanity I think when Americans don't do things like that we we do other things that express our spiritual longing like eat the entire box of Oreo cookies and watch too many Netflix serials but I I mean I think I think in other words we endure time less constructively we medicate ourselves in our senses to withstand temporal tea and the pilgrimage is partly a different way of withstanding temporal existence patiently yes to your question yes we're now right get into a discussion about beauty you've presented it very objectively but invariably the person will say well that that oak tree is beautiful to you right can you just oh sure can you just comment a little on the police subjectivity or personal taste has in this whole discussion and maybe the limits no that's always a question I get and I never know the answer to it I'm always stumped by that I mean I think the first thing is let me actually you know it used to be people would say well morality is objective but you know beauty subjective now they say morality is subjective and beauty subjective and truth is subjective so beauty is actually now on a kind of more level playing field with everybody else in the transcendental community but I mean I think it's harder to analyze then then like what is real metaphysical truth about being or like what is really morally good or what is good in creation I think it's harder to analyze beauty but I think it's also that like the science of metaphysics and the science of morals we just have less analysis of it so the first thing I always do with those people is trot out the definition because I think well yeah and then try to give the illustrations because I think there's a certain kind of evidence evidential character to them and since they think it's all subjective they have no going theory and so you know in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king and in the land where everyone has only subjective conceptions anybody who has any really good objective khun's conceptions can have a lot of influence and especially if your subjective conceptions are drawn from someone as intellectually potent as thomas aquinas so i mean the first thing i do is sort of trot out the objective definition but then i think there are places you can make room for subjectivity so for example do you like Thai food well some people would say it's kind of strange to combine things that are very salty anything's very sweet and I don't think it's you know that when you when you if you have I don't know if you ever go to Indian restaurants I mean I don't go to restaurants that often but I do sometimes go to restaurants in you go to an Indian restaurant sometimes the waiters who are Indian and say well that food that plate is very beautiful it's a very interesting Indian expression you know the food is beautiful but actually the food is beautiful because of the symmetry of the taste there's integrity fun we could talk about the food so the point is I don't think Thai food is so beautiful because the seat this is the salty and sweet like I don't I don't get that the pad thai but I have friends who swear by it well maybe that's partly biological you know maybe I just have biological dispositions maybe I haven't educated my palate so you're the problem with subjectivity is maybe I haven't learned like on the aesthetic level maybe I like the guitar mass because I'm like the guy who's only ever eaten at a fast-food restaurant and never really learned to appreciate a more kind of a delicate food and you know so I don't really you know we see this in moral and moral life there's people like somebody's being very sensitive morally and another person just doesn't even see it because they're kind of a little bit unrefined morally and it's okay but it's like you missed it back that person would be extremely thoughtful you just didn't see it and so I think it's aesthetics it's kind of like that you you you know it's partly we kinda have to learn you have to teach people beauty is by giving them expressions of what is beautiful and but the definition of Aquinas helps them see there's something objective at stake father thank you I get asked a lot very very frequently how to make or what beauty is I'm just gonna tell them to ask you so mystic Institute if you go to SoundCloud - mystic Institute online we have put up all our lectures and there's a bunch of lectures up there about beauty so you can just send them online they won't you have to correspond with me they can go here okay here it up online thank you or really an one of your your opening opening sentences use we mentioned a relationship of beauty and mystery really a relationship of a trace so beauty as a sort of trace of mystery could you expand on that a little bit please yeah I mean I said that was Dostoevsky so I did not talk in this I did not mention in this talk and I tried to do this very briefly I did not mention this talk how Beauty is related to being because Aquinas thinks everything is beautiful because thinks everything exists is beautiful insofar as being so anything insofar as anything exists it has some kind of goodness for Aquinas and some kind of beauty so people who are about well what is the goodness versus of the beauty well the goodness is like the perfection of a thing so you know like we're gonna experiment on mice we need good subjects so what we need are healthy mice that can really do everything on mice can do we don't need sick mice so we need good mice perfect mice they've got I got a goodness to them and it's a broad sense or like if you're trying to be honest are you really being honest like he's a good he's a good honest person meaning he's thoroughly perfectly honest okay so the goodness comes from a certain kind of perfection of a thing reaching its end or doing what it's supposed to do being the kind of thing it is a human being should be truthful if you're truthful you're you know you have a good honesty Beauty is a kind of splinter that emerges from the the attractiveness of the form of a thing so when a thing has this kind of perfect form it it dazzles or it attracts and so what is that that's kind of an opaque idea it's not initially obvious what that what I'm saying but the point is that in a way when you're looking at the beauty of like the tree you're looking at the splendor of a form in its intelligibility like the mind can kind of wrestle with it it can go into it and think about it so beauty reveals the mind to itself because when I see things are beautiful I I kind of I'm gazing at things and I sort of see what my mind is for but then I start to think maybe there's a like maybe there's mind behind the mind you know maybe there's like a deeper intellect maybe there's some kind of trace of a hidden truth that has created the world with beautiful forms you see it's simple way to say it is the world is full of beautiful splendid forms that makes my intellect aware that I can gaze on splendid forms but I didn't create those forms so where do they come from well that's mysterious maybe there's an author of beauty but what is the author of beauty that's mysterious it's unknown you know beauty is like the homage to the trace of the mysterious or the homage to an unknown God I'm gonna take your question last ma'am you use the word useless a minute ago and I I think it's really important to understand that the practical efficient world that we live in isn't what amenable to the beautiful that often comes as a gift or a surprise and it requires a kind of patience I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the mitigating well the forces that mitigate against being receptive to the gift of the beautiful yeah okay so I mean technology and technical efficiency are great strengths of American culture and I think when Americans travel abroad and come back somewhat disillusioned by what they find in terms of efficiency and technological capacity sometimes in other cultures they can sound very arrogant and very short-sighted but there's something true too because you know that the cultures have various strengths and it certainly represents something human that we want technical efficiency we want results for result-oriented persons who are practical beings and aristotle aquinas talked about that too the problem is this the more you ramp up efficiency the more you're tempted to put it in terms of Aristotelian causes to look primarily at the material cause and the efficient cause and like we have a certain amount of process we have to get through to get from A to Z so let's just burn through the stages as fast as we can and get there and first of all is your intimating that creates the kind of activism of the mind because practical so it's not a speculative gazing on the beauty of reality it's the kind of processing and making things happen and in our practical intellect we are supposed to do that and there's a time for that just like there's also time just be contemplative but the other side is we might not be looking at what we're transforming that carefully so you know like I'm sitting there processing changing effectuating change but I'm not gazing and I mean the stereotypical example is we're we're cutting down the redwood forest to make lumber but we didn't stop and look at like the nobility and beauty of the trees okay that's a terribly stereotypical environmentalist example but it's completely legitimate in itself and the point is you could you could kind of expand that in the way we another example is like how we use the Internet I think quite amazingly actually to get information to be connected to people to have visual stimuli and now but it also changes the way we think it changes the rhythm at which we think because we don't take the time as much to read a book and stop and figure out whether we think an idea is true and be patient with an idea or discuss it with someone so in a certain way we're not as deeply connected with other people because of the superficial way we connect to other people I say this is the person who answers all my emails but I think the challenge to remain kind of contemplative in our intellectual life and so a culture of technology is a great advantage and opportunity but it needs to be balanced with a culture of contemplation and truth seeking and a culture of genuine aesthetics and that's a very difficult balance to maintain so the church has a role there I think in the larger culture because I think our contemporaries actually often feel technology saturated and overwhelmed by the pressures of efficiency Millennials certainly are in reaction against my generation and the baby boomer generation in this respect of wanting more time for leisure but how do we channel that in a constructive direction I think the church has a lot of wisdom in that respect thank you very much for all your attention thank you you [Music]

Channel: Napa Institute

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Length: 56min 54sec (3414 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 19 2018