Glory of the Lord, vol. I: “Introduction” (An Existential Introduction)

Last updated on: September 30, 2016 at 10:16 am by Anne Carpenter

Glory of the Lord, vol. I: “Introduction” (An Existential Introduction) 2016-09-30T10:16:59-08:00 Anne Carpenter

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Marc Chagall, "The Creation of Man" (WikiArt)

Marc Chagall, “The Creation of Man” (WikiArt)

I am writing this to help my students, and I thought I’d share:

The Mass of the Holy Spirit begins the academic year at nearly every Catholic college. It is fitting, after all: the Spirit is the one who gives wisdom and zeal, the one whose gifts animate the life of the Church. The Spirit is the breath (ruach, pneuma) of God, filling Adam’s lungs (Gen 2:7) and raising Christ from the dead (Rm 8:11). And we of the universities, though we use many of our natural powers as we ask our thousands of questions, we need the Spirit because we cannot break open the seals of creation (cf. Rev 6).

My specific task during Mass was to read the second reading, from Saint Paul, which began, “The Spirit scrutinizes everything, even the depths of God. Among human beings, who knows what pertains to a person except the spirit of the person that is within? Similarly, no one knows what pertains to God except the Spirit of God.” (1 Cor 2:10-1).

I thought immediately of theology, of the scarlet on the academic hood around my neck. I felt a kind of vertigo, as if the earth had dropped away for a moment, and I stood at the precipice of understanding just how profoundly theology relies on the Spirit. How desperately unwitting, how much nonsense theology is, without the Spirit of the Father to give it words.

But this is very hard for us to see, hard to remember, and Balthasar argues that this is in part because we have lost beauty. Without beauty, he says, religion becomes horrific (18), and creation is rendered “an indigestible symbol of fear and anguish” (19). Beauty has this way of holding together the wholeness of things (17), and its absence leaves us in the hollows of “expressionlessness,” like “dry wood” (24). I can see how this is so when we treat religion like it is a stranglehold we desperately need to escape, like some kind of clawing ancient power – and how could religion not be this to us if all religion can do is tell us truths and prod us to act good? The chapel on campus becomes the foothold of an invasion instead of the entryway to eternal mystery.

Beauty, Balthasar says, is both form and splendor (19-20). In German, this is Gestalt and Glanz. The first, form, is partly drawn from Thomas Aquinas and is partly modern: form is the animating principle of a thing, what gives it life and a direction (a telos); form is also what we recognize when we perceive a thing, what makes that thing that thing and not another. Splendor is the mystery of the depths of being (Sein), of existence, which “shines forth” from what we perceive. Splendor is this “more” that we know when we know things. With beauty, “We are confronted simultaneously with both the figure and that which shines forth from the figure, making it into a worthy, a love-worthy thing” (20).

So in both religion and the world, there is a certain attractiveness (splendor) that draws us near and leads us on. There is also a specificity, a uniqueness (form), in each thing that we draw near to. In other words, we yearn to know the world, and this yearning is not only a perception of the world’s goodness, but it is also a perception of the delightfulness of truth. The joy of questions and their answers.

I think sometimes of the outrage at injustice that seethes across campus like the breath of a great, slumbering dragon that wakes then falls to sleep again. We are disgusted at the evils of the world and on campus, though we each name quite different things. But it is hard to sustain this fierce gaze into the darkness without an accompanying sense of the whole that lies broken before us. So it is that determination and despair seize us in equal measures. I imagine it as if we flinch away: we do not want to see beauty broken, to really feel that loss, so we decide ahead of time that the world is not beautiful in any case. Or, if it is, that is merely your opinion.

Because it is much harder to see the world as a place of both joy and suffering, to know that these often exist side-by-side in a single person.

Balthasar is perhaps too dramatic or extreme when he says that we have lost beauty, or when I repeat him. I grant that this may be so. But I do not think he is wrong, and I think there is something of a biblical sense of loss in his words. I mean that there is something rather tattered and lost about the world and about us, right there alongside our happiness. For Balthasar, we do not want to perceive this. I think that is also true.

The deepest beauty – which we also struggle to see – is the glory of God. God’s glory is entirely different than the beauty of the world, and they are linked only by the tenuous thread of analogy. What is most remarkable, for Balthasar, is that God enters the world and, using the form of the world, shows us his glory (30-32). And this is the beginning of theology, and theological aesthetics.

hans urs von balthasar

theological aesthetics

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