Quest for beauty, quest for God
It’s truly nice to hear Pope Benedict regularly talk about beauty. I notice that since he became Pope, he makes it a point to give some incisive thoughts about this reality that we often miss.
Recently, he had a wonderful get-together with some 260 artists from different fields—painting, acting, architecture, literature, music, etc.—where again he told them not only of the elements of beauty—its essence, source, purpose—but also of their—our—duties towards it.
Ever since I got bitten by the beauty bug, I have been into some kind of adventure in search of it. I remember some verses of a poem we studied in first year high school—quit the naughty thought of when it was—that got stuck with me through the years.
They gave me my first taste of what I call the irresistible charm and mystique of beauty and launched me to its quest, sometimes bumpy, sometimes smooth and sweet. I now don’t remember the title and the author, but they went this way:
“Rhodora / if sages ask thee why / thy beauty is wasted on the earth and sky / Tell them, dear / that if eyes were made for seeing, / then beauty is its own excuse for being.
From then on, I had that lingering idea that whatever it is that we consider true and good, whatever it is that can give us happiness, can be summarized under one category—beauty. It was the catchall for all these ideals that somehow satisfy or at least pacify the unutterable yearnings in our heart.
Pope Benedict’s meeting with the artists had that beautiful tone of being both cordial and frank, sublime and challenging. He welcomed them and invited them to “friendship, dialogue and cooperation” with the Church, even if they may still be quite remote from the practice of religion.
What was important, the Pope pointed out, was that there was that common interest in the pursuit of beauty, extricating it from the usual pitfall of “reducing the horizons of existence to mere material realities, or to a reductive and trivializing vision.”
Or even to worse things, like the erupting firework of a wide range of human depravity. We seem to have a carpet bombing of that ugly aspect lately. With the election fever rising, we are witnessing the dark side of humanity, as ad hominem attacks, rash judgments, demonizing arguments, etc. fill the media.
Mere opinions are made into dogmas, suspicions and biases are turned into facts and made the explosives of their mutual accusations. The air is poisoned, the place becomes a war zone and everyone suffers. Really ugly! The Maguindanao massacre now looks puny.
Still, there’s hope. We should refuse to be dragged down to hell by these demonic gimmicks done by a few so-called clever guys we have around. Let’s use these black spots as illuminating contrast to the real beauty meant for us.
But we have to know what authentic beauty is. There had been false but subtle pictures of it, ridiculous caricatures and outright direct assaults on it. We need to be very discerning and prudent, because truths and falsehoods are often mixed up nowadays and found in opposite camps.
Thus, the work of artists is pivotal. They are expected to provoke in others and to sustain the sense of beauty that leads to its true origin and essence, that is, to God. The search for beauty is a pilgrimage toward God.
Pope Benedict quotes Hermann Hesse who said: “Art means revealing God in everything that exists.” I agree with this completely. At the end of the day, that’s what art really is.
With their talent to touch and enter the heart of humanity, the artists in their respective field now face the challenge and bear the duty to captivate all in the appreciation of real beauty, freeing them from a beauty that is reduced, entangled and stifled.
Let’s hope that they manage to pursue their artistic creativity and originality along the lines of fidelity to God and continuity with his will and ways. This is the trickiest part of the artists’ life. They have to resolve the apparent contradiction.
Rightly calling artists the “custodians of beauty,” the Pope cited some words of Pope John Paul II in asking, “To communicate the message entrusted to her by Christ, the Church needs art. But does art need the Church?”
Let’s pray that they get to see the point.(Fr. Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City. Email: roycimagala@gmail.com)
