Category Archives: beauty

Angels and the Sexes

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There is perhaps no topic that St. Thomas Aquinas is more closely associated with than angels.  Dubbed The Angelic Doctor, both because of his angelic purity, and because of his thorough compilation of the Church’s teachings on the angels, he is a reliable teacher on the topic.  We can turn to him and find the necessary principles that will enable us to answer any question we might have, including the question as to why angels always appear as men in Scripture. 

One of the things that St. Thomas does is to help us see beyond on modern prejudices because he appeals to universal principles.  There is a modern tendency, especially in an age of exaggerated gender equality, to attribute it to patriarchal repression.  But there is more to it than that and it begins by turning to Aquinas’ negative definition of an angel as that which is “understood to be incorporeal” (ST, q.51, art.1).  Lacking bodies, are neither male nor female by nature.  Nevertheless, because matter makes the invisible visible, the angels use a body to reveal themselves. 

Where the Body Comes From

To say that they “use” a body leads us to a necessary digression.  The angels do not rob a grave nor perform something like a good possession, but instead draw together the matter necessary to create the physical appearance of a human body.  “Appearance” because it is not truly a human body because its proper form of the human soul.  Although they do not have a body by nature, they do, by nature have the power to move matter in accord with their will (assuming Divine approval of course).  Making a body then would be perfectly within their natural powers.

This “body” serves solely the purpose of revealing the angel and allowing him to communicate with humans on their level.  In this way, the angels are in the image of God, given the power to use the material to make the non-material intelligible to us.  This is why we can never look upon their choice of body as an accident of social convention or a concession to patriarchy.  Instead it is chosen for a purpose, namely to reveal the angel, in both his nature and personality, to men.  This purpose helps set the tone for an explanation as to why the bodies are always male. 

Angels, because they lack materiality, also lack, philosophically speaking, potency.  The angel is pure intellect, always being in act of knowing a loving.  If they cease to think and love, they cease to exist.  Likewise, being immaterial, they “live” outside of visible creation.  This means that angels are always the initiators in their interaction with mankind.  Men cannot beckon them (this is why the angel will not tell Jacob his name) nor conjure them up.  They must always come on their own accord.  In “coming” they enter into the physical world from the outside.  They must come from outside of visible creation and enter into the physical world.  Finally, angels are by their mission, the militant protectors of mankind.  They are warriors assigned to battle the evil spirits in their assault upon mankind.

The Body Reveals the Personality

If the angel, in forming a body, wants to convey both his nature and his personality, then how should he present himself?  To convey personality, he must choose one of the sexes and not just an amorphous blob or non-personal type matter.  To convey his nature, he must choose one or the other.  To see which one, another slight digression is in order.

The sexes, male and female, are meant to reveal masculinity and femininity.  The masculine principle is always the initiator, always the one who comes from the outside.  The feminine principle is always passive and receptive.  The masculine is, viewed philosophically, acts as the efficient cause in reducing the feminine from potency to act.  Likewise, the masculine is always the protector and warrior of the feminine. 

Angels, by choosing to appear with men, are revealing that they have initiated the conversation with men, and that they have come from outside of visible creation.  The Heavenly Host is an army arrayed in battle to protect us.  This militancy is best portrayed by being a man.  It is for these three reasons that angels always appear as men in Scripture and why we always speak of the angels that we don’t see as “he”.

In the book of Zechariah, there is a story of how the prophet was visited by an angel.  In that regard, it is no different than many other cases in Scripture of similar visitation.  It is unique however because at first glance it appears that a female angel (actually two) makes an appearance.  There is reason to think however that these angels are actually demons.

The prophet is visited by an angel who points out to him a basket that contains a woman whom he identifies as “wickedness”.  He closes the basket and then the angel raises Zechariah’s “eyes and saw two women coming forth with wind under their wings—they had wings like the wings of a stork—and they lifted the basket into the air.  I said to the angel who spoke with me, ‘Where are they taking the basket?’  He replied, ‘To build a temple for it in the land of Shinar. When the temple is constructed, they will set it there on its base.’” (Zech 5:9-11).  These “two women”, some posit, are angels.  But the destination, Shinar, which is where the tower of Babel was built (Gen 11), later referred to as Babylon, tells us something different.  Throughout Scripture, Babylon is always presented as the city of the devil and thus they are carrying wickedness back to its biblical home. 

Devotion to the Angels and Angel Statues

All of that being said, why does it matter if they appear as both men and women or only as men?  It matters because angels are not just hypothetical beings but real people who play an active role in the world of mankind.  It becomes then a matter of discernment, giving us a principle by which to distinguish between an angel of light and an angel of darkness.  Given all that we have said, it is not surprising that exorcists and demonologists find that only demons appear as women and that they caution us to avoid a feminine spirit.  This is not to suggest that women are evil, (for the demons also appear as men) only that femininity does not properly convey the nature of the angel.  The demons operate on deception and seduction and thus we should not be surprised that these is one of the means they use. 

It isn’t just discernment that matters, but also devotion.  Devotional art ought to portray the object of devotion as it truly is.  It may abstract away certain pieces (like the excess blood of Christ on the Cross) but it must remain true to the object itself.  In other words, devotional art ought to imitate nature because it helps to foster a deeper devotion.  This is why we should be cautious in accepting the modern tendency to depict angels as female in art.  The angels themselves are artists and they have chosen the male body to portray themselves.  Masculine angel art helps to foster true devotion to the angels because it depicts their true characteristics more than a female art would.  In this way, that is because it has claritas, the masculine angel is always more beautiful than the feminine. 

If it is really true that only demons appear as women, then these aesthetic objects may in fact be idols, fostering devotion to devils instead.  Devotion is always directed from the heart to the object.  In this way it has a power of forming our hearts to love the object of our devotion.  A poor depiction of angels, or even one that is really demonic, can eventually do harm to our spiritual life.  This is why it is always better to foster devotion based on what we do know, namely that angels always take on masculine form, then to speculate, and risk offering devotion to something far more insidious. 

If Harry Met Paul

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The former Chief Exorcist of Rome, of pious memory, Fr. Gabriele Amorth is well known in Catholic circles for his books on the demonic.  He is well known outside of Catholic circles for his repeated criticism of the Harry Potter series.  Speaking mainly from the experience of casting out thousands of demons, he once said, “behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil.”  This was met by mockery outside the Church and deaf ears within.  Many Catholics, clergy included, see “nothing wrong with Harry Potter” and thus allow and encourage children to read the series, see the movies, visit amusement parks and play video games.  Fr. Amorth is not the only exorcist who has warned against the series and even Pope Benedict cautioned against it during his time as Prefect of the Congregation of the Faith.  Deaf ears can often lead to blind eyes and thus it is imperative that we have a coherent explanation and not merely scare tactics of why Harry Potter is dangerous.

To begin, we must concede that for a parent to offer an “it is harmless” defense of anything is not good parenting.  Even if there is such thing as a “harmless” story (as opposed to helpful or harmful), it is questionable parenting to use that as a criteria for what you expose your children to.  Junk food for the body might be permitted, junk food for the mind ought not to be.  But in truth it is an attempt to feign neutrality when in fact there is really no such thing as a neutral story.  Inundated by television and movies, which condition us to accept views of the world uncritically, we can easily forget how powerful a story is to convey a world view.  We tend to equate entertainment and goodness.   

Why Stories Matter

Stories are, to borrow a phrase from JRR Tolkien, a sub-creation.  The author creates a world of his own imagining and then animates that world.  But it is not a creation ex-nihilio, but a sub-creation.  To be intelligible it must rest upon reality as it really is. A good story should also be entertaining, but to be good it must wrap a narrative around a particular aspect of reality so as to let the light of truth shine upon it.   A bad story may also be entertaining, especially if we are uncritical of what we are reading or seeing.  In fact, it often is in order to mask the ugliness of the story.  Ultimately what makes it a bad story is that it distorts reality.  It puts forth a false idea of truth and goodness, redefining them in subtle ways.

Stories have such a powerful effect on children because of their unbridled capacity for wonder.  Wonder gives them a much more expansive view of reality which makes them particularly apt to see the message attached to the narrative.  They don’t just read a book or watch a movie, they insert themselves into the world created by the author and move about.  This is why a whole generation of now adults grew up playing Star Wars and why another generation is growing up playing Harry Potter.  If you don’t want your children pretending to be magicians, using magic for good or ill, then you would not want them to read these books.  Children will play in the stories they hear and read.

There is also a bit of a mixed message that is being sent.  Magic, sorcery and divination are all presented as intrinsically evil by the Church (c.f. CCC 2117) but presented as something that can be used for good by the Harry Potter books.  Since “intrinsically evil” implies one can never use it for good, this sends a rather mixed message.  In short, on the one hand we have a story where the hero uses it and on the other we have stories in Scripture where it is strongly condemned regardless of how it is used.   Deuteronomy 18:9-12 describes magic as an abomination before God and tells how a believer should respond in the face of it.  One need not wonder what would happen if Harry met St. Paul given the latter’s interaction with the magician in Acts 13:6-12.  The point though is that a child will not naturally allow a contradiction to exist and thus will reject one story and accept the other.  One can hardly imagine that, without proper guidance and formation, the child will almost always choose the more entertaining story.

What is Magic, anyway?

A fuller understanding of magic itself will help us better grasp the inherent danger; a danger that is growing daily as our culture is re-paganized.  There are about 20,000 books on Amazon that describe different Wiccan spells so we are talking about more than just mere sleight of hand or some fringe movement if we merely follow the market. Magic is not a sub-creation created in the mind of the author, but something that exists in the real world. Magic is about harnessing superhuman power and using it to overcome our natural limitations.  So, when we speak about magic what we are really talking about is angelic power.  Angels by their nature can act upon material creation simply by willing it.  They can manipulate pre-existing matter in any matter that they wish.  This is exactly what those schooled in magic and the occult are trying to do.

The problem is that evil angels, demons that is, are willing to share this power with human beings.  Not in order to help them but to entrap them.  They give them superhuman powers through spells and the like in exchange for control of them.  By grasping at a power beyond them, they submit their own human strength to the demons.  The demons are only too happy to comply because it makes them “like God” because it is a cheap imitation of God’s power of miracles.  Ultimately it is an attack on God and the humans are simply pawns who end up bearing the brunt of it.

The Harry Potter books never say where the magic comes from, but it comes from the place that all magic comes from hell.  It can seemingly be repurposed for good, or else it would lack appeal, but ultimately this good is a mere smokescreen for the evil that lurks behind its power.  This repurposing of magic for the good is the theme behind another fantasy story, one that acts like the magic elephant in the room anytime Harry Potter is discussed–The Lord of the Rings.

Magic is a key element in the Lord of the Rings as well, and yet, most would say these would be categorized as good stories.  To grasp how it is different from Harry Potter we must return to what was said earlier about the source of magic.  If magic, at its core is angelic power, then there is nothing wrong with angels using it.  It is their natural power.  Those who naturally use magic in the story, namely the Elves and Gandalf, are not human.  Gandalf is not a man but an angelic being called a Maiar who had taken human form.  He and the Elves are, in Tolkien’s sub-creation, angels.  It is natural for them to use “magic” and thus they are not seizing something that does not belong to them, but applying their given powers in pursuit of the good.  The story makes clear that all those lesser creatures who ultimately try to harness that power, even if for good use, ultimately come to ruin.  It is a story ultimately against magic and not for it.  And in that way it is vastly different than Harry Potter which celebrates its use by men and women.

Abusing Wonder

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There is a national movement that is being played out in libraries, schools and bookstores in which drag queens read come and read to children.  The Drag Queen Story Hour is touring the country and drawing publicity wherever they go.  “Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) is just what it sounds like—drag queens reading stories to children in libraries, schools, and bookstores” according to its website.  Aimed at 4-7 year old children, these events are little more than child abuse however for reasons that ought to be readily apparent.

There probably has been “story time” for as long as there have been stories, which means almost always.  From time immemorial children have loved it because it feeds their soul.  Childhood is a time of wonder, a time where a child’s natural desire for truth, beauty and goodness are fed.  Stories are one of the means by which wonder is sparked and truth is found.  It makes use of the power of wonder to set them on the path of truth.  The architects of Drag Queen Story Hour also know about the power of childhood wonder, but they abuse it.  They abuse it by making the story-teller the focus rather than the story.  And in this way we can accurately say that these events are truly child abuse.

Why This is Really Abuse

This seems like hyperbolic rhetoric until we examine it a little further.  It was called child abuse, not just because it abuses their sense of wonder, but child abuse because it abuses childhood.  Man has natural desires that need to be fed.  The highest of these desires is for knowledge of the truth.  It is not the strongest, that privilege belongs to sexual desire, but it is the highest and is tied to our ultimate fulfillment.  Wonder is the fuel that sets man on the journey for truth.  Thanks to a child’s natural development, sexual desire is curbed for almost the first decade and a half of their life.  This creates room for them to develop their capacity for wonder and to find its ultimate fulfillment in Truth.  For full development of the child they must be allowed space for creative play, learning and discovery.  Story time is meant to fill the gaps where experience is lacking. 

To manipulate this natural course of development is the very definition of abuse.  Children are not naturally sexual beings nor are they particularly curious about sex.  We know this because of their natural hormonal development (sex hormones remain steady and relatively low for the first 10-12 years of life), but also because they exhibit a natural (and healthy) sense of shame.  These story times are meant not to sexualize children, at least not directly, but to remove their otherwise healthy sense of shame.  Once they do develop sexually, the protection of shame will be gone and the child will be particularly apt to participate in sexual activity.  But also, by removing their sense of shame, and this is the really important part, they also lose their natural protection against sexual intrusions.  A child with no sense of shame will not tell another adult they have been violated because they think it is normal.  This early sexualization is not really about them at all, but to make them into victims who offer no resistance.  To see this as anything other than an attempt to normalize pedophilia is to ignore the facts.

But it also has a second purpose that is closely related to the first.  The “revolution” in the Sexual Revolution is not for unbridled sexual activity.  The revolution is that it is the means by which a new world order can be imposed from above.  The old order, marked by Christian morality and founded upon the family, has to be overthrown.  It will be replaced by slavery to vice and founded upon the fiat of Big Daddy.  People who are addicted to vice are easy to control because they will regularly give away their freedom for a hit.  The Sexual Revolution is a direct attack on both Christian morality and the family.  And the Drag Queen Story Hour is yet another example. 

The New World Order

It is an obvious attack on Christian morality by breaking down the walls that have kept people free.  According to its website “in spaces like this, kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where people can present as they wish, where dress up is real” (emphasis added).  Notice the subtle use of revolutionary language first of all.  But the problem is that dress up can never be “real” because we are not the masters of reality.  Reality is something outside of us and only those who conform themselves to it, can truly operate freely within it.  Children are given wonder to discover reality, not to make up their own.  To abuse that is to make the next generation the revolutionary foot soldiers. The restrictions are there to keep us free.  Christian morality has, for the past two millennia, given the guiderails to reality.  Remove those guiderails and all that is left is power to keep order.

Story time replaces the family.  Parents have always told their children stories, even when they couldn’t read.  It was the primary pedagogical tool in the parents’ teaching toolbox.  It was the means by which true values were passed from one generation to the next.  All of this happened within the confines of the home, enabling wonder to run free and safe, while questions abound.  Parents would answer the questions and give their children not just stories but truth.  But now story time must be done outside the home so that indoctrination can occur.  A distinctly parental activity becomes a public one.  One more chink in the armor of the family. 

“It takes a village to raise a child” may not actually be true, but it will be made true unless we put a stop to this nonsense.  Children are being abused and are being set up for further abuse.  We are raising the lost generation unless we act counter to this movement.  The Sexual Revolution is winning and if we do nothing to stop it, then we will all be living in a new world order.

The Glory of God

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Within the Christian vocabulary there are a number of terms that are regularly bandied about, but cry out for definition.  Grace immediately comes to mind as one of the most common.  A close second however is the term glory.  We know it is something that we are supposed to give to God in everything we do (1Cor 10:31).  Short of that however we are hard pressed to describe what this actually entails.  For something so important then it behooves us to reflect on exactly what we mean when we speak of the glory of God and how it is possible that we could actually “give” it to Him.

Because we cannot know God as He is in this life, we spend time contemplating His attributes—His goodness, His power, His wisdom, His omniscience, His Immutability, and so on.  But God Himself “spends His time” contemplating only one—His beauty.  That is, His beauty captures all of His attributes in their wholeness, proportionality, and radiance.  Sacred Scripture has a word for this undiminishing beauty, glory.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Glory

In theological terms God’s beauty, that is, what He is eternally contemplating, is referred to as His intrinsic glory.  From a human perspective this might seem the very height of narcissism, until we call to mind that all goodness and truth are found in God.  The Father, in gazing upon (or knowing) His perfection generates the Son.  From the mutual love of the Father and the Son for the Divine Perfection proceeds the Holy Spirit. Basking in the light of His infinite perfection, God has no need for anything other than Himself and yet, still He created.  Without any need, the only reason for creation must be found in Himself, that is, it must be because of Who He is.  Out of love of His own goodness, He desired to communicate that goodness to creatures.

No finite creature could ever “hold” the infinite goodness and so He makes a multitude of creatures, each with the purpose of reflecting His goodness, even if to a lesser or greater degree.  Or, as St. Thomas says, “the entire universe, with all its parts, is ordained towards God as its end, inasmuch as it imitates, as it were, and shows forth the Divine goodness, to the glory of God” (ST I, q.65, a.2).

From this notion, theologians develop the term extrinsic glory.  This is the reflection of the intrinsic glory that is found in creatures.  The Psalmist proclaims “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps 19:1) and St. Paul reminds the Romans that “Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made” (Romans 1:20).  Simply in existing, all things reflect God’s glory.  But He also willed to make creatures who not only reflected His glory, but could bask in it with Him.

The proof of this is within the story of creation, as elucidated through the scholastic dictum, “first in the order of intention is last in the order of execution” sheds further light on this.  The last act of creation, that is, the first act of the Seventh Day, is God’s “command” for man to bask in it by joining in God’s rest seeing all things as “good, very good” in reflecting the glory of God.  Man is invited to set aside this time specifically for basking in the “after burn” of God’s glory as a perpetual reminder of his purpose.

Man, then, among all visible creation is the only creature with the capacity to “give” God glory.  Like the rest of visible creation he reflects it, but with his unique powers of knowing and loving he can also give it back by acknowledging it and willing his participation in it.  This is what we mean when we say that man gives glory to God—not that God doesn’t already have it, but that through adoration and praise he may willingly return it to God.

Glory as a Temptation

Man is constantly confronted with two temptations.  The first is to see only the glory and to forget the One Whom it points to.  God has put just enough traces of His glory in creation so that man will seek out the true source.  But even these mirrors are so beautiful that there is always the temptation that they eclipse the One whom they were meant to image.  We can fall in love with the creatures and forget the Creator.

While this temptation is ever-present in our fallen world, it is the second temptation that is the more serious of the two.  With the capacity to give God glory comes the (seeming) ability to keep it for ourselves.   This is the sin of Lucifer and his minions and forms the seeds of pride within us.

Now we see that St. Paul’s admonition to the Corinthians to do all for the glory of God is no pious sentiment, but a program of life.  Every thing that we think, do, and say should find its reference point in magnifying God’s glory.  Our Lord too wanted this to be our program of life.  He told His disciples that their light, that is their reflection of God’s glory, should so shine that when other men see what they are doing they know immediately that it is not their own work, but a manifestation of God’s glory (Mt 5:17).  This constant referral of all things to God’s glory increases our share in it both now and in eternal life—“ whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God.”

The Mystery of the Transfiguration

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One can hardly begin to imagine the amazing things that the Apostles, especially the inner trio of Peter, John and James, saw during their time with Our Lord.  But if you were to ask which event stood out above the others, the answer might surprise you at first.  You might think for St. Peter it would have been the event of the miraculous catch or walking on water, but instead he mentions only one—the Transfiguration.  Given nearly three decades to reflect upon it, the Vicar of Christ in his second encyclical still finds it to be the most formative event in His life, describing himself as receiving honor and glory from God the Father when he was an eyewitness of the majesty of Christ on the holy mountain (c.f 2Pt 1:16-19).  It is this truly awe-inspiring event on the mount of Transfiguration that the Church invites us to celebrate today.

To set the tone, it is worth mentioning that the Transfiguration is one of the few events in the life of Christ which is found in all three Synoptic Gospels.  The Holy Spirit thought that this episode was not only formative in the life of the Apostles but ought also to be for the Christians that were to follow.  For each of the mysteries of Christ’s life are recorded within Sacred Scripture not only for our knowledge but as invitations for our participation.  The Church reminds us of this invitation by including this feast with the liturgical calendar because, as Pope Pius XII reminds us, although these historical events occurred in the past, “they still influence us because each of the mysteries brings its own special grace for our salvation” (Pope Pius XII, Mediator Dei, 165).  It is then the Church’s hope that we will lay hold of the special grace attached to the Transfiguration.

What the Transfiguration Reveals

Grasping what made this experience so monumental for St. Peter will help us to drink more fully of the mystery ourselves.  In this single event we find a compendium of Christology.  The Transfiguration reveals the fullness of the Person of Christ—true God and true man.

When asked, most Christians would say that Ss. Peter, John and James witnessed His divinity.  This is true to a certain extent, but what they saw was the glory of His sacred humanity.  A moment’s reflection on the accounts will make this clear.  First, their reaction betrays this belief.  They are clearly awed by the fact that “His face shone like the sun and His garments became white as light” (Mt 17:2), but they are not at any pains to look away.  Instead when the Divine presence is manifested in the cloud, they “fell on their faces” because they know that “man shall not see me and live” (Ex 33:20).  It is the word spoken by the Father that reveals Christ’s divinity to them—“This is My beloved Son in Whom I am well pleased.  Listen to Him” (Mt 17:6).

His divinity, according to St. Thomas, was also made known to the Apostles in His power over the living and the dead.  Elijah was(and still is) among the living.  He has never died and lives within some heavenly realm until his return to defeat the Antichrist as one of the two witnesses (c.f. Rev 11:3-12).  Christ had power to summon him.  Christ also was the Lord of the dead, able to bring forth Moses from the realm of Abraham’s bosom.  It was to preach to them of His Exodus, that is His Passion, Death and Resurrection, that He brought them forth.

One suspects that the profundity of the Transfiguration for Peter was not just because it revealed Christ’s divinity to Him, but because it also put flesh around the divinity.  It is the foundation for what has since been explained as the Hypostatic Union.  Although it would take the fullness of Christ’s mission and the gift of the Holy Spirit to realize it, the Apostles now knew that this was a man, but no mere man, that was walking around with them.

The Second Person of the Trinity, the “Beloved Son” is God.  In the fullness of time, He took to Himself a human nature without setting aside His divine personality.  He remained and remains a divine Person that used a human nature (not a human person) as His instrument for our salvation.  In the natural course of events, when a body and soul are fused together in conception, a person is formed.  But in Christ, the body and soul united to the Second Person of the Trinity so that He supplied the personality.  This is why we can accurately say that God became man and not that a man became God.

This uniting of the human nature with the Eternal Word is called the Hypostatic Union.  This union means that the body and soul of Christ enjoy special privileges.  One of those privileges was the Beatific Vision.  This is the direct vision of God that all the blessed in heaven possess; each being able to see all things in their divine relationship.  It is a source of constant joy and glory so that this beatitude overflows from the soul into the body, making it shine like the sun.  This effect, one of the four qualities of a glorified body, is called Clarity.

It is a miracle that is, a suspension of what naturally happens that the effects of the Beatific Vision did not flow into all the regions and powers of Christ’s soul allowing Him to suffer and sorrow.  Otherwise He could not be the “Man of Sorrows.”  Likewise it is a miracle that His Glory did not overflow into His body.

The Transfiguration is a result of God “suspending” this miracle so that the natural clarity of Christ’s body shines forth.  He suspends this miracle to reveal the other three qualities of the glorified humanity at other points in His public ministry.  He shows His natural agility by walking on water, His natural subtlety by passing from Mary’s womb, leaving her virginity intact and His impassibility when He was unharmed by the Jews attempts to stone Him.  But because clarity is perceptible to the human eye, the Transfiguration becomes a testimony to the full humanity of Christ.  It is the testimony of the fullness of divinity and humanity in this single event that leaves the indelible mark on St. Peter’s mind.

The Transfiguration and Us

The Hypostatic Union plays into this in a second way as well.  In Mystici Corporis Christi, Pope Pius XII says “[F]or hardly was He conceived in the womb of the Mother of God, when He began to enjoy the Beatific Vision, and in that vision all the members of His Mystical Body were continually and unceasingly present to Him, and He embraced them with His redeeming love.” (75).   It was the Beatific Vision that made each one of us present at the Transfiguration.  He performed this miracle then not just for the Apostles, but for each one of us individually.  He simply awaits our active participation in this mystery so that He can give to us the graces He has already won.

Like all of His mysteries, there are personal graces to be found for each one of us; graces we discover through personal meditation upon the mystery itself.  There are also the more “generic” graces attached to the mystery of the Transfiguration as well.  Blessed Columba Marmion articulates a three-fold grace that Christ wants to give us when we ascend the summit of Tabor.  The first is the grace of increased faith.  We can re-echo the Father’s declaration by proclaiming, “Yes Father that is Your Beloved Son.  I believe.  Help my unbelief.”  Secondly, there is the grace of hope.  The Transfiguration reveals to us our destiny.  By sharing the Sonship of Christ, we come to share in His blessed reward.  Finally, there is the grace of charity won by doing whatever He tells us.  The commands of God are always supplemented by the power to fulfill them.  And in this regard, the Transfiguration becomes a great source of salvation here and now.

Beauty Will Save the World

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The mark of a truly wise man is that he is able to gather the seeds of wisdom in his midst and fears not to adopt them as his own.  Sometimes the wisdom is even snatched from the lips of an idiot.  Case in point: one of the wisest men of the 20th Century, St. John Paul II, was unafraid to adopt as his own the thesis of Dostoevsky’s character Prince Myskin in his novel The Idiot that “Beauty will save the world.”   In his 1999 Letter to Artists, the Pope said

“People of today and tomorrow need this enthusiasm[sparked by wonder] if they are to meet and master the crucial challenges which stand before us. Thanks to this enthusiasm, humanity, every time it loses its way, will be able to lift itself up and set out again on the right path. In this sense it has been said with profound insight that “beauty will save the world” (Letter to Artists, 16).

Fast–forward to our day, seventeen years after the Pope put ink to paper and we, the “people of tomorrow,” are collectively more boring and duller than the simplest peasant from the so-called Dark Ages.  Our minds, thanks to their reduction to nothing but firing synapses, have atrophied paralyzing our capacity to wonder.  There is nothing new under the sun.  While the circumstances may have changed, the prescription is perennial—“every time humanity loses its way” it is the encounter with beauty that will set us “out again on the right path.”  What makes our circumstances rather unique is that in order for “beauty to save the world” it must first be rescued from the poison of subjectivism.

Most of us are quick to denounce relativism in both its axiomatic and moral forms.  But when it comes to its aesthetical claims, we find ourselves all too ready to concede that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”  If beauty is entirely subjective, that is a matter strictly of personal taste, then how can we join the Pope’s aesthetical revolution, a revolution that always “stirs that hidden nostalgia for God” (LA, 16)?

Is there Such Thing as Objective Beauty?

The linking of beauty with truth and goodness was deliberate.  The truth ignites the intellect, the good moves the will, but the beautiful strikes the heart.  Beauty’s grip on the heart gives it an indomitable power to move us.  It is found in many disparate types of things—there are beautiful beaches, beautiful people, beautiful art, and beautiful music—so that it transcends all categories.  In this way it is the third wheel of the other two transcendentals.  Unlike its transcendental counterparts, goodness and truth, it can only be known when it is experienced.  Someone may tell you something is beautiful, but you are merely repeating what they have said until you experience it for yourself.  Beauty, therefore, because it is completely practical, is always threatened by a subjective interpretation.

When asked to define Time, St. Augustine says he could define it if you didn’t ask him to.  Beauty is like that in that we know what it is, but it is difficult to define.  The most succinct definition is that beauty is the material expression of the inner most identity of a thing.  Beauty reveals what a thing is and leads to knowledge of that thing.  This is why St. Thomas defines beauty as “that which when seen, pleases” (more on this definition in a moment).

When we attach the adjective beautiful to each of the things mentioned above, we are saying that there is some quality in that particular object that sets it apart from other objects of its kind.  A moment’s reflection and we realize that the beauty is not in the eye of the beholder but in the object itself.  Before beauty can be in the eye of the beholder, it must first be in the object eyed.  Because beauty is objective, St. Thomas sought to articulate some principles by which the beauty in the object could be moved to the eye of the beholder.

In a paragraph on the Trinity (for what could be more beautiful than God Himself?) in the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas assigns three conditions:

“For beauty includes three conditions: integrity or perfection, since those things which are impaired are by that very fact ugly; due proportion or harmony; and lastly, brightness or clarity, whence things are called beautiful which have a bright color” (ST I, q.39, art.8).

  • A beautiful object has integrity meaning it reflect the fullness of the object’s being.  It lacks nothing that it ought to have.  A male peacock may have beautiful feathers, but if it is missing a leg then it tends towards ugliness.
  • A beautiful object has due proportion in that there is an order and unity to it.  Everything is in the right place and in the right amount.
  • A beautiful object has clarity in that what the object is, its ontological reality, shines forth.  Clarity means that the appearance (or sound in the case of music) of the object makes it clear what it is.

 These three conditions can be thought of as the objective components of beauty and give us a basis upon which to talk about and evaluate beauty.  We may call a church building that looks like an auditorium ugly not because we don’t like it, but because it lacks clarity and does not reveal what it is.  We may call DaVinci’s Mona Lisa beautiful because it has integrity, due proportion (it is filled with examples of the divine ratio) and clarity, even if the subject is a rather plain woman.

Why It All Matters

Once we recognize the objectivity of beauty we can return to St. Thomas’ definition of beauty as “that which, when seen, pleases.”  When St. Thomas refers to the beautiful as that which when seen delights he is referring to an intuitive seeing (knowledge) and not merely seeing with the eyes.  He is speaking of a delight of the intellect and not just the senses.  More accurately, the beautiful creates a delight in the mind that spills over into the senses, that is it strikes the heart.  “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is not proof of subjectivity but proof that there is a need to cultivate taste.  Mozart’s Requiem is objectively beautiful, but the fact that I may not like it, is because I have deadened my taste buds from consuming so much ugliness.  The beautiful must be slowly reintroduced to my system before I can fully enjoy its richness.

Why this discussion needs to happen is because Christians have abdicated their role as peddlers of the beautiful.  There is little beautiful Christian art.  There is little beautiful Christian music.  Even Christian movies are mostly ugly.  Rather than attempting to make something beautiful, using Aquinas’ criteria, they have tried to adopt the ugly forms the world uses and smuggle Christianity into them.  What comes out is something ugly and uninspiring.

A friend of mine and I were teaching a class together.  Before going to teach, we went to Mass.  As we were climbing the steps to go to the classroom, he said to me “that was a beautiful Mass.”  I agreed with him, but admittedly it wasn’t the first thing I thought of when I came out of Mass.  Those words left a lasting impression on me however because they were the last words he ever spoke.  A couple of minutes later he was on the floor after suffering a massive heart attack.  This was a holy man who had cultivated the habit of capturing the beautiful and allowing it to move him.  So moved that day that the Mass was like a springboard launching him from the sign to the full reality.  Please God he is seeing the full Beauty right now.  Ultimately this shows that beauty matters because Heaven is Beautiful and each encounter we have with it, only increases our longing for its fullness.

In an age in which all truth and goodness are thought to be relative, the power of beauty to move even the most hardened of hearts cannot be overlooked.  This of course assumes that we can present and point out those things that really are true, good and beautiful.  It just might be that beauty really will save the world!

On Nude Art

Anthropology, beauty, Theology of the Body, ,

On May 13, 1981, a day marking the 64th anniversary of Our Lady’s first visit to Fatima, Pope John Paul II was shot by a would be assassin just prior to giving his Wednesday Audience address.  The attempt on his life, its connection to Fatima and Our Lady’s intercession has been well documented.  What has often been overlooked however is the fact that he was in the midst of giving a series of catecheses that was to become the Theology of the Body.  Had the assassin’s bullet found its mark, the Church would have been all the poorer without this great corpus on our the meaning of corporeal existence.  It was more than just a great personal love for the man Karol Wojtyla that spurred Our Lady to guide the bullet away from every major organ in the Pope’s body that day.  It was also motivated by her great love for all her children, especially those challenged by lust.  For she had told the visionaries during their “visit” to hell that “more souls go to Hell because of sins of the flesh than for any other reason.” She knew of the Pope’s plan for “creating a climate favorable to the education of chastity” (TOB May 6, 1981) and that by embracing that education many souls would be saved.  It is no mere coincidence that the Pope had just completed an extended analysis of what is perhaps the greatest modern day challenge, pornography.  It is as if the Pope’s near death was Our Lady’s exclamation point on the previous week’s teaching.

The Pope began his discussion of pornography by pointing out that the human body is a perennial object of culture.  Because sexuality and the experience of love between man and woman is so deeply imbedded in what it means to be human, art and literature always find fertile ground in those two arenas.  But the Holy Father was also aware that the world, especially in the West, was rapidly being (re)transformed form a culture of the word into a culture of the image.  This resulted in a culture in which everything—from photoshoots to movies to reality TV shows to viral videos to hacked personal sex videos— finds its way to an audience.  With virtually unlimited access, the idea that certain things should be surrounded by discretion is anathema.  The Pope commented that even the use of the term “pornography” is a linguistic addition that represents a softening for what had previously been called obscaena, from which we get the word obscene.

The Puritanical Backfire

In many ways this represents a backfire of the puritanical approach that sought to keep even artistic representations of the naked human body hidden from sight.  The Church had forgotten some of what it meant to be Catholic—embracing all that is good, true and beautiful in the world—and adopted this priggish approach instead.  Men of the Church had even gone so far as to cover over nudes in Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel with unsightly loincloths.  But John Paul II was proposing a different approach, namely learning to distinguish between the obscene and the aesthetic through the development of  the ethos of the image.  So committed to this approach was he that he would later remove those same awkward loincloths in Michelangelo’s masterpiece in order to show “the splendor and dignity” of the naked human body (Homily at the Mass celebrating the restoration of the Sistine Chapel, 1994).

At either extreme the problem remains the same.  Without a guiding ethos, erotic art and pornography remain indistinguishable and we swing from license to prohibition and back again.  The ethos of the image provides an escape from this merry-go-round, but only if we are able to grasp two important points.

True art consists in taking ideas and imprinting them in matter.  It is the idea and the beauty with which it is presented that moves us.  This excitement of our aesthetic sensibilities then moves us to further contemplate the idea.  There is a certain universality of beautiful art as the particular is abstracted away.  This power to move however can be abused when the artist attempts to move the viewer or the listener merely by exciting their aesthetic sensibilities.  Now it is no longer the idea and the clarity in which it is presented that moves us, but the direct appeal to emotions.

The second point is related to the first.  Unlike all other objects that appear as the matter of art, a person is an object that is also a subject.  This means there is always a certain dignity attached to the human body as the subject of art which can never be lost, even if it is abused.  Instead, according to the Saint, the offense comes in the intention of the artist. If the artist intends to present a nude body so as to convey some truth about masculinity and femininity then one should consider it erotic art.  If, however, their intention is to present a body so as to excite sexual desire in the viewer then this would be considered pornographic.  This may even include someone who is not fully naked.  This is a favorite trick of Social Media and sites like FoxNews.com who like to present soft pornography in the form of “See such and such’s Beach Bod” or “Watch such and such’s Wardrobe failure” as click bait.

The Spousal Meaning

While there is a certain grey area between erotic art and pornography, there are far less than 50 shades.  In fact John Paul II thought it rather easy to discern the intention of the artist—whether or not the spousal meaning of the body is violated.  What this means practically is whether the work of art enables the viewer to more deeply understand the meaning of masculinity and femininity—of what it means to be a person.  Just as the body reveals the person in the real world, so too should the nude body reveal that there is a person (even if the model is anonymous) there.  As philosopher Roger Scruton puts it “The pornographic image is like a magic wand that turns subjects into objects…It causes people to hide behind their bodies.”  They become simply objects of desire and nothing more.

Regardless of the intent of the artist however, the Pope was realistic in that we are fallen and prone to what he calls the “look of concupiscense” in which we may look at a beautiful nude and still be moved to desire.  For that we must begin to develop what I will call a “spiritual aestheticism” as a corrective.  This means that we develop a taste for objective beauty in all arenas of our lives.  Only then will we see beauty in the human body and be moved to contemplation.  Returning to Scruton he gives what I think is an excellent tool for self-examination.  He mentions that the truly beautiful should stir our imagination (our bodily step towards wonder in our minds) and not fantasy.  The moment we find fantasy rising in our minds we know we have crossed over.

George Weigel once called the Theology of the Body a “theological time bomb” that was set to go off some time in our century.  Thanks to the intercession of Our Lady of the Rosary on that fateful May day in 1981, the fuse has already been lit.  Please God that the first target will be the scourge of pornography—not just to remove it from the moral landscape but to free all of us to see the beauty of the human person in and through the body.

 

On Reading Great Books

beauty, Culture

One of the marks of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth Century was their propensity for burning books in an attempt to “cleanse” the culture of any spirit that was contrary to their ideology.  Anyone who has read or seen the Book Thief can see an example of those who acted as a cultural remnant to keep the great works alive.  Every totalitarian culture has needed this remnant to act, and unfortunately ours is no different.  Interestingly enough though, we willingly give them away and no actual book burning is necessary.  Instead we bury them under a mountain of dust.  We cannot really say why other than “reading is boring.”  But I believe there is a deeper reason at work here, one that needs to be brought out into the light of day so that we can restore literary works to the prominent role they have held in nearly every culture that has gone by.

According to the CIA World Factbook, the United States has a 99% literacy rate.  Despite this incredible fact that nearly everyone can read, so few choose to except when absolutely necessary.  I deliberately referenced the CIA World Factbook and spoke of the “incredible fact” of nearly everyone being able to read.  At the heart of the Information Age is the fundamental confusion between information and understanding.  We confuse having a lot of facts about a thing with having an understanding of it.

Most people read merely for information.  They increase their store of facts, but have not increased their understanding.  In many ways, our patron saint is Cliff Clavin who could bombard the patrons at Cheers with fact after mind-blowing fact.  But all of these facts without an overall context in which to place them leaves us fragmented.  Where do these facts fit into reality and how do they help explain it?

Cliff Clavin

Of course, reading also takes a great deal of time and attention.  If I am reading merely to increase my store of information why bother reading at all when I can simply turn on the TV?  The average time a TV new show in America devotes to each subject is less than a minute.  This gives the viewer no time to interpret what the meaning of what they just saw is and they assume that the facts speak for themselves.  If the media is wise (often like serpents) they will spin the presentation of those facts and hide the interpretation within that presentation.  The point however is that each event become merely like an episode on a sit-com with very little connection to some overall story.  By next week, the focus will be on a new set of facts.

Reading for understanding however takes in information but attempts to fit it into an overall context.  It seeks to understand so that one might explain.  You are left fundamentally changed by an encounter with a good book because you have moved from understanding less to understanding more.  You will forget facts, but understanding never ceases.

There is a second reason why we do not read and that is because we have been conditioned to be chronological snobs.  To read the good books assumes that those who have gone before us are wiser than us in some way.  There is a certain inequality that must naturally exist between a teacher through speech or writing and a student.  We tend to think that those who have gone before us were simpletons.  We don’t read Aristotle’s metaphysics and his ethics because we proved his physics were wrong.

Even if we read good books by the authors who are still with us, we don’t like the presence of this inequality between teachers and students.  We prefer to have “facilitators” and not teachers.  All of the great men throughout history however were great readers and schooled in the classics.  Read the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and see what a love of reading and learning turned him into.

Obviously it is not enough to say why we don’t read.  What makes reading an integral way for us to grow in understanding?

The most obvious reason is that we can only learn from teachers who are somehow present to us.  Books makes the great teachers who are absent present to us.  It is as if we can have a conversation with the greatest minds of those who ever lived.  I have long claimed that St. Thomas Aquinas is my spiritual father because of the conversations I have had with him through his writings.  The fact that he is a saint obviously helps facilitate that learning as well, but whether the author is a saint or not, reading allows us the vantage point of reality that is only possible when we “stand on the shoulders of giants.”

Culturally, we suffer from a form of ADD in which we cannot sit still or concentrate for any length of time.  This is because we have forgotten how to control our imaginations and memory.  The minute things are quiet, our imaginations begin to run amok.  However when we read, the mind seizes control of these two faculties to form images and recall other things related to what we are reading.  This soon becomes habitual and we have greater control of them even when we are not reading.  In many ways, reading can help to undo this effect of the Fall.

In reading this essay, one could rightly sense a certain amount of personal prejudice for reading Old Books.  The Old Books have stood the test of time not because they are particularly well written (most of them are), but because they shed light on the eternal truths.  As CS Lewis says in his introduction to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation, we ought to be prejudicial toward the Old Books because,

Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and especially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period.  The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we.  But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.

What makes Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets so enduring is his portrayal of the good and evil that runs through man’s heart.  The Divine Comedy is remarkable not just for its innovative use of terza rima, but also for the imaginative manner in which the author depicts man’s journey to his ultimate end that Dante built on St. Thomas’ philosophical vision of man.  With all the books on marriage and family being written today, which one could supplant Homer’s Odyssey in portraying the family as the center of civilization?

In closing, I can find no better summary than that of Chesterton (another giant we should mount), “It is always supposed that the man in question has discovered a new idea.  But, as a fact, what is new is not the idea, but only the isolation of the idea. The idea itself can be found, in all probability, scattered frequently enough through all the great books of a more classic or impartial temper, from Homer and Virgil to Fielding and Dickens. You can find all the new ideas in the old books; only there you will find them balanced, kept in their place, and sometimes contradicted and overcome by other and better ideas.  The great writers did not neglect a fad because they had not thought of it, but because they had thought of it and of all the answers to it as well.”

Finding Beauty in the Church

beauty

One of the great tragedies of recent times is that we have lost the sense of the beautiful.  We have become so focused on the practical that we are no longer concerned with the beautiful.  What is beautiful is thought to be only one’s opinion.  After all, beauty is in “the eye of the beholder.”  Some of this attitude has also made its way into the Church, especially when it comes to the building of churches.  The Catechism attempts to correct this attitude by reminding us that the buildings that Christians construct for divine worship ought to be seen as “not simply gathering places but signify and make visible the Church living in this place, the dwelling of God with men reconciled and united in Christ” (CCC 1180).  In other words, the church buildings ought to be beautiful.

Everything that exists shares in the transcendental properties of truth, goodness and beauty.  It is God who has each of these absolutely so that each experience of one of these properties can be a path to knowledge of Him.  This is why philosophers have always thought them to be objective and not dependent on anyone’s opinion.  Certainly in a fallen world we can struggle to recognize them, but that does not change the fact that they are not merely someone’s opinion.  In a culture that is dominated by the image, it is the beautiful that holds the most promise of leading us to God.  It is through beauty that we can be led to truth and goodness.

St. Thomas defines beauty as “that which when seen, pleases.”  At first glance this seems to be supporting the idea that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”  But what St. Thomas means by “seen” is in the intellectual sense—as in grasped.  The fact that it must be “grasped” reminds us that beauty is in the object and not in the “eye of the beholder.”   To further explain beauty, he defines its three constituent elements as integrity, due proportion and clarity.  Integrity means that there is a wholeness in that a thing has all that it should have.  Due proportion refers to an inner harmony so that all of its various parts fit together to make the whole.  It also refers to a thing being proportionate to its purpose.  Finally, clarity or radiance is related to the other two in that it is a measure of the object’s ability to communicate its wholeness and proportionality to us and revealing what it is and what it is meant to be.  While most people could not define these three elements, they still refer to them when they perceive that something is “missing something” (integrity), looks like it should be something else (due proportion) or simply doesn’t look like it should (clarity).

So then Catholic churches are beautiful only to the extent that they reveal what is going on in them.  In other words, a church is beautiful when the theology that underpins the architecture is true.  This theme of what makes a church beautiful is taken up in Cardinal Ratzinger’s book, Spirit of the Liturgy.  His point mainly is that because the Liturgy itself is a work of God and is meant to reveal a heavenly reality it cannot change.  What can change are the externals (like the architecture and décor of the church) which serve to amplify and clarify these heavenly realities.  The church building ought to serve as a sacramental reality.  Like all sacramental it should refer to the past, the present and the future.

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First, it recalls and fulfills the temple by revealing the continuity between the Old and New Testaments.  It is a continuation of the Temple where there was sacrifice and the presence of God.  This is why the altar is always the centerpiece of the church.  The altar reveals what the church is for—the re-presentation of the sacrifice of Christ.  Without an altar you do not have a Catholic church.  It is also why the Tabernacle should be situated inside the church building and right behind the altar.  If the Tabernacle is stuck in some far away chapel, the reality of the presence of God receiving our sacrifice is more difficult to detect and there is a subtraction of its overall beauty.

The Christian church buildings were meant to be a continuation of not just the Temple, but the Synagogue as well.   The synagogue was the place of verbal prayer and scripture reading and teaching.  This is why the ambo is set off from the altar.  The Word remains enshrined in a place of honor.  One difference is that synagogues faced Jerusalem because it was regarded as the place of God’s earthly presence while churches faced east.  This is because the Church has always interpreted Psalm 19 as representing Christ as the rising sun.  This is meant to reveal the cosmic dimension of the liturgy and the belief that the Lord will return from the East.  It is also why prior to Vatican II the people and the priest both faced the same direction—they were both anticipating and praying for Christ’s return when we will all participate in the Liturgy of Heaven fully and not in sign.  This understanding clearly was lost once the priest faced the people.  Once this meaning is no longer grasped we begin to see churches in which the people sit around the altar in some fashion, facing each other.

The great churches also have pillars and walls that were decorated with flowers and ivy.  This is meant to serve as a reminder of the Garden of Eden when the entire world was God’s Temple.  God created the world and gave it to man as a space of worship.  It is also meant to be a foretaste of what is to come in the “New Heaven and New Earth.”

Finally, the church building ought to be so decorated as to give us foretaste of our heavenly future.  This is why we find statues of the saints within the sanctuary itself.  The statues of Our Lady are usually situated somewhere near the front on the right side of the altar.  She is the Queen of Heaven and Earth that sits at God’s “right hand arrayed in gold” (Ps 45).  All of the statues portray the saints not as they might appear in history but as they might appear in their heavenly glory.  There also ought to be depictions of the angels as well to remind us of all the members of the Church Triumphant that join us in each liturgy.

Obviously there is much more that can be said and should be included with the architecture and decoration, but the overall point is that the goal of church buildings ought to be beauty.  If you want to increase Mass attendance, build beautiful churches.  Insofar as the architects depart from the three aspects of beauty that Aquinas mentions, they will fail to convey to the people the magnitude of what is going on.    As Dr. Denis McNamara says in his book Catholic Church Architecture and the Spirit of the Liturgy, “..good liturgical architecture ought to be like good preaching.  It should attract and please the uneducated, edify and educate those who bring grater knowledge and delight the specialist who is capable of deep contemplation.”