From Beauty to Truth

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An oppressive pall drapes the world today: war and greed, disregard for human life, disdain for the environment. Some days I don’t want to leave the house, open Facebook, read the newspaper or listen to the news because all I see and hear is death, destruction and despair.

Amid this gloom, beauty appears as an anomaly. Stories of war drown tales of the aid offered to refugees. A fine-tuned ear is needed to hear modern voices repeating the plea Mohandas Gandhi made almost 100 years ago, to “Live simply, that others may simply live.” Numerous countries are legalizing abortion even as the U.S. Supreme Court just overturned Roe v Wade. That 35 faith-based organizations just cut their investments in fossil fuel companies seems a futile gesture in the face of the ongoing devastation caused by global warming.

The Church teaches that we are to assist those in need and to care for creation. These teachings are only one of the many ways the Church offers beauty, a beauty found also in luminous stained-glass windows and pious statues, and it is through beauty that we can bring the truth of our faith to the world, as I was reminded last week in the seminar presented by Fr. Patrick Briscoe, OP at the Catholic Media Conference.

Somewhat light-heartedly, Fr. Briscoe advocated using the Summa Theologica to teach the truths of our faith, but he acknowledged that even St. Thomas Aquinas’ brilliance wouldn’t reach the minds of most people today, many of whom reject the very idea that religion might have good to offer.

I agree wholeheartedly that the Summa is a wonderful resource for theologians, but even Catholics turn away from its scholarly approach. For example, when discussing Christ as a shepherd, Aquinas argues about principal and secondary authority.

By contrast, Psalm 23 brings out the truth of the Good Shepherd with words that even many nonbelievers can recite – “The Lord is my shepherd, there is nothing I shall want. ...” The pastoral beauty conveyed by the psalm reaches the soul in ways that Aquinas’ intellectual arguments can’t.

Fr. Briscoe also recounted a tale about St. Dominic that is instructive for those who seek to evangelize today. As a young priest, St. Dominic was traveling with his bishop through France. They stopped at an inn whose owner was an Albigensian — he believed the heresy that taught, among things, that the physical world was inherently evil and that Christ only appeared to have a human body.

Imagine the scene, if you will: a Catholic bishop and a future saint take lodging from a man who believed a heresy condemned by the Third Lateran Council. One might think there would be acrimony on both sides, but the bishop apparently went peacefully to bed, while Dominic stayed up all night talking with the innkeeper. Unfortunately, there’s no record of what was said. Dominic was well-educated – he’d studied the arts for four years and theology for six – but somehow I doubt he did any sort of intellectual bullying. I can’t see the innkeeper putting up with any badgering, certainly not for an entire night. Instead, I visualize the two of them sitting at the table, beer mugs in hand, talking and listening to each other. Dominic must have been persuasive, because by morning the innkeeper recanted his beliefs.

What does this have to do with beauty? Hearts are won by emotional appeals, not intellectual arguments, and all humanity appreciates beauty. I suspect Dominic showed the innkeeper the beauty of the truth, not just the intellectual reasoning behind it.

In discussing this with Fr. Christopher Gray, pastor of St. Mary of the Assumption Parish, he agreed that beauty does lead to wonder, but he noted that the writings of saints such as Aquinas “have a great deal to teach humanity today, as so much of how they lived was precisely through contemplation of the eternal through the worldly ephemeral. What we ought to do today, they did.”

I agree that much of what the saints wrote is worth reading, but I think that for many people beauty is the path to intellectual aspects of our faith.

We have a beautiful Church – our Scripture, Tradition and prayers, the stories of our saints, our music and our art. Let us look on the beauty of our Church as a sunlit flower in this world of uncaring concrete and steel, a gentle way in which we can attract others to the truth.

Marie Mischel is editor of the Intermountain Catholic. Reach her at marie@icatholic.org.