Stendhal writes in Rome, Naples and Florence about a celebration in St. Peter’s Square: “At that moment, there were only believers around me, and I myself was of such a beautiful religion.” Paul Claudel, for his part, writes in Scene V of the first day of The Satin Slipper: “What is beautiful unites, what is beautiful comes from God. I cannot call it anything but Catholic.” Finally, the Gospel states in Matthew 6:29: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they labour not, neither do they spin. But I say to you, that not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these.”
What is the link between these three texts? They are all about beauty. But not just any beauty. They deal with the religious and, strictly speaking, theological dimensions of beauty. There is a certain risk in bringing theology and beauty together. The dominant theology in contemporary Catholicism tends to consider beauty, particularly that of rituals, to be, at best, superfluous and, at worst, a guilty distinction that detracts from authentic religion, which, as we know, consists in maintaining high and sad moral sentiments about the state of the world. As for theology that presents itself as “progressive” and “critical,” I have to say that it regards beauty as a suspect category, insofar as it lends itself poorly to the study of “structures of domination” and the “deconstruction of gendered stereotypes.”
This should not discourage us. Ever since Nietzsche, we have known that considerations do not need to be topical to be meaningful. Thus, we must persevere in questioning these three texts, which speak to us of beauty and religion, but from very different perspectives. The first, by Stendhal, was written by an anticlerical atheist (remember his famous dictum: “God’s only excuse is that He does not exist”) who was suddenly moved by the beauty of the Catholic rite in a certain context, best summed up by the adjective “Roman.” The second, a great Catholic poet and playwright, speaks of the origin and effect of beauty, attributing to it an explicit theological character—beauty unites, beauty comes from God, and is therefore, in its essence, Catholic. Finally, the Gospel text seems to speak of something quite different—it tells us that a modest flower is better adorned than Solomon in all his wealth, i.e., the man who, for a Jew of Jesus’ time, embodied all the splendor of human power at its height.
Despite their differences, these three texts have one thing in common. They tell us that beauty is not, or not only, a matter of aesthetics. It is a deep-seated conviction of Western metaphysics that beauty is a specific matter, governed by specialists, who have a monopoly on the understanding of beauty, on its intelligibility. And yet, the three texts I have quoted speak to us of beauty in order to move, through it, towards something that is apparently something else. Stendhal speaks of beauty leading to belief. Claudel tells us that beauty unites us in truth. Finally, the Gospel tells us that the simplest, most unadorned beauty devalues everything in man that expresses the pomp of power.
Thus, beauty opens up. But on what and in what does it open? It is a bold statement to say that beauty is openness. In common perception, beauty is the opposite of openness. Beauty closes in on itself, through the perfection of its forms. Beauty is its own end, we are often told; it is self-sufficient. And we know that as soon as beauty claims to be “moral,” for example, it quickly ceases to be beautiful and becomes merely edifying. So how do we resolve the issue? Perhaps by considering that, despite appearances, the three texts do not abandon beauty to speak of a radically different category. Whether they speak of religious emotion (Stendhal), metaphysical truth (Claudel), or moral truth ruining the pretensions of the great of this world (the Gospel), all three texts still speak of beauty.
If they still speak of beauty, it is because religious emotion, metaphysical truth and moral truth are still beauty. This is not to say that only what is beautiful is religious, truthful and moral. This position, which is called aestheticism, is superficial—it believes, at bottom, that beauty has nothing to say about religion, metaphysics and morality, because it erases religion, metaphysics and morality. But what we are asserting here is radically different: we maintain that religion, metaphysics and morality are also beautiful, as beauty is beautiful, because “religion,” “metaphysics” and “morality” on the one hand, and “beauty” on the other, speak of revelation, and of an identical revelation.
Beauty as Revelation
This necessarily leads us back to beauty. What is beauty, and what is it as we find it in religion, metaphysics and morality? To try and answer this question, let us return to the Gospel text: it speaks of flowers, of every flower, more beautiful than King Solomon’s garments. It is a strange expression. Is every flower really beautiful? And why establish a hierarchy of beauty, which we say is always subjective, since de gustibus non est disputandum? If the Gospel overrides these banal objections, it is because there is an ontological superiority in the beauty of the flower, so that the least beautiful flower is nevertheless infinitely more beautiful than King Solomon in all his glory.
Why is there ontological superiority? Let us get one possible misunderstanding out of the way right away. It is not a question of “nature,” with all its familiar clichés and corollaries about the innocence of nature, its authenticity as the basis for its presumed superiority over “civilization” and, for example, the “expensive” nature of King Solomon’s clothes, resulting from an unjust levy on the poor. If flowers are so beautiful, it is not because they are “natural.” It is because they reveal.
The dictionary (Le Robert) gives us four possible meanings of the verb reveal: “1) To make known, to make known (what was unknown, secret); 2) To make known, by a supernatural way, what was unknown to men (and unknowable by reason); 3) To make known, to let guess or see something by a manifest sign; 4) Photograph. To make visible the latent image.” To reveal, then, is perhaps both to make known what is hidden, to make it known by a means not determinable by reason, and in the form of a sign that makes visible. What does the flower reveal? It reveals what we do not know, or no longer know. The dominant metaphysics teaches us that everything must be where it is, that it can only be where it is. This necessity results from the determination of the thing by intelligibility, which, whatever form this intelligibility takes—philosophical, scientific, economic, technical—teaches us that the thing is determined by laws that explain its presence, so that the thing’s presence in the world is evidence that we need only register as given.
The flower teaches us that, despite the laws of intelligibility, the flower’s presence in the world is the opposite of necessity and normality. In religious parlance, this opposite is called a “miracle.” The presence of the flower, of every flower, is miraculous. Because it is miraculous, the presence of the flower is a gift. But we no longer remember that it is a gift because, in our logic, there is evidence of the nature of things that makes nature a simple routine fact, a habit that has no other possibility than to be a habit, a routine. Our view of the world is routine, so that nothing ever appears to us as a gift.
But how does the flower teach us that its presence is a gift? Not by the application of a superior intelligibility that would merely confirm the routine nature of nature. The flower teaches us because it stirs us. This stirring is a mystery. We are not quite sure why and by what we are stirred, but suddenly the flower has ceased to be a routine given, a hollow evidence about which there is nothing new to say, to reveal its unheard-of singularity, which distinguishes it from all other things, and, through the perception of this singularity, the gift that is given to us, the gift that it gives us. Where does the shock come from? It comes from a sign. The flower has beckoned us in such a way that our entire attention is called, summoned by this sign. This sign is what we call “beauty.”
The sign “lets us guess or see something.” We could introduce a Platonic orientation here, and consider that the sign refers us to some idea, to some ideal archetype of the flower, of which the flower would only be the sensible translation. Instead, we should take up the idea of the “revealer” in the photographic sense of the term: the sign “makes visible the latent image.” But what “latent image” are we talking about? According to the diction [Robert], latency characterizes “that which remains hidden, does not manifest itself.” Thus, the beauty of a flower is a mysterious sign that suddenly reveals what is not manifest. There can be many reasons for not manifesting oneself. Because we do not want the manifestation, for example. But we can also consider that the unmanifested comes from a deficiency on our part; the unmanifested, the hidden, is only such because of our inability to discern it. It is only hidden to us because we do not know how to encounter it.
Once again, we must summon the metaphysical bias that leads us to grasp things only in terms of intelligibility. For a thing to be intelligible, it must expose itself, even if it means exposing itself as absence. This exposure presupposes that the thing is delivered up to the one who determines it, that it is posited outside itself as inert data, so as to be able to account for what it is. Thus, what we take to be the thing is not the thing itself, but its exposure. We might ask what the difference is between the thing and its exhibition. What is different is precisely this exposure, the fact of being exposed as an object. But what about the thing before this exposure as an object? Before exposure, there is the thing, but the thing as non-exposure, the thing as withdrawal from its exposure.
Why does the thing stand back from its exposure? Because it resists exposure, because it does not want to expose itself. For it to expose itself, we have to go through the operation of intelligibility, which is external to the thing, even when the thing is called “thought.” The thing is resistance to exposure, and we can say nothing more about it because what is both prior to this resistance and deeper than it, escapes us, and always will. Resistance to exposure is the life of the thing. The term “life” is used here as an analogy, drawing comparisons with the most remote reality—physical existence. Biologically speaking, physical existence is a continuous resistance to “death,” which is, by far and away, and in “quantitative” terms, one might say, the majority state of things in the universe. Similarly, life, in the sense in which I use the term, is resistance. But, unlike biological existence, it is not, or not only, resistance to death. It is “resistance” in general, irrespective of the distinction between biological and non-biological, and this is why it can resist the abstract process of determination by intelligibility.
Again and again, the thing resists its exposure; again and again, it lives. But this “life” and this “resistance” cannot be apprehended through intelligibility. If this were the case, resistance to exposure would be immediately undone. But the thing persists in resisting. If it persists in this way, it is because resistance does not allow itself to be determined. It does not expose itself. Or, if it does expose itself, it does not surrender. This is because, every time we try to grasp it, resistance retreats. It withdraws into an impregnable place where intelligibility has no access. And yet, it manifests itself; but as soon as it runs the risk of being exposed, no longer of manifesting itself but of being manifested, it withdraws. If resistance did not manifest itself, we would have no information about its presence. But if it did not withdraw, it would immediately cease to resist. Thus, resistance to exposure, the life of the thing, constantly comes and constantly withdraws. Nor should we imagine a temporal succession of the two movements. Life both comes and withdraws; because it comes, it withdraws; because it withdraws, it comes.
The “Advenance” of the World
We can create a name for this concomitant coming and going of life. We will call it “advenance.” Advenance is that which is constantly ad-vening, never that which has come. Ad-venir is both to come and to withdraw, so that it is impossible to grasp through intelligibility what is both being and non-being, movement and its opposite. Ad-venir is bound up with time, and like time in its depth, it is instant and eternity, the fullness of being and the flow of Heraclitean waters in which one never steps twice.
For man, advenance is the hidden, the unmanifested. Not because advenance does not manifest itself, but because man is incapable of perceiving this manifestation. He is incapable of doing so because he is entirely—and increasingly as Western metaphysics occupies the world—oriented towards the intelligible determination of things, so that, mobilizing all his lucidity, he is, at best, capable of perceiving advenance as negativity, refusal, resistance. But advenance is not negativity. It appears to us as such insofar as this is how it is best approached by man, but it sometimes, in rare instances, reveals another face: it reveals itself as a gift. Not as a gift given once and for all, but as a gift that never ceases to give itself, without ever being a given or a due, a gift that maintains itself as a gift.
When man envisages advenance no longer as something that resists but as something that gives itself, when his gaze crosses advenance, when the thing ceases to be an object and becomes once again what it has always been—a gift—then an upheaval occurs. This upheaval is always brief, even if it can happen again. It is brief because the very nature of advenance is to come and go; yet the human gaze is not accustomed to this movement of coming and going. The human mind would like to grasp the gift, to appropriate it, without fully understanding that advenance is elusive and that, as soon as we think we have grasped it, the advenance of the thing escapes, leaving us only with the object in its enclosure and passivity.
Beauty is the sign that “hints at or lets us see something” that is not manifest. Beauty is the sign of advenance, through which we perceive things no longer as a necessary and normal routine and dull “positing,” but as gifts, that is, as life. That things come into the world, that there is life in them, that gives itself and animates the world, is something we have all collectively forgotten, especially on our Western shores. And suddenly, we perceive this sign. In a flash, the thing reveals itself as unique, astonishing, prodigious. But this requires a singular gaze: a gaze that is not that of the owner who appropriates, or the exploiter who exploits, or the indifferent who is indifferent, but a gaze that consents to glimpse: this encounter with the thing consists in accepting that the thing has its life, that it preserves its intimacy and the secret of its being.
Beauty is a sign. The sign is what shows, never what abolishes or neutralizes. The sign shows the thing as happening; but this happening remains a mystery. Why does it happen? What is it about it that gives it life? The gaze that glimpses never solicits answers to these questions. It is careful to maintain a distance from the thing, but this distance itself becomes close and familiar, like a loving presence. Preserving the mystery of the world, but making that mystery tangible to us, is the task that beauty fulfils.
But why, then, if we return to the Gospel, is the humblest flower more beautiful than King Solomon in all his glory? This is so because the flower is not encumbered by any superfluous purpose. It’s there, “without why,” as Angelus Silesius famously said. The flower is there, in its simplicity; but this “simplicity” is what is most difficult to perceive and receive. The flower gives itself; it is all life and nothing but life. This is why its beauty radiates, and perhaps the humblest wildflower radiates even more than the most magnificent rose, because the wildflower is unencumbered by the reputation of its beauty. It is a pure gift, a joyful and silent consent to live, a priceless gift for those who know how to glimpse the gift that is given to us.
Does this mean that only nature is beautiful, because only in nature do we find the entire gift of life, without reticence or pride? That is not what the Gospel text says. It introduces a hierarchy. King Solomon’s garments, in all their richness, are less beautiful than a simple flower. That does not mean they are not “beautiful.” But they are less “beautiful.” Why? Perhaps because they are not there just to be “beautiful?” They are part of a desire to impress, to show dominance; they aim to justify royal power. Thus there is something of the superior charlatanism in them, which characterizes all power, dogged by the need to legitimize itself, and which Pascal ironically and mercilessly exegetes in his Pensées. King Solomon’s clothes are meant to be superb, to show that the king is the king, and his power is not to be trifled with. Perhaps this is why the humble flower of the field, swaying in the breeze of the plains, touches us more.
The Ends of Western Art
But the beauty created by men is not limited to royal garments. What about art? The text does not tell us, but is art, too, entirely devalued in comparison to the flower of the field? The answer is not unequivocal. And it is perhaps the major problem with art, and Western art in particular, that it is so obsessed with this question that it sees salvation, alternately, only in slavish imitation of the flower or in the desire to defy it, to prove that it can do better and, basically, to perceive the whole of nature as competition. Art, whether it defends or glorifies itself, is always constructed in relation to nature, that is, in relation to the question of re-presentation.
Why such an orientation in art? Because we have forgotten what happens. Very generally, we perceive nature not as something that happens, but as something that has happened. There is a major difference between these two types of perception. In the second case, nature has been created once and for all. It therefore imposes the evidence of its presence; it is the evidence of what is. Since it is there, all around us and within us, the only question is: do we want to imitate it or go beyond it? In either configuration, the starting point is re-presentation, either to stick to this re-presentation by being as faithful to it as possible, or to deny this dimension of re-presentation, to display the independence of art, in the manner of Magritte’s well-known painting proclaiming, “ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“this is not a pipe”). There is, in fact, another possible orientation of the mind: one that considers that, since art is only a matter of re-presentation, it threatens in principle the monopoly vested in the Creator, that of having created nature. Any movement of so-called religious purification (i.e., obsessive fear of competing with the Creator) is necessarily iconoclastic, because it knows only two dimensions: the Creator and the created, which is and must remain the Creator’s monopoly.
The realm of art is circumscribed by these three possibilities, all of which in fact stem from an identical conception of nature as something that has already happened. This is why the “revolution” attributed to modern Western art, whether for praise or denigration, is not a revolution at all. The detachment from nature advocated and practiced by this art, notably through the abstraction movement in painting, is not detachment at all. On the contrary, modern Western art is the culmination of the mind’s occupation with the re-presentation of nature as the realm of the happened. For this art form, nature constitutes absolute evidence, so that the new can only be elsewhere. Where does this “elsewhere” lie? In the dismantling of nature. Since nature is everywhere, and imposes its overwhelming self-evidence, art can only be a work of dismantling the self-evident, and therefore a critical work that does not go beyond the stage of criticizing natural, naturalizing re-presentations. Modern art is a protest against nature and the obsession with its re-presentation; it is another way of saying that Western art continues, more than ever, to be governed by the principle of re-presentation.
But art’s very nature is also to escape itself and its obsessions, to generate, from far and wide, unforeseeable, miraculous undertakings. This is what happens when art ceases to unfold in the shadow of re-presentation, and once again glimpses advenance This glimpse goes far beyond the usual labels of “figurative,” “abstract” and so on. Because it is no longer governed by the principle of re-presentation or its refusal; the work itself becomes advenance, in the sense that in it, life awakens, as life is in the flower. The work emerges into the world as a revelation of the unmanifested; in other words, as a gift; and in revealing itself as a gift, it reminds us that the whole world is a gift. The major work of art moves us, just as the beauty of the flower moves us. It moves because it reveals that the world is not what we think it is: not the delimited, unsurprising territory of what has happened, but a continuous creation that is happening today as it did on the first day, and to which man is invited to contribute. The major work of art teaches us that the world has never been there; it is always happening.
Once it is no longer governed by re-presentation, the work of art opens up to beauty just as much as the flower of the field. The hierarchy of judgment that devalues the splendor of King Solomon in his glory no longer applies to art. And yet, there is a hierarchy in beauty; among authentic works, nothing is equal—we perceive this intuitively. Where does this hierarchy come from? It results from the greater or lesser purity of the gift. I have already said that the superiority of the simple flower comes from its joyful, silent consent to live. This consent comes from within. It is without reticence, without questioning, without fear. It is so because the flower accepts to efface itself entirely behind its advent. Many things in this world are swollen with importance, because of the character of necessity and/or utility attributed to them by the human gaze. This “necessity,” this “utility,” ruthlessly pushes aside advenance in favur of the function that man assigns to things, which must be highlighted, as King Solomon’s coat is highlighted. The flower of the field, on the other hand, has neither necessity nor proven utility. Biologists will say that it obviously has a use in the chain of biological existence, and they would be right. But for the majority of those who contemplate it, this biological function takes second place to the simple, absolute beauty of the flower’s coming into the world.
Greater or lesser simplicity, withdrawal from the “self” (i.e., from the representations of the “self” that make up the “self”), determine the quality of advenance in the world. This is the greatest challenge facing the authentic artist. Creating art usually requires technical mastery, an awareness of one’s own talent, which in the artist determines an “ego” without which the artist dares not venture onto the steep path of creation. But, at the same time, beauty can only emerge in the abolition of the “subject,” in the search for patient simplicity that is no more than the oblivion of all theatricality, to be no more than the hand that paints, sculpts, writes a score. It is not the art form that is at issue. There is no pure art “in itself,” no arte povera which, through the conditions of its production, miraculously achieves the required simplicity. Baroque art, which is essentially rich, complex and “worked,” has often led to marvelous successes; whereas art that is supposed to be “poor,” “pure” and “sparing of its effects” can result in appalling bloat, because of its propensity to play the comedy of poverty. In truth, the dilemma lies entirely with the artist. Will he be able to overcome himself and, while retaining his science, have the humility not to parade it? Will he be able to move towards the inner emptiness that, in Rothko’s bleeding reds, suddenly brings out the splendor of the original red?
The Gift and The Welcome
Our commentary on the Gospel phrase has led us to beauty as the revelation of the unrevealed. We can now turn to Paul Claudel’s statement: “What is beautiful reunites, what is beautiful comes from God. I cannot call it anything other than Catholic.” How can we understand this? Let us start with the phrase “What is beautiful comes from God.” We said earlier that “beauty is the sign of advenance, through which we perceive things no longer as a necessary and normal routine and dull “positing,” but as gifts, that is, as life.” The gift sends us back to the giver; life sends us back to the one who makes it be. But the Giver stands back from His gift. Why is He withdrawn? Perhaps because the Giver does not want His presence to overwhelm the gift He gives us. Perhaps He wants us to rejoice in the gift He gives us, and for nothing to come between us and our joy, for from this absence of interposition comes authentic recognition.
But this withdrawal prevents us from knowing who the Giver is. It is impossible for man to go beyond encountering the life that is in things. This is why, even less than life, God allows Himself to be determined. This is also why “reason” is incapable of demonstrating the existence of God—any more than His non-existence, for that matter. To the very end, we will be asked to gamble. Given the domination exercised in the West through the metaphysics of determination, it is inevitable that this necessity of wagering will be perceived, with irritation or disquiet, as a lack, a defect. But we must question this spontaneous perception. Why must we be disappointed? Because we love reason, we trust it? We are right to love and trust reason. And, precisely, as Pascal has shown, the logic of the wager is perfectly compatible with a mathematized rational approach, which leads us to believe in the existence of God because it is in our interest to do so.
There must, however, be another reason for our frustration. It stems from our attachment, not to reason, but to certainty. We would like to be certain, once and for all, that God is—or that God is not. But we never will be certain. Why do we insist on certainty? Because certainty authorizes seizure, even seizure of nothingness, in the hypothesis that God is not. And with seizure comes power over things, their transformation into object forms capable of assuming the function we assign to them. Thus it is not reason we have to get rid of, but certainty.
Turning to God is not an “irrational” choice that we would risk by closing our eyes and jumping into the void. It is a choice that, like Pascal, we can judge to be perfectly rational, but which does not guarantee us any certainty. Faith is knowledge, but knowledge without certainty. This can be frustrating. But it can also be an opportunity to ask ourselves whether this knowledge without certainty is not itself a gift, a grace. What is this grace? The grace of believing. For knowledge without certainty like faith, certainty is replaced by love. Faith is therefore knowledge in love. Loving knowledge is not subjective knowledge. It’s knowledge that uses the intuitions and divinations of love to reach out to the beloved.
If it were not for the necessity of faith, man would dispense with love to go to God. And that is exactly what happens when we believe (without knowing that we believe) that God exists, so that He is no more than an object of study. But to believe is to love, and so to go towards God is to go through love. And what does love tell us? That “God is love.” This expression cannot be understood in terms of metaphysical determination. There is no concept that is love and that would allow us to define God. So, is the expression “God is love” meaningless? No. Love is precisely that which never allows itself to be limited or confined. It does not let itself be enclosed, because in everything it is already beyond that which claims to name it. Love is that which goes beyond love.
Where does this out-of-body experience come from? From a happy energy that spends itself ceaselessly and finds in its expenditure the conditions for an even greater, more intense expenditure. We know neither where this happy energy comes from nor where it goes. But it is this energy that makes it possible to give, and to give not just once, but constantly and ever more. So, through the revelation of beauty, that is to say, the advent of the world, we suddenly feel this happy energy.
But is it only a feeling? So far, we have said little about the state of mind of those struck by the evidence of beauty. We have simply spoken of a “mysterious stirring.” Could beauty be like the grace that shook Saul on the road to Damascus? It could be. But it could also be that, more often than not, this stirring was prepared. It was prepared by a disposition of the soul called “attention.” As a rule, we walk through the world without contemplating anything more of it. This is because we are not interested in the world; we are interested in ourselves within the world, so we only look at the world through the prism of interest. What is in it for me? What can this or that thing do for me? How can it be of use to me? In this way, without even being aware of it, we reduce things to their object form. Now, the object form can be useful to what we consider our interest. But it has no depth. It has no depth because there is no life in it. It is not a gift but a tool, or rather a util, to use Martin Heidegger’s expression. Occasionally, the util welcomes life. But this is a rare occurrence, which happens inadvertently and rather hinders the function we assign to util.
To see the world differently, we need to stand back, forget the tumult of our lives and the anxious pursuit of interest. In our world, as it is configured, this withdrawal is very infrequent and always fleeting. But it is enough for us to have been attentive to the world for a brief moment. What is the nature of this attention? It resembles a phenomenon we experience more often—the phenomenon of love. In genuine love, we look at the Beloved with passionate attention; no longer in terms of what we can get from Him, but in the mystery of who He is. Naturally, this mystery is never unraveled, nor must it be, so that the Beloved continues to be a revelation of the unrevealed in His presence.
The attention we pay to the world, and to things within the world, in brief privileged moments, is of the same nature. It is loving attention. For a flash, we become passionately attentive to the thing we are contemplating; we fall silent to let it simply be (but this “simplicity” is perhaps the hardest thing to achieve). We love it. Then comes the shattering revelation of the thing’s advenance, the revelation of beauty. The thing has responded to our love. But is it the thing that has responded, or rather the life within it? Life came to us because, from our loving attention, we called life and, through life, the happy energy that ceaselessly creates life.
The encounter with beauty is thus participation. It is participation in the life of life, that is; the energy that, out of love, makes the world be, the wind stir, the Mont Sainte-Victoire in Cézanne’s painting rise, the second movement of Mozart’s piano concerto No. 23 soar. “What is beautiful comes from God,” says Claudel. The encounter with beauty makes us part of God’s work; and if our feeble attention spans were sufficient, we would be sensitive to this work that is accomplished, not only in certain privileged moments, but also through the apparently most banal occurrences, the moments most devoid of “history.” But in the best of cases, we are only able to experience this transfiguration of “banality” a posteriori, when nostalgia—the awareness of “never again”—cloaks the past moment in a veil of pathos, enhancing its value.
Catholic Beauty
But Claudel also tells us that “beauty unites.” How does beauty unite? We might consider, for example, that beauty “unites” insofar as beauty has, up to a point, the virtue of uniting men in the same admiration. But this statement does not dig very deep. Beauty unites, first and foremost, because it brings the universe, and everything within it, back to their common origin. “Origin” does not mean something that happened once, a very long time ago. “Origin” means that which, at every moment, begins—the first manifestation. This first manifestation is the advenance that is constantly happening.
Beauty unites because it warns us—it warns us that the being of things is not in the deceptive evidence of the “there” of their presence in the world. The “there” is not being; it is only the “there” of their “being there;” and “being there” is not the being of the thing. The being of things is in their advenance, in their continuous arising. And advenance is itself the revelation of the unrevealed, the revelation of that which remains obstinately hidden and which is the gift of the world. The gift of the world refers to the Giver who eternally gives. This is why beauty unites things in their common origin, which is the gift given, not once but eternally.
Beauty unites those who contemplate both things and the world, in infinite gratitude to the Giver. Of course, this world is not perfect. For the time being, it is traversed by the assaults of the Adversary, whose names are “suffering,” “injustice” and “death.” The present world (a present that will last until its definitive transfiguration) is torn apart. But this heartbreak, however real it may be, in no way erases the absolute value of the gift. This is why beauty can unite the whole of creation in a common gratitude—a gratitude that will always remain “below” the gift, but which, for creation, is the only way to rise to the gift of the Giver.
We are at the opposite end of the spectrum from the West’s current approach to the world. For the West, the world is merely a collection of data to be interpreted and ordered in a certain direction, that of utility. It has no use for “gratitude” or “origin.” The West still tolerates beauty, out of habit. But you can sense that this bothers the West. It bothers it because, despite all the efforts of the “secularized” West to limit the world to the evidence of being there, beauty opens up, through gratitude, to that which goes beyond being there, to the sacredness of the world. This sacredness does not lie in being there; otherwise, our world, hungry for objects to consume, would be saturated with sacredness. Rather, it lies in what almost no-one sees any more, and to which almost no-one attaches any value: it lies in the advenance through which the common provenance of things allows itself to be seen: the blissful energy that, without ever tiring, gives and gives again, hoping for, but never demanding, a recognition that never comes.
In the current state of decrepitude of discourse, and in particular religious discourse, in the West, beauty is basically our ultimate theological institution. Which is precisely why Claudel calls it “Catholic.” That a poet as attached to orthodoxy as Claudel should confer this title on beauty is, at first glance, surprising. But, by bringing people together, beauty fulfils this Catholic function far better than current theological discourse, which is almost entirely concerned with translating hard Christian truths into the much softer, more comfortable terrain of Western humanism. It does so because it teaches us once again what the universal is—not what men call such, but what is such.
The universal is first and foremost the common origin. Sacredness is not a matter of “sacred” and “profane,” a division on the basis of which things would be divided, so that on the one hand we would have the domain of God or the gods, and on the other, the domain of men, where the laws of calculation and interest could triumph. Sacredness inhabits the entire universe, but only on condition that we glimpse the universe not from the “there” of the being-there of things, but from the advenance, which in everything and at every moment, arises and maintains itself in its withdrawal. The world comes into being because, in its ever-renewed provenance, it is a gift that gives itself. Seen from the perspective of this gift, the entire universe is sacred within the universe, which does not mean that we should lazily refrain from touching anything, but that man must develop a use of the universe in keeping with this sacredness.
From their common origin, things also derive a common solidarity. Western science and, above all, the ideology of that science, will pits the “struggle for life” and the principles of “species selection” against us. We believe that, beyond biological reality, there is a principle of solidarity between things, such that, for those who know how to glimpse, they illuminate each other. Discerning this mutual illumination is, in essence, the mission of the poet, whose task it is not only to manifest the beauty of all things within the world, but also the mysterious correspondences, the subtle arcana, that refer indefinitely from one thing to another, from one thing to the world, from the world to the thing.
Where does this solidarity come from? From their common origin, as I said. The thing is a gift. It is a gift, not only to the final dedicatee, but also to all other things. How does this gift materialize? It is expenditure and dispersion. In the gift, the thing gives itself to the world and to that fundamental reality of the world, which is time. As I have already said, the thing is not an ideal archetype. In accordance with the Giver’s will, it agrees to fall into time, i.e., to undergo wear and tear, indifference and, finally, dispersion in the course of time. It is entirely self-surrendering, as only genuine giving is. Expressed in theological terms, the gift of the thing is a figure—a figure of Christ’s sacrifice, whose ontological depth it does not reach, but whose sacrificial purity it approaches.
The final dedicatee of the gift remains—man. The human being who experiences beauty, i.e., the revelation of the gift, emerges from worldly banality into loving attention. This loving attention is enthusiasm, the Claudelian virtue par excellence. For the Greeks, enthusiasm is divine transport. This transport leads man into a world that is such that eternity itself changes him; the world as it truly is, different from the world of weariness, indifference and resignation—a truly Catholic world where everything stirs with the happy energy of the Giver and communes with other things and with itself; a world of foolish happiness where man, redeemed, becomes in turn a loving artist and pure energy.
A Theology of Beauty
Here we find Stendhal. “At that moment, there were only believers around me, and I myself was of such a beautiful religion.” There are two ways of interpreting this surprising sentence from a writer who is more or less explicitly atheist, very explicitly anticlerical, and not really known for his liking of religion. The first, shorter interpretation settles the difficulty by saying that these are “lightning rod” phrases, designed to numb the censure of Restoration governments, so that less orthodox assertions can pass. An eminent Stendhal specialist, Michel Crouzet, on the other hand, believes in the authenticity of the emotion expressed here, and sees it as a manifestation of Stendhalian religiosity—perhaps paradoxical, since it co-exists with “atheism,” but very real.
Stendhal is the apostle, to remain in the religious register, of the “hunt for happiness.” Morally speaking, he worships “energy,” the vital force, which distances him all the more from the already sentimental and maudlin Catholicism of the Restoration. He abhorred what he called “Jesuitism,” which was basically hypocrisy at the service of upward mobility. Why, then, is such a man seized with deep, heartfelt emotion at a celebration in Rome’s St. Peter’s Square, at the very heart of Catholicism?
He says it himself: it is beauty that summons this impression. Stendhal likes paradox, sometimes provocation; but unlike the various modern nihilist sects, he does not cheat beauty. He does not say that everything is beautiful; he does not say that everything that “transgresses,” everything that attacks, everything that serenades fashionable clichés is necessarily “beautiful.” On the contrary—only that which is beautiful is beautiful; and beauty is not a matter of chance. What is beautiful is that which is borne. Borne by what? Stendhal is no philosopher. He is more interested in what he feels than in where that feeling comes from. And yet, if we ask him, he tells us that he sees in beauty, perhaps, the energy that makes man not always mediocre; and, on the other hand, that energy is not only a matter of character, of determination—there is also gentleness, and even tenderness, as in those paintings by Correggio that he admired so much.
At this ceremony in St. Peter’s Square, Stendhal encountered, perhaps for the first time, the truth of beauty. Not the “beauty” of being there, in the sense, notably, of Greco-Roman paganism; but beauty in its rigorously theological dimension, as we have evoked and sought throughout these pages. This beauty is born of the inner strength of ritual, of the splendor of signs, and is not only beauty in itself, but the provenance of beauty, and the beauty of provenance, through the celebration of the advent of the world. Such is indeed Catholic beauty—the beauty that unites, to use Claudel’s terms: beauty as the advent of itself, that carries man along the path of enthusiasm; that is, of loving gratitude to the Creator and to His creation.
But while he can experience Catholic beauty, Stendhal cannot really recognize it. This is the meaning of his use of the fateful imperfect tense (I was of such a beautiful religion), which signifies that it is only a momentary emotion. Stendhal turns this revelation into a magnificently aesthetic emotion, like contemplating a painting by an unknown Italian master in a Galleria. Why is this so? Because, for him as for so many others, Catholicism cannot be just that—the absorption of personal energy into a greater, higher energy that floods the universe. Stendhal knows all too well what Catholicism is: the shenanigans of the Congregation, the pettiness of the royal government, which relied on the clergy to keep the people in line, the narrow-mindedness of the bigots. Because of all this grey reality, with which he had been at personal war since his youth, Stendhal can only consider the revelation in St. Peter’s Square from the point of view of “aesthetics.” And aesthetics, after all, is a radically different domain from religion, and one that only meets the latter from afar, and always on the surface, never in depth.
This brings us to one of the miseries of modern Christianity, which, for reasons that would take a long time to go into, has all too often become, in practice, a machine for “moralizing,” disserting on the state of the world, praising the dominant values or even examining one’s conscience. The political and ideological banners change with the times, from clerical monarchism to liberal progressivism, but in the end, none of this really matters. It is the same Christian discourse, virtuous and reasonable, perpetuated in perfect good conscience, so that it hardly notices that we are paying less and less attention to it.
But that’s not what Christianity is—in fact, it’s the opposite of that. Christianity is not a discourse, a certain convenient way of being in the world. It is an aesthetic; not in the sense of self-proclaimed aesthetes, but because, as I have tried to show in these few pages, the authentic test of beauty is the form of truth when it is given to the world. To be a Christian, then, is not to gossip about the state of things, not to display effusive moral sensitivity, not to endlessly interrogate one’s conscience in the clammy confines of interiority. It is about receiving the transfiguration that suddenly, for the time of a glance, frees our being from the world of all its representations; and it is about participating, with a joyful, loving impulse, in this transfiguration.
As a well-known saint once said, echoed by a great writer: “All is grace.” Until we have convinced ourselves that Christianity lies in this statement, and nowhere else, we are unlikely to convince others.
Featured: Cestello Annunciation, by Sandro Botticelli; painted ca. 1489-1490.
