The Cross as the Fulfillment of Beauty
This is a Socrates+ exclusive piece by Grace Payne.
Love is the ultimate expression of beauty and of light, as Victor Hugo concludes his classic Les Misérables, “the beautiful is nothing but the summit of the true…To love beauty is to see the light”[1].
Throughout the glimpses of beauty experienced in music, literature, and art, we can come to find the fulfilment of beauty and love through the redemption of our souls in Christ.
Thomas Aquinas argues this clearly throughout his writings, “an ineffable reality that is manifest in the experience of beauty. Great art, in short, brings us to a disposition of adoration and love”[2].
The truest fulfilment of beauty is experienced in the completed desire for love found in Christ – “no caresses tenderer than your charity, and no object of love is more healthy than yours. Truth, beautiful and luminous beyond all things”[3].
To summarise Jonathan Edwards, “Thus to experience love is to experience beauty; to be loving is to beautify; to be filled with love is to be beautiful”[4]. Aesthetic beauty fills one void, but when that beauty has eternal meaning, it is not only satisfying but further awakens our hearts to desire more beauty.
Later, throughout the journey out of the shadowlands and into heaven in The Great Divorce, CS Lewis’ narrator encounters the woman who exclaims, “I am in Love”[5]. As we gaze and pursue the beauty found in the Lord’s creation expressed in nature, the arts, the sacraments – we ourselves are echo her statement; we participate in the love and faithfulness of the gift of Christ.
Hans Urs von Balthasar states, “How do we become beautiful? By loving him back, him who is eternally beautiful. The more love grows in you, the more beauty grows, since love is the beauty of the soul”[6].
Just like the Lady, love grows to overtake the lives of followers of Christ.
There is no greater beauty than the act of salvation.
It is the pinnacle of costly beauty, of a love that is self-sacrificing.
Mostly known for his sculptures and paintings, Michelangelo Buonarroti was also a gifted poet. He ends one of his most famous sonnets with a perfect conclusion, “Neither painting nor sculpture can any longer quiet the soul, turned to that divine love which opened its arms on the cross to take us”[7].
By tuning our hearts, ears, and eyes to embrace and enjoy the beauty around us we begin to see a glimpse of the divine creativity of the Saviour’s love for this earth and His creation.
In countless paintings we see the love and the blood flowing from his side, we hear the tension in the orchestras and compositions, and we see the compassion and care poured out.
It is only in the mind and wisdom of God that He could turn something so brutal, so physically excruciating to experience and witness into the most beautiful gift of love.
While the Roman’s designed crucifixion to distort and destroy the beauty of man’s life, soul, and physicality, “from a theological vantage point it is arguably the most beautiful thing God ever did and ever allowed for the benefit of his creation.
Therefore, Christian aesthetes should be on the lookout for beauty’s residence in both subtle and surprising places”[8]. It is only through the Lord’s wisdom and his mercy that “God’s beauty embraces death as well as life, fear as well as joy, what we might call the ugly as well as what we might call the beautiful”[9].
In this magnanimous and diverse act of sacrifice and beauty, the love flowing from his side continues to pour throughout the different ways in which His love is felt and experienced daily and momentarily.
Just as each individual is made uniquely and distinctly, the facets and methods of experiencing the love of God differ as well.
While differences can sometimes cause division, the multifaceted and far-reaching beauty of the Love of God finds a way to embrace all the different expressions. In the embrace of a loved one, the ever-changing expressions of the sky and seasons, a jaw dropping word of musical or visual art – expressions of his love, nature, and beauty abound.
When we love the Lord our God it is not merely his creation we are enjoying. Indeed, is it not the wonder and detail of the plants, the magnificence and splendour of a finely architected church, it is not the words and poetry which speak so eloquently and give us words to express our gratitude.
It is an “embrace of my inner man, where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain, where there is sound that time cannot seize, where there is a perfume which no breeze disperses, where there is a taste for food no amount of eating can lessen, and where there is a bond of union that no satiety can part. That is what I love when I love my God”[10].
Our capacity to love, for beauty, for salvation truly comes from our relationship and obedience to the Lord’s hand moulding and guiding our lives.
As Van Bevel states on love, “The central place of love appears also from the fact that every virtue is a form of love…. Love orients us in life… all good and evil depend upon love. Love operates forgiveness and quenches every sin, whereas lack of love is the cause and ratification of all sin. Love is a dynamic reality; it possesses beginning and perfection; perfect love is perfect righteousness”[11].
The love of the Lord is the fount of all true beauty, all goodness, all reality – and by embracing his love and dwelling on his beauty – we find our own love and our own feeble beauty become strengthened.
If beauty were merely aesthetic and a visual representation, it would not stand the test of time.
True beauty is only known and fully experienced through the self-revelation of the Lord’s beauty.
As Keats eloquently portrays in his famous Ode on A Grecian Urn, “Beauty is truth; Truth is beauty – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”[12].
The Lord’s self-giving and sacrificial love in every way is the fullest epitome of beauty.
As Karl Barth beautifully states, he “is Himself supremely and most strictly an object of desire, joy, pleasure, yearning, and enjoyment”[13].
This Good Friday, I pray we would remember – the sacrifice of the Son on the cross is the fulfilment and epitome of Love, and the ripples and waves of this generous love still extend to all who would look today.
[1] Victor Hugo (2012) Les Misérables (Canada: HarperCollins Canada, 2012)
[2] Richard Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 119.
[3] Augustine and Chadwick, Confessions, 31.
[4] Louis J Mitchell, Jonathan Edwards on the Experience of Beauty (US: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2016), 6.
[5] CS Lewis, The Great Divorce, 126.
[6] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Volume II (US: Ignatius Press, 1984), 136.
[7] Richard Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 183.
[8] Ed Rybarczyk, For Him Who Has Eyes to See, 62.
[9] Richard Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 193.
[10] Augustine and Chadwick, Confessions, 183
[11] Van Bavel, Love as cited in Ed Rybarczyk, For Him Who Has Eyes to See, 49.
[12] John Keats, Ode On a Grecian Urn (Poetry Foundation, n.d.), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn.
[13] Richard Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 139.
