The practice of goodness is accompanied by spontaneous spiritual joy and moral beauty. Likewise, truth carries with it the joy and splendor of spiritual beauty. Truth is beautiful in itself. Truth in words, the rational expression of the knowledge of created and uncreated reality, is necessary to man, who is endowed with intellect. But truth can also find other complementary forms of human expression, above all when it is a matter of evoking what is beyond words: the depths of the human heart, the exaltations of the soul, the mystery of God. Even before revealing himself to man in words of truth, God reveals himself to him through the universal language of creation, the work of his Word, of his wisdom: the order and harmony of the cosmos—which both the child and the scientist discover—“from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator,” “for the author of beauty created them.”*
[Wisdom] is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her. For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness.* For [wisdom] is more beautiful than the sun, and excels every constellation of the stars. Compared with the light she is found to be superior, for it is succeeded by the night, but against wisdom evil does not prevail.* I became enamored of her beauty.*– The Eighth Commandment, CCC 2500
Before Discussion Notes
- St. Thomas Aquinas- what is beauty? Intersection of three things: 1. Wholeness- exists as one thing, all parts contribute to a unity 2. Harmony- parts are in relationship to each other 3. Radiance- light or shine, splendor, colorful, clarity of form, when the form of something shines forth.
- Some beauty is only seen after training.
- Transcendental- goes above any categorical dimension
- All being is true. Form makes something to be. Objective intelligibility makes something true, to be.
- Whatever is is good because it appeals to the will. The will recognizes something desirable. I want union with that. I want understanding of that. The good is being apprehended as desirable. Once you make that move, the will is awakened.
- Whatever is is splendid. Attractive. Of the three, beauty is maybe the first because it’s visceral. It’s what is first noticed, the first to get attention. My will then has an appetite for it. Von Balthazar- “It’s the smile of the mother that then awakens the child to being.” The baby recognizes something beautiful. It opens the baby to something being, something enticing to the mind and will.
- The particular beautiful opens you to the source of beauty.
- Josef Pieper- “Wholeness is what man strives for.”
- Beauty is sought for its own sake.
- Cultivate it. Discipline it. The whole point is to be useless seeking a goal that is within not without.
- Read, look at art, listen every day.
- Don’t surrender to lordship of autonomy, all about your subjectivity. No no. Train your subjectivity and take it and introduce to the world subjective value. Teach someone what to love. Direct love in the right way. Bring subjective into line with objective value. Tell them why it’s so beautiful. You need mentors.
- Every movie, song, etc today says whatever you want. Do whatever you want.
- Have a great mentor.
- Because the transcendentals are all grounded in being, they should be mutually implicative. The truth should leave you to the good. The beautiful should lead you to the good.
- The refinement of your aesthetic consciousness should lead to a refinement to your moral consciousness. There should be an integration of the whole man.
- Von Balthazar – Anything beautiful first arrests you. You’re stopped in your tracks by it. Then the beautiful elects you. You’ve been chosen. He says the beautiful sends you. You’re sent on a mission.
- “Beauty is arrowhead of evangelization.”
- Who am I that I get to experience this?
- Beauty and love leads to enthusiasm. You want to bring people in.
- Truly beautiful shakes you out of yourself and puts you in the presence of the divine. It’s terrifying because it wrenches you out of your ordinary consciousness.
- We always want to control things, it fits into my subjective consciousness. The truly beautiful breaks into and rearranges my consciousness. I become a different person because of it. I don’t control it. It controls me, and that’s frightening.
- Should go through transcendentals to the source. When you get stuck, it’s idolatry. Don’t get stuck. Allow them to carry you to the source.
- Ugliness is a privation of beauty that ought to be there. Wickedness is a parasite of the good.
- Order amores- what’s the order of love? God first, the supreme good.
Sacred art is true and beautiful when its form corresponds to its particular vocation: evoking and glorifying, in faith and adoration, the transcendent mystery of God—the surpassing invisible beauty of truth and love visible in Christ, who “reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature,” in whom “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.”* This spiritual beauty of God is reflected in the most holy Virgin Mother of God, the angels, and saints. Genuine sacred art draws man to adoration, to prayer, and to the love of God, Creator and Savior, the Holy One and Sanctifier.
– The Eighth Commandment, CCC 2502
Bonus
Farm to Jesus 