Art leads one to Truth

(and ultimately to God)

Ana Braga-Henebry, M.A.

                God is the standard of all beauty. He is Beauty Himself.  We are made by Him, and our destiny is happiness with Him one day.  Thus, deeply embedded within our spiritual nature is a yearning, a longing, a desire for beauty—the desire for God Himself.

                Religious and non-religious people alike are moved, albeit individually and differently, by beauty.  What happens when one faces a work or scene of beauty? Be it a model of Greek statuary, an Impressionist painting, a Fra Angelico mural; in architecture: a well proportioned building, or even a beautiful street of old houses; in nature itself: a clear dawn just before daybreak, a crisp Fall day, a gorgeous sunset over the ocean. The human spirit, when faced with the appreciation of beauty, suffers a sense of longing.  It’s almost as if beauty can hurt.  A deeply beautiful, moving piano sonata of Beethoven or a Chopin prelude can bring tears to one’s eyes.  This sense of longing is the human heart desiring God, its ultimate destiny.

                The culture of death is also the culture that glorifies the Ugly.  The Ugly as a rebellion against God and consequently against the human spirit itself-- a God-destined spiritual being.  We are surrounded by it. Young female models with ugly clothing and bored faces, dark make-up.  Pop music of dull harmony, thudding primal rhythm, and splintered dissonant melody.  Ugly urban decay, ugly human action—selfishness, war, greed—all the fallout of sin. The culture of death is the culture of sin – sin, the purposeful turning away from beauty and light.  A culture that hates the beautiful and shuns the revealing clarity of light also shrouds the malformed actions of abortion in the dark and isolated closet of an individual’s right to sin.

                Exposure to beauty ennobles the human soul.  By surrounding himself with beautiful things man actively seeks and moves toward to his Creator.  This will eventually provoke in him a desire to search more and to discover the source of this beauty.  The source of his cause of longing.

                Professor John Saward’s book by Ignatius Press entitled The Beauty of Holiness and the Holiness of Beauty: Art Sanctity and The Truth of Catholicism points that the Reformation was an iconoclastic reform, a quite literal smashing of sacred art and architecture, that resulted in a purging of the sacred in art from our culture and the loss of our sense of perceiving sacredness in works of art. The frontispiece to the book bears a striking quotation by Pope Benedict XVI, then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, that places the cultural situation succinctly into perspective:

The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.  Better witness is borne to the Lord by the splendor of holiness and art which have arisen in the community of believers than by the clever excuses which apologetics has come up with to justify the dark sides which, sadly, are so frequent in the Church’s human history.  If the Church is to continue to transform and humanize the world, how can she dispense with beauty in her liturgies, that beauty which is so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the Resurrection? No. Christians must not be too easily satisfied.  They must make their Church into a place where beauty—and hence truth—is at home.  Without this the world will become the first circle of Hell.

                To close, I present my own translation of a sonnet by the Brazilian Benedictine monk, Dom Marcos Barbosa, OSB, a prolific poet and author. My master’s thesis involved translation a selection of his poetry to the American audience. Dom Marcos was a loving, holy and artistic Benedictine, and our family in Brasil was most fortunate to have a lifelong friendship with him.