Tuning in to God!
Aesthetics allow us to perceive and experience beauty, which in turn attunes us to divine revelation in such a way that our outlook on the world is forever shifted toward a more religious, contemplative, and active lifestyle. Gadamer writes, “Our reflection is almost always oriented toward the visual arts, and it is in that realm that our aesthetic concepts are most readily applied” (17). Many notable authors use aesthetics to strengthen their arguments, and they unanimously agree that sensation is spiritual, and the arts are an instrument of communication across continents.
Balthasar believes that art is always (to an extent) religious in that it invites us to contemplate creation. For him, there is an aesthetic dimension to Christ. He writes that Jesus is “God’s greatest work of art,” that he signifies the union between God and humans, and that he is “the expression of the Son of Man’s humiliation to the status of slave of the Lord … [In Christ] God reveals himself as the eternal two-and-one, Father and Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit” (117). This theme of aesthetics for making connections between Christ and ourselves is also noted by Gonzalez-Andrieu, who adds that another crucial part of this connection is love: “… the good news of God’s closeness and love that he [Jesus] comes to bring — in sight, in sound, in touch, in movement. It is this that transforms everything. Jesus came to embody aesthetically in his life and death what it is to be human and to be loved by God” (38). God’s expression of his love for us through Jesus (as recorded in the Bible) is translated to us down through the ages through the arts. Balthasar adds that the art is what draws us back to ordinary discipleship in order to see the face of God in the flesh (425). So divine revelation and aesthetics are not just what is revealed to us as beautiful, but also that which engages the totality of our senses, our aesthetic capacities, and attunes us to what is revealed, to recognize God in our everyday lives!
Because of this personal attunement, our notion of beauty is bound to change according to our individual perceptions of Christ. But how does discipleship play into our busy everyday lives? Is there even a place for it? The answer is that our lives cannot go untouched by God in some way. Pieper believes this is done through (religious) festival, because at its core is celebration of the world. Though Pieper sees an “invisible aspect” to festival celebration, he also writes that it “can attain a physical form, can be made perceptible to the senses, only through the medium of the arts” (52–53). As a result, the benefits of the festival reach and affect our souls through the arts, and restore wonder that draws us away from the regular workaday world. In other words, we need to celebrate beauty in our lives. Years later, this idea was picked up by Giozueta, who agrees that life is about living, animated by our actions more than our words: “In popular Catholicism, the people’s action is mediated by physical symbols, such as the bread in that is shared and the flowers placed on Jesus’ corpse, by physical gestures, such as kissing the crucifix or kneeling alongside Mary, by physical movement and processions, by singing songs and playing musical instruments, and by the very physical effort exerted in preparing the church for the celebrations. Our relationship to God thus involves embodied action in the world; it is not merely a private sentiment or feeling” (103). Through applying our senses we can have encounters with Jesus in song, in art, in prayer, in taking the Eucharist, and in countless other ways.
To recognize this beauty, this gift of life and recognizing God in our world, Balthasar says we must first attune our senses, particularly our eyes and ears. We train our eyes to see beauty in a painting in its colors, harmony, texture, etc, and in an animal’s movements, to see the vitality of the animal itself, the soul made manifest in body. Seeing is an encounter with reality, which Balthasar says is always part spiritual (wholly material does not exist). We have both spiritual and physical senses that allow us to perceive God. Balthsar writes, “In his love for his neighbor the Christian definitely receives his Christian senses, which of course, are none ‘other’ than his bodily senses, but these senses in so far as they have been formed according to the form of Christ…love is not ‘act without image’; on the contrary, love is what creates image and bestows shape absolutely” (424). And because Christ appears in all images, and is particularly manifested in the church, Balthasar says that it is by showing love, or being a good Christian disciple, that we attune our senses to recognize the beauty in our surroundings and in our lives.
If we are called individually as disciples to see the beauty in our world, how can entire communities better appreciate what is beautiful? The answer lies in art. It reaches out to our senses, to change us for the better, and therefore become closer to God in our newly enlightened states. Art is universal. History offers us examples of this, from Garcia-Rivera’s writing; “Our Lady of Guadalupe’s beautiful difference came at a time when Juan Diego’s people were dying by the thousands of disease brought in the wake of the Spanish conquest. That Mary would appear resembling, in part, an Indian was wondrous. Even more surprising, her beauty included the Spanish as well. An Indian Mary might raise eyebrows with pious Spaniards. Yet such Spaniards might tolerate it. An Indian-Spanish Mary, a half-breed, the incarnation of human difference, would be a scandal. Nevertheless, this Lady’s beauty charmed even the Spanish and continues to have a profound influence on all the people of the New World” (39). We are sometimes also called to an aesthetics grounded in suffering, because art has the responsibility of expressing both the good and the bad we encounter in life. To Cone, “His [Jesus’] suffering was real and his pain was great. He died the the death of a natural man” (44), which makes us able to connect to Jesus’s own experiences. Art allows anyone who suffers to enter a real encounter with Jesus through the beauty of, for example, a spiritual. Spirituals might not be a matter of “high culture” yet it is music that resides in the very bones of people. It’s through those sensual connections with people that we are brought together and are able to “sense the non-sensual” — the divinity that is all around us, and if we can just attune our aesthetics, engage all our senses and open our hearts to love, the world will become a more beautiful place for all of us.
