Von Balthasar says somewhere that beauty makes demands, and suggests that this is a natural analogy to the attitude of faith, which is like an aesthetic response to the form of Christ.
Beauty makes demands. If I hear the central movement of Beethoven’s Appassionata or any of a dozen other pieces of music, I can’t do anything else. I’ve got to listen. Try not breathing deeply when you catch a whiff of hyacinth. Try not looking at a beautiful landscape, a beautiful building, a beautiful woman. It’s possible not to look, but it takes an act of resistance, a rebellion.
David Bentley Hart appeals to this to establish the objectivity of beauty: If beauty were purely subjective, could it command attention, could it fascinate, could it surprise?
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
The Revival of Patristics
On May 25, 1990, the renowned patristics scholar Charles Kannengiesser, S.J., delivered a lecture at the annual…
The Enduring Legacy of the Spanish Mystics
Last autumn, I spent a few days at my family’s coastal country house in northwestern Spain. The…
The trouble with blogging …
The trouble with blogging, RJN, is narrative structure. Or maybe voice. Or maybe diction. Or maybe syntax.…
