Rejoicing in the Works of the Lord: Beauty in the Franciscan Tradition

The Beauty of the Human Heart

37 The BeauTy of The huMan heaRT For medieval thinkers, beauty was not simply understood as the object of human desire, contemplation and love. Beauty framed a spiritual journey of transformation: a via pulchritudinis. We become what we love. Just as the world around us gives brilliant testimony to order, measure and proportion (three properties of the beautiful), so the inner world of spiritual transformation witnesses to the dynamic power of Beauty as Cause and Principle for all that is.51 Beauty cannot simply remain something we admire, contemplate from afar and appreciate, as if the world were a large museum that we visit from time to time. Beauty, living beauty, requires that we enter into the dynamic of divine love and participate in the beauty of the world, the beauty of rational love and the beauty of God. For Franciscans, the experience of beauty is, first and foremost, an experience that informs and transformslife.Ifweareauthenticallyinvolvedintheexperience of created and rational beauty, we become artists, co-creators of beauty in the created order. In this chapter, we consider more carefully the turn inward inspired by the experience of beauty. We see how the recognition 51 In Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2006), Ann Astell explores the Franciscan aesthetic through Bonaventure’s writings. She identifies his Legenda Major as an icon, “consciously crafted as a work of beauty in honor of the saint whom Bonaventure regarded as God’s artistic masterpiece.” Astell parallels the Legenda Major with the Itinerarium to show how, for Bonaventure, the form of a work mirrored its message. A teaching on the transformation of Francis must itself be beautiful. Its form reflects that of the transformative human journey into understanding and loving union with Beauty itself. Mary Beth inghaM 38 of beauty in the world is only the beginning of our journey toward divine Beauty. The journey inward In his Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, Bonaventure makes use of Platonic notions of exemplarity and participation in order to ground the human journey as one of imago Christi. Through meditation upon the life of Christ, and the life of Francis, the individual becomes inwardly transformed into the image of the Beloved. This process of transformation involves the centrality of Francis as the icon of Christ, of creation as the Sign of Beauty, and of human desire as the impetus for the journey. The Itinerarium’s six stages of illumination mirror the journey of Francis and are themselves the medium through which persons move toward union with that Beauty beyond human comprehension. Chapters three and four mark the midpoint of the Itinerarium, where the soul enters into itself first, as reflection of God in its natural powers and second, as those same powers are reformed and made beautiful by grace. As the intellect reflects upon its own capacity for understanding, it comes to recognize “that light which enlightens all who come into this world, and which is the true light and the Word in the beginning with God.”52 In The Threefold Way, Bonaventure lays out the stages of purgation, illumination and union. The second way, the illuminative, involves the imitation of Christ. One gazes upon the first truth and is thereby elevated to the intelligible realm. Here is the affection of charity raised to God and expanded to the neighbor, emptied of all that is worldly.53 This is the realm of Divine Wisdom, the Art of the Father, the divine Exemplar that is Light.54 52 Bonaventure, Itinerarium, III, 3, WSB II, 87. 53 The Threefold Way, n. 10 in Writings on the Spiritual Life, Introduction and Notes by F. Edward Coughlin, The Works of Bonaventure, X (St. Bonaventure: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2006), 128. 54 Spargo, The Category of the Aesthetic, 101. the Beauty oF the human heart 39 In order for the soul to reach its fullest perfection, it must be clothed with the theological virtues, faith, hope and charity. For this, it needs the Mediator, Jesus Christ. The image of God in the soul is reformed and “made into conformity with the heavenly Jerusalem.”55 The soul, now believing, hoping and loving Christ, “recovers its spiritual sense of hearing and of sight, – its hearing so that it might receive the words of Christ, and its sight that it might consider the splendors of that Light.”56 Bonaventure’s reflection on the spiritual senses draws...