Beauty and Terror

Having heard Benjamin Britten's War Requiem performed recently brought me to ponder anew the relations between beauty and terror. Britten musically interweaves Wilfred Owen's World War I poems with texts of the Mass for the Dead. At the point of the offertory, the music retells the story of Abram and Isaac: "So Abram arose, and clave the wood, and went/ And took [Isaac] with him, and a knife." The boy observes the preparations for the sacrifice and asks where the lamb is for this offering: "Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps/ And builded parapets and trenches there, /And stretched forth the knife to slay his son." The images of parapets and trenches contemporize the biblical account. A musical shift interposes the voice of a divine messenger who bids Abram: "Lay not thy hand upon the lad/ Neither do anything to him. Behold, a ram . . . Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him." A children's choir of innocent trebles joins the baritone and tenor soloists. The children begin to sing the ancient Offertorium prayer text from the Latin Mass: Hostias et preces tibi / Domine laudis offerimus. . . . ["Sacrifices and prayers we offer, Lord, to you with praise . . . bring them from death to life"]. Unlike the biblical ending of the narrative, however, a terrifying text is then sung by the soloists: "But the old man would not so, and slew his son—And half the seed of Europe, one by one." Britten musically intensifies the phrase, "one by one," repeated in broken musical lines by both soloists over the children's prayers.

In Britten's art, texts of terror are musically articulated in ways that go beyond what language itself can hold. This silence acknowledges the unspeakable, both denying and permitting access to certain elemental facts of the human experience of war. Yet I am drawn to hear this musical work again, knowing that time will deepen such strange beauty, or as novelist William Maxwell might say, "time will darken it."

Poetry about extremity always approaches this paradox of expressing what is on the edge of unspeakability. Think, for example, of the Holocaust-permeated poetry of Paul Celan, in which readers contemplate drinking the "black milk" of the crematorium's smoke. One thinks of Rilke's line from the First Duino Elegy: "For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror." ¹ How often the terrifying and its aftermath of grieving may lead to surprising but near unbearable beauty. Terror and beauty lie unacknowledged for most of us, until the conditions of perception come around: typically when pain and terror strike by chance, or when we are enraptured by the splendor of something radically "other." Without ritualizing into embodied patterns of knowing, feeling and acting, intense experiences of terror or beauty can be deceptive. They can "lie"—in the sense of distorting our view of what and how the world is. What is revealed in extremity requires retrospect and recollection in order to illuminate how to live. Christian spirituality has a stake in receiving and interpreting such experiences, and guarding against lies and distortions.

Three interrelated sets of question follow: first, how do we come to see relations between the beautiful and the terrifying? We shift from nouns to adjectives here—for knowledge is in and through our being affected, in and through eros for truth, for what is good. Some of these ritual practices are transformative while others may not be so. Secondly, how might we speak of the intelligence of human emotions stretched between the extremities of human pathos by which human beings gain a sense of the world? Human emotions such as awe, wonder, grief, compassion, fear and grateful receptivity are ingredient in a way of being and knowing and intending the world. How do we think "in, with and through" our emotions, and not only about them in self-reflection? The third question asks: can we discover transformative ritual practices that open us...