The Experience of Beauty

Some memories are kneaded into our lives. These memories reappear with a smell, color, or tone of voice that makes them as present to our minds as if we were living them again. A friend of mine recently wrote to me with one of those memories: it was an experience of beauty.

I was in a dull hospital room painted cream and maroon, looking at a woman in a green shimmy. Her face was puffy, her body spread over the sheets, her wrist marked with a plastic hospital bracelet. She had suffered polio as a child, and carried the marks through her forty years of life. Then cancer had hit, twice. The day I visited was the first that she had eaten solid food since she had been interned, a week earlier, after a serious reaction to the medicine she was taking.

As I had come up in the elevator, I did not know what to expect. Of course I wanted to make her comfortable and to cheer her up. But—what would I talk about? What would she say? What would she look like? And could I cope with that?

These doubts nagged me down the hospital corridor as I peered at the numbers on the doors. I finally came to hers, knocked, and walked in.

"Oh, what a nice surprise," she said, and invited me to sit down. And she began to tell me about her day. What she'd had for lunch: "I had peas today; they were well cooked . . . just the way I like them . . . It was good to have peas. I haven't been eating for a fortnight." And then her view. She pointed to the window: "What a wonderful day it is outside. And I'm so lucky to have a view like this! God is good to me. Sometimes I see the birds winging their way across from one building to another, or to the trees that I know are down in the garden." I looked out the window. I could see a dash of sky that banged against another tall, concrete ward.

We talked for a little while longer. She grew tired; it was time for her to sleep. I went back to the elevator. I felt as though the ordinary bleariness of life had suddenly refocused, and I had glimpsed the beauty of the tiny things of life: a drop of sky, a well-cooked pea. I wondered why I could not perceive the incredible wonder of life like her. And it's funny: on the way to the car, it seemed like the noise and rush suddenly blinded me to those moments of clarity.

My friend asked herself why this woman could perceive beauty more clearly than she did. She felt that she had seen the beauty of the world as it really was in that dull hospital room, and had been almost blinded, she wrote, when she entered back into ordinary life. It seems to me that this is a common experience. Why? Isn't our world looking for beauty? Doesn't the quest for the beautiful drive the plastic surgery industry, shopping sprees, and myriad diets?

Yes and no. Yes, because we all want to be beautiful, but no, because it seems that we do not know how to find true beauty in the world around us. Hans Urs von Balthasar says that we are broaching a world "without beauty":

In a world without beauty—even if people cannot dispense with the word and constantly have it on the tip of their tongues in order to abuse it—in a world which is perhaps not wholly without beauty, but which can no longer see it or reckon with it: in such a world the good also loses its attractiveness, the self-evidence of why it must be carried out. . . . In a world that no longer has enough confidence in itself to affirm the beautiful, the proofs of the truth have lost their cogency.¹

This introductory passage, part of Balthasar's "theological aesthetics," suggests three reflections. The first is phenomenological. We find ourselves in a...