Preface

Archbishop Bruno Forte in his book, The Portal of Beauty, suggests that there exists a widespread indifference or hostility to beauty in the contemporary world, while also demonstrating that a Christian theological understanding of beauty can show us what it means to say that beauty can call us to salvation.¹ Forte’s reflections are deeply grounded in the Christian tradition of thought about beauty from Augustine through Hans Urs von Balthasar, and it is of particular benefit to readers of the English translation of Forte’s book that we also gain access through Forte’s work to the fruit of Italian scholarship on this tradition. In addition, Forte calls to our attention in his final chapter significant poems by Italian poet Eugenio Montale and Catalan poet Joan Maragall. Forte enables us to reach a fresh understanding of what it means to recognize the precarious position of beauty and he revitalizes our recognition of beauty’s theological importance.

As Forte indicates in his chapter on Balthasar titled “The Glory of Beauty,” it is the great merit of Balthasar’s theological aesthetics to have called attention to the contemporary urgency of recovering a theological understanding of beauty. Forte’s exposition of key arguments from Balthasar is cogent, but especially helpful is the expanded contextualization of the contemporary cultural conditions that have obstructed cultural openness to beauty’s theological power. Forte draws upon Italian writer Cristina Campo to ask in the opening words of his final chapter, “Is not beauty the place where we must necessarily begin?”² Campo in turn draws our attention to American poet William Carlos Williams who in Paterson explores the fear of beauty in the modern world: “But it is true, they fear/it more than death, beauty is feared/more than death, more than they fear death.”³ The text quoted by Campo is from Book III of Paterson, but Paterson’s Preface to Book I immediately names the centrality of the theme of beauty: “Rigor of beauty is the quest. But how will you find beauty when it is locked in the mind past all remonstrance?”⁴ This confluence of cultural sources suggests the contemporary predominance of a troubling spiritual condition: there are elements in modern culture that cultivate hostility and avoidance of beauty, and yet it is beauty that points the way to overcoming spiritual depletion. Forte builds his analysis of the sources of hostility to beauty by indicating the close association between beauty and death: like death, beauty disrupts the seeming autonomy, self-sufficiency, and tranquility of an enclosed worldly horizon and induces a restlessness that calls us to seek beyond the familiar temporal world. As Forte says, “beauty unsettles us in a way we often seek to avoid: we flee from beauty as we flee from the thought of death.”⁵ Therefore, the modern project that sees death as something to be conquered through scientific and technological mastery over the natural world also predisposes us, even if only as an unforeseen consequence, to regard beauty as an indication of a fragility that we seek to overcome.

Just as Forte’s book provides an expanded understanding of the hostility to beauty, so also the intense focus on the deep implication of beauty in the Christian understanding of the Trinity and the Incarnation helps us see what it means to speak of the saving power of beauty. The opening sentence of the book provides what we might call a Christian distillation of the concept of beauty, that is, a concept that implies an understanding of Christian revelation as the foundation for this approach to beauty. “Beauty is an event; beauty happens when the Whole offers itself in the fragment, and when this self-giving transcends infinite distance.”⁶ While this account of beauty is sufficiently broad to accommodate aesthetic theories that do not draw upon Christian revelation, the formulation is prepared, so to speak, to be especially suitable to a Christian trinitarian and incarnational vision of the world. Forte follows the insight of Balthasar according to which the human person, having been created in the image of God, is endowed with...