Beauty and Hermeneutic Identity in Consecrated Life: Gadamer and the “Icon of the Transfigured Christ”

“Thank you, Sister, for wearing your habit!” “Mom, a blue fairy!” “Sister, would you and your sisters pray for my special request?” Comments that spring spontaneously from the lips of persons who encounter religious demonstrate that those in consecrated life keep up a consistent dialogue with those who observe them, oftentimes without words. Consecrated life serves as a sign to those who live it, and for those who view it from without. The variety of reactions and responses to the sight of a religious sister, brother, or priest in habit show that this sign is significant enough to comment upon, creating wonder at a kind of beauty discerned by the observer and reminding him or her of the transcendence of human existence. In 1996, Saint Pope John Paul II wrote an Apostolic Exhortation in honor of Consecrated life called Vita Consecrata (On Consecrated Life), where he calls the religious the “Icon of the Transfigured Christ,” linking those living the evangelical counsels with “Christ’s radiant face in the mystery of the Transfiguration.”¹

In his essay, The Relevance of the Beautiful, Hans-Georg Gadamer acknowledges hermeneutic identity, and therein, symbol and festival, or celebration, in art. Every art piece is a tradition or history that addresses the viewer, according to Gadamer, and the viewer responds according to his or her tradition. Art can reveal and also conceals the yet-to-be revealed. In viewing the “icon” of consecrated life through Gadamer’s aesthetics, this paper will discuss several of his keys to understanding any art, including the universal, the ontological function, the connection between beauty and truth, and philosophical aesthetics—with some aspects of Kant’s Third Critique. Gadamer addresses hermeneutic identity whereby a challenge is issued by the work and is accepted by the viewer. In this “dialogue,” Gadamer’s process of recognition discussed in his analysis of symbol “elicits the permanent from the transient” and assists us in becoming more aware of the “power that tradition exercises over us.” In “reading” and recognizing tradition, we begin to take it upon ourselves to generate a “shared community of meaning,” the fulfillment of festival or celebration, where tradition is transmitted rather than conserved, where we learn “to grasp and express the past anew,” finally encountering it. Festival unites everyone, reminding us that in our quest for understanding, beauty and truth, we have hope in ultimate fulfillment. Since human life on earth is a preparation for the eschatological² fulfillment of Eternit”, this festival, signified by the Eternal Banquet or “Supper of the Lamb,³ is at the heart of the dialogue with the “Icon of the Transfigured Christ,” the religious, and this is a reminder of the transcendent destiny of the human person.

The Icon of the Transfigured Christ

John Paul II writes that consecrated life, profoundly established in the model of Jesus Christ in His life and teaching, is “a gift of God the Father to His Church through the Holy Spirit” whereby the religious—in the profession of the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience—continually reveals the “characteristic features of Jesus.”⁴ These features “are made constantly ‘visible’ in the midst of the world” and those who view this “icon of the transfigured Christ,” are guided towards the “mystery of the Kingdom of God already at work in history, even as it awaits its full realization in heaven.”⁵ The “universal presence and the evangelical nature of its witness” clearly indicate that the life of consecration is “a reality which affects the whole Church… ‘which concerns us all’… [and] is at the very heart of the Church as a decisive element for her mission, since it ‘manifests the inner nature of the Christian calling’ and the striving of the whole Church as Bride towards union with her one Spouse.”⁶

Consecrated life was not only an assistance to the Church in former years, but is also “a precious and necessary gift for the present and the future of the People of God, since it is an intimate part of her life, her holiness and...