The Beauty of the Cross: The Theological Aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar

Introduction

THERE IS AN OLD JOKE sophisticates like to tell about the pious religious praying at an altar at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Our Lady appears to him and says: "I want you to build me a beautiful church." "Where?" the stunned monk asks. And Our Lady answers "here."

A "beautiful church"—a thing, a place of beauty. I would like in this essay to explore some dimensions of the question of the role of beauty in the knowledge of God. To do so, I would like to begin by exploring beauty in religious perception in general, in mystical traditions in particular, and then move into some of the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar on the subject.

The Dangerous Pull of Beauty

The sophisticates who make that joke may not be exactly Schleiermacher's "cultured despisers" of religion, but they sometimes do seem to despise religion's humbler practitioners, in the name of aesthetics. Such aesthetes have given beauty a bad name among those who take truth and goodness seriously as well.

This is not entirely without good reason. The beautiful is indeed dangerous territory. English theologian John Saward points out that the devil does not usually pose as truth or goodness, but rather prefers to mislead souls with a false beauty ¹ —St. Ignatius, echoing St. Paul, speaks of Satan masquerading as an "angel of light." We can be easily blinded by false lights, we can be seduced by sweetness; our eyes naturally respond to light, and any image that presents itself can readily imprint itself deeply upon our souls. It might be better not to look.

Last summer as I was reflecting on this material, I was in the high desert of Colorado, with views of a hundred miles, and a 14,000-foot mountain outside my window. It was impossible not to be moved by the natural beauty around me. Perhaps I am drawn to natural beauty as a child of northern peoples, lingering late in our forest-dwelling paganism, who have so readily found God in nature. In the words of the beautiful Swedish hymn, we sing: "Oh Lord My God, when I in awesome wonder, consider all the works thy hands have made." In spite of the best efforts of a bulldozing culture and of a certain school of church architecture in this world, we are surrounded by beauty. Children readily see it: their stance in the face of the splendor revealed in things is called "wonder." At the child's level, beyond any specific form, there is perhaps wonder that anything should be at all. That is, simple wonder at Being: and being in such lavish profusion.

We are in fact so surrounded by attractive forms that we can become glutted, satiated: we can have too much of this good thing, and seek refuge from the lush jungle of imaged being in the starker regions of silence and emptiness.

Beauty and Religious Traditions

For many, beauty is the most powerful draw in religion. However, in general, highly developed mystical paths eschew form, image, and word, which are seen as suited for the lower stages of the spiritual path, but not for the higher. Yet even a tradition as based on the via negativa, the apophatic way, as Buddhism nevertheless reflects the power of the beautiful. The sublime aesthetic of Buddhist art and iconography flies in the face of its doctrine that one should let die any pull of eros because eros only draws one into more illusion. And so Zen in its antinomian spirit chants: "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form" and teaches: "if you meet the Buddha kill the Buddha" and the enlightened monk burns the splendid Buddha statue, because he has seen beyond—and before (or been seen by the beyond and...