Where Does Beauty Fit In?

The world remains a beautiful place, a witness to the handiwork of God, and, while the things that man makes can be beautiful, it is as if we have lost the theory of beauty and can be led into harsh terrain therefore. Houses become machines for living in (Le Corbusier), music can become abstract and technical, or perhaps go into a diabolical beat, something similar can happen to painting and a permissive society loses the beauty of a wedding. Our present Pope, Benedict XVI is aware that this contemporary loss of beauty can enter into the Liturgy itself.
One might imagine that beauty was just to do with the sensible, but St Augustine frees us from that assumption by addressing God as ‘O beauty, ancient and new’, and God is not an object of sensation.
In traditional metaphysics beauty was one of the transcendentals, belonging to something in the measure that it had being, truth, and goodness. Even Homer nods, and Lonergan appears to drop beauty as an objective transcendental or for that matter as an intentional transcendental. He quotes Langer on ‘Feeling and Form’ allowing the aesthetic to allow an escape from the ready made world of responses to stimuli where red means ‘stop’ and green means ‘go’.
The scriptures, while they are beautiful and a huge inspiration to art, do not much expound beauty, though perhaps the term ‘glory’ while it belongs to God himself also belongs to the situation where man responds to God rightly and so, at first surprisingly to us, the crucifixion is seen as glory. Thank Heaven that is not the whole of the story. ‘Man fully alive is the glory of God’. (St Irenaeus)
We need a much more adequate theory of beauty for man responds to beauty for good or ill. David was quite taken by Bathsheba bathing and so led to murder. The moralists remind us that we choose evil under the aspect of good. We choose because we are attracted by beauty. Could we not say that insofar as we are free all our choices are governed by the aesthetic dimension? That the Nazis played Wagner and classical music in their concentration camps indicates that the aesthetic theory we need must not be trivial or partial – it must be to do with the motivation that makes a genuinely good man and expresses a genuinely good situation as we find in the liturgy of the Church but not only in the liturgy. The Benedictine saying ‘Laborare est orare’ – ‘to work is to pray’ – hints that beauty belongs to ordinary work and to manual work. To see beauty in manual labour does not belong to many parents as they dream and hope for their children, which suggests that the perception of genuine beauty is part of a rare moral attainment, part of authenticity and holiness. Where would our human being be without the work of human hands, without wine and bread and cleanliness? I found myself more taken than usual with a programme about fishermen off the East Coast of America having to deal with rough seas and engine failure. It is not without a periodic drama that fish and chips turn up in the local shop.
Can we use Lonergan to get into a theory of beauty which is at once physical and spiritual? The way is through the psyche which arrived on the stage with Freud in 1899 and which has contributed to the general malaise of twentieth century man.
The psyche is intermediary between our non-conscious bodily reality with its energies and needs and our conscious intentional reality which is sensitive, intelligent, rational, responsible and loving. The psyche precedes intentional reality with the images and feelings of dream life and escorts intentionality in a nuanced way with appropriate images and feelings, so that the wild passionateness of our being is guided by evidence, true understanding and deliberation. Our full blooded reality should bear winess not just to nature, as a lion, but to thought and reality and indeed to the divine.
Father Robert Doran SJ a gifted follower of Lonergan points out that awareness of the psyche and of its limited energy helps to make us responsible for our psychic welfare. Too little striving in our life and we collapse into the boredom of depression. Too much, and we wear ourselves out, and collapse back into a depression which is needed to allow psychic energy to recuperate and life to start anew.
Lonergan distinguishes different levels of intentional reality, the sensitive, the intelligent, the reasonable, the responsible and the loving, and we move up and down from one level to another. The fact of love may make us attend anew to the colour of Sarah-Jane’s eyes. Does not the aesthetic, the beautiful belong in some way to each level and involve the psyche at the level of feeling? ‘Feelings are the mass and momentum of our living’. Or where senses are not operative are we not engaged with words, their meanings or with persons, their values and the value they have for us? We respond to others and their expectations from an early age. As Lonergan writes ‘excellence in any walk of life is ever a matter of effort, training, education, encouragement and support.’ Is not the achievement of excellence a matter of personal, beauty and if such excellence has been prompted by a parent, a teacher is not the love shown a thing of beauty?
If we deliberately attend to the way the psyche assists the intentional scale, there is the pleasure of sensation, of sitting comfortably, of eating and drinking, of feeling the sun or the wind. Is not the psyche directly engaged here bringing the operations of the senses to consciousness and indeed helping us to select what we shall be conscious of?
There is ‘having a question’. I recall Elizabeth Anscombe saying the great thing is to find a good question and I recall wondering how you do that. You have to be up with others in a certain area but attending to something new, like Einstein knowing abut Newton but attending to the clock face from the back of a moving tram. Light must take time to tell the time. A question focuses the whole of attention, with the psyche providing appropriate images. Is ones whole horizon going to shift? The thinker goes over the matter again and again. Is there not beauty in the quest as well as in the dawning insight? Do we not call this beauty ‘wonder’? It is not only a genius who wonders. We all have to wonder what to do with our freedom, what to make of our lives.
There is an attainment in the sureness of knowing, a delight in the object known and a delight too in communicating a matter to others and getting a response. The French word for knowledge is ‘connaisance’, a being born together,
Life is thoroughly interpersonal. There is love in understanding another’s concerns and a glad willingness to help. This makes family life or parish life or community life and brings reciprocal benefit. A person finds personal meaning not just in being loved but in loving. There is beauty here which engages our freedom, our effort and even at times our sacrifice. There is a growth in unity making a family, a friendship, a tribe, a parish, a church, a nation. There is the beauty of the Gospel, the clarity of conscience and the peace of holiness.
The psyche too can be engaged in bias, dramatic, egotistic, group or general. Here the entrapment works by a sort of beauty too - hence the vital importance of intentional consciousness which reaches real knowledge of the situation.