Joseph Ratzinger BEAUTY CHURCH 2

Sorry for the bad translation

The BEAUTY

Message of His Eminence Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to the XXIII Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples entitled: The feeling of things, the contemplation of beauty (18-24 August 2002 |,.. ^
Each year, the Liturgy of the Hours of Lent, he returned to hit a paradox in Vespers is the Monday of the second week of the Psalter. Here, side by side, there are two antiphons, one for the season of Lent, the other for the Holy Week. Both introduce the Psalm 44, but we anticipate an interpretive key of all opposed. It is the Psalm that describes the wedding of the King, his beauty, his virtues, his mission, and then turns into an exaltation of the bride. During Lent the psalm antiphon is to frame the same that is used throughout the remainder of the year. It is the third verse of the psalm that says: "You are the fairest of the sons of men, on your lips is common grace."

It is clear that the Church sees this psalm as a poetic-prophetic representation of the spousal relationship between Christ and the Church. Recognizes Christ as the fairest of men, the grace poured upon his lips indicate the inner beauty of His word, the glory of your ad.

So it is not merely the external beauty of appearance of the Redeemer to be glorified in him is rather the beauty of truth, the beauty of God who draws us to him and at the same time gives us the wound of love, the holy passion (eros) that makes us meet together in the Church and the Bride and the love that calls us.
But on Wednesday of Holy Week, the Church changes the antiphon and invites us to read the Psalm in the light of 53.2 h: "It has beauty or appearance, we have seen a face disfigured by pain." How do you reconcile that? The "fairest of men" is not so much that they put in appearance you want to watch. Pilate before the crowd saying, "Ecce homo" in order to arouse pity for the man struck and upset which has not been any outer beauty.

Augustine, who in his youth wrote a book about the beautiful and convenient, and appreciated the beauty in words, music, fine arts, felt very strongly this paradox and realized that in this passage the great Greek philosophy of beauty was not simply rejected but rather dramatically put into question: what is beautiful, what beauty means should have been discussed and tested again. Referring to the paradox contained in these texts, he spoke of "two horns" that play in opposition and yet they get the sounds from the same breath, the same Spirit. He knew that the paradox is a contradiction, but not a contradiction. Both quotations are from the same Spirit who inspires all Scripture, which, however, plays in it with different notes and, in so doing, puts us in front of the totality of true beauty, of truth itself.
From the text of Isaiah comes first, the question of which have dealt with the Fathers of the Church, if Christ were so beautiful or not.

Here lies the more fundamental question whether beauty is true or whether it would be rather ugly to lead us to the profound truth of reality. Whoever believes in God, God who is manifested in its altered appearance of Christ crucified as love "to the end" (Jn 13:1), knows that beauty is truth and that truth is beauty, but in the suffering Christ he also learns that the beauty of truth includes offense, pain, and yes, even the dark mystery of death, and that it can only be found in the acceptance of pain, and ignorance.
An initial awareness of the fact that beauty has to do with the pain is certainly also present in the greek world. Consider, for example, in Plato's Phaedrus. Plato considers the encounter with beauty as the salutary emotional shock that brings out the man himself, the "enthusiasm" to pulling other than self. The man, as Plato says, he lost to him perfectly conceived of. Now he is constantly in search of the primitive form healing. Memory and nostalgia led him to research, and the tears off dall'accomodamento beauty of everyday life. It does suffer. We could say, in the Platonic sense, that the arrow of nostalgia affects humans, and it hurts so precisely puts her wings, rising up. In his address at the Symposium Aristophanes says that lovers do not know what they really want from each other. It is clear that contrary to the souls of both are thirsty for something other than the pleasure of love.

This "other", however, the soul can not express it, "has only a vague perception of what it really wants and talks about herself as an enigma."

In the fourteenth century, in the book on the life of Christ of the Byzantine theologian Nicolas Kabasilas this experience is found in Plato, in which the ultimate object of nostalgia continues to remain unnamed, transformed by the new Christian experience. Kabasilas says: "Men who have in itself a desire so powerful that exceeds their nature, and they crave and want more than what is adequate suck man, these men were hit by the bride herself, he left himself in their eyes a burning rays of her beauty. The extent of the wound reveals what is already the arrow and the intensity of desire suggests Who is he who has the dart body. " The beauty hurts, but as such it draws man to his ultimate destiny. What Plato says, and more than fifteen hundred years later, Kabasilas has nothing to do with superficial aestheticism and irrationalism, by running away from the clarity and the importance of reason.

Beauty is aware, of course, a superior form of knowledge because it strikes the man with all the grandeur of truth. In what is left entirely Kabasilas greek, as he puts knowledge at the beginning. 'Origin of love is knowledge - he says - the knowledge generates love. " From time to time - he continues - the knowledge may be strong enough to sorting at the same time the effect of a love potion. " He does not leave this statement in general terms. As is characteristic of his rigorous thought, he distinguishes between two kinds of knowledge: knowledge through education that knowledge is, so to speak, "second hand" and does not imply any direct contact with reality itself. The second type, in contrast, is knowledge through experience, through the relationship with things. "So long as we have not had experience of a concrete being, we do not like the object as it should be loved."

True knowledge is being struck by the dart of the beauty that hurts man, be touched by reality, "from the personal presence of Christ himself "as he says. Being impressed and captivated by the beauty of Christ is more real and more profound knowledge than mere deduction rational. We should not underestimate the significance of theological reflection, of exact and precise theological thought: it is absolutely necessary. But here, disdain or dismiss the blow caused by the correspondence of the heart in the encounter with beauty as a true form of knowledge, impoverishes us and dries up the faith, as well as theology. We must rediscover this form of knowledge, is a pressing need of our time. From this conception Hans Urs von Balthasar has built his Opus magnum Theological Aesthetics, of which many details have been incorporated in the work of theologians, while its basic approach, which is really the essential element of all, is not was not accepted. This course is not simply limited to, or better, is not primarily a problem of theology, but also of the pastoral which should encourage re-encounter with the beauty of faith. The arguments fall on deaf ears so often in our world because too many arguments against competing with each other, so that man is naturally thought that the medieval theologians were as follows: the company "has a nose of wax", ie the can be addressed, if only you are clever enough, in many different directions. Everything is so sensible, so convincing, to whom should we trust them? The encounter with beauty can become the hit of the arrow that wounds the soul and in this way opens our eyes, so that now the soul, from the experience, has the judging criteria and is also capable of correctly evaluate the arguments.

It remains for me an unforgettable concert of Bach directed by Leonard Bernstein in Monaco of Bavaria after the early death of Karl Richter. I was sitting next to the Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann. When the last note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor-Kantaten died triumphantly, we look to each other spontaneously and naturally as we said, "Who has heard this, he knows that faith is true." In that music was a perceptible force so extraordinary to realize this reality, not through deduction but by the impact of the heart, that it could not have originated from nothingness, but could only come through the power of truth that is actualized in the inspiration of the composer. And the same is it not evident when we allow ourselves to move the icon of the Trinity of Rublev? In the art of icons, as well as in the great Western paintings of the Romanesque and Gothic, the experience described by Kabasilas, starting from the interior, was made visible and participatory.