Blog #2

Beauty and divine revelation are very interconnected. One can not survive without the other if we are to live harmoniously and ascend to God and surrender ourselves to the world. Balthasar touches on this idea by stating that Christian thinkers began with depreciating the ladder when thinking about beauty so we must discard the old sense of beauty and make way for a new one. Since divine revelation is what God has revealed to us about his very existence, that in itself is a gift that is beautiful. It is revealed in the word becoming flesh and this action of speaking and carrying it out and embodying it helps us to understand the deepest truth of Christ and God.

Beauty is essentially a vehicle for divine revelation and attuning one’s senses to perceive these truths helps us to attain a higher order or version of ourselves and find God. Art and beauty can help us to create that pathway to God and worship. For Balthasar, the aesthetic encounter relates to revelation in the sense that you can come to appreciate and delight in the experience of encountering beauty and art. The aesthetics of creation is also something that is religious for Balthasar because to look at art is to receive it as a gift that God has graciously given to us. So aesthetic disposition is necessary for Christianity. His critique is that the present world is lost in positivism and it reduces what we read in Pieper and that we need to pay attention to the world with particularity. The world is a gift that has been bestowed upon us by God and we must take it all in and receive it with wonder as mentioned in “Bridge to Wonder” reading by Cecilia Gonzales-Andrieu.

We must pay attention to the world with an aware and actively open and conscious mind. The world is meant to be experienced in all its particularity and wonder and beauty it has to offer. All art is essentially religious because of that offer that the world allows us to have. God can also be seen through these gifts and how it manifests in us and our communities and world through God. Discipleship and beauty connect in this sense because of how we work through God and our spiritual senses. Our senses are formed to recognize this beauty all around us by attuning our soul and senses, sight, scent, taste, touch, and hearing. There may be a tension between the contemplative dimension of Christianity and aesthetics but there is a sense of attunement or dialing in your senses to understand suffering and how pain can be healed through beauty. This is evident in Latin American liberation theology and the black theology of liberation. Beauty is abundant but also different. A different beauty is manifested through our Lady of Guadalupe. Her existence is a collision of the Native and Spaniard communities and her very existence and everything she has gone through and the union of these two identities is beautiful. It brings us to terms with how beauty and justice can connect because the totality of the union of these two groups and all that it encompasses shows how praxis and taking action to see the beauty and be active in our communities to heal with one another and create a change that may benefit not only communities but the world as a whole.

Balthasar linked discipleship and beauty because in suffering and surrendering yourself to God, you are able to have a totality perspective of the world and turn to show your whole self to God. Theology is a way of seeing and loving and learning to take on this way of love and perception is beautiful. We can receive this love and enlightenment through the word of flesh. We are able to hear and sense God and in prayer even closing your eyes allows you to be more spiritual in prayer and feel close to your faith whatever it may be. The soul is truly manifest through the body, the body and soul aren’t simply just separate. Our soul feels through our body and it is when we connect these too and enrich our senses is when we are able to ascend to God and feel harmonious with one another and within ourselves and our relationship with God. Once you are able to take an even deeper entrance into the material world and all it has to offer, we are then able to perceive the world made flesh through spiritual senses.