Beauty tends to elicit in us a type of shock. We draw a breath in. Why? If beauty tells us about the eternal verities, whence the surprise? Ezra Pound once said that the artist’s task is to “make it new.” The “it” is the truth of the world. A work of art doesn’t invent truth, but it does make it accessible to us in ways that are not normally available because words and images have been tarnished by overuse or neglect. Art fails when it merely tells us what we already know in the ways that we already know it.
That is why art is so deeply related to the prophetic dimension and the place where it connects to truth. That prophetic shock, that challenge to complacency, that revelatory reconfiguration of the way things are, gives us a truer picture of the way that the world is.
Truth without beauty is fleshless abstraction, a set of propositions. Only beauty can incarnate truth in concrete, believable, human flesh.
Beauty also has the capacity to help us to value the good, especially the goodness of the most ordinary things. The greatest epics, the most terrible tragedies, all have one goal: to bring us back to the ordinary and help us to love and to cherish it. Odysseus encounters Circe, Cyclops, the sirens, Scylla, and Charybdis, but his real destination is home and the marital bed that makes it his place in the world.
That is the magic of art. It may spread a huge canvas, it may be bold and baroque, but its essence is to remind us of the everyday and to transmute it into a sacrament.
Beauty tutors our compassion, making us more prone to love and to see the attraction of goodness. Art takes us out of our self-referentiality and invites us to see through the eyes of the other, whether that other is the artist herself or a character in a story. Because beauty endows goodness with mercy, it enables us to see how difficult it is to achieve goodness, how often one good exists in tension with another. Our pursuit of the good is inherently dramatic, and drama is based on conflict.
Thus goodness without beauty is moralism, holier than thou.
At the same time, it is only fair to say that beauty without truth is a lie. Beauty without truth becomes the mask that von Balthasar speaks of, a mask that has no relationship to the face behind it.
Beauty without goodness is frigid and lifeless. It can be pure virtuosity—form without meaning—but then it fails to touch the heart. We admire the acrobatics but fail to see the point.
Perhaps it goes without saying, but any serious discussion of beauty needs to treat it as something more than prettiness. The Greeks, as I have suggested, were deeply divided about beauty. They loved harmony, proportion, symmetry, the ideal form. But they also knew darkness, as their tragedies attest.
To my mind, a deeper understanding of beauty came into being with Christianity. The cross, the instrument of torture and shame, was taken up into a higher vision of beauty. Brokenness and woundedness—the shattering of the ideal—can become the means whereby beauty is revealed. Here is a beauty that is anything but sentimental. It is akin to what Yeats meant by his phrase “a terrible beauty.” Lest we forget, the glorified body of the risen Christ still bears the marks of his wounds.
Beauty itself wounds us, pierces our hearts, opens us up. Let us, then, free it to dance in “uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good.”
The Tragic Sense of Life
When i first arrived at Oxford University in the early 1980s to pursue graduate work, I was all swagger on the outside, but that was to conceal the soft center of terror within. I had gone from being a big man on a small midwestern campus situated between two cornfields to a nobody at an ancient European university whose “New College” had been founded in the fifteenth century. For one thing, there were the social bewilderments attendant upon entering a society where class was a more important and more complex phenomenon than I had ever known it could be. But in the end my greatest fears were centered on academic performance. I remember in particular being crushed by my tutor’s response to my essay on King Lear. My argument had been something to the effect that the tragedy of Lear’s humiliation and Cordelia’s death was mitigated by the spiritual insights these two characters had gained. In particular, I pointed out the Christian implications of Lear’s famous words to Cordelia:
Come, let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies. . . .
My tutor, who combined a gentle and kindly soul with a bear-trap of a mind, suggested that perhaps I was sentimentalizing what was in fact a shatteringly bleak ending—that I was missing the savage, tragic irony of the play. After all, he said, Cordelia is executed right after this speech and Lear himself dies from the shock. Within moments he is screaming “Howl, howl, howl” and is then himself dead, dead, dead. The play, my tutor reminded me, was deliberately set by Shakespeare in pagan times, so the characters have no access to Christian consolation, no heaven to right earthly wrongs and make everything better.
I don’t recall whether I blushed, but I was immediately overcome by both shame and gratitude. I not only sensed the merit of his challenge but I also felt liberated. My youthful, earnest religiosity had imposed itself on the text, papering over an abyss of waste and horror with innocuous pieties.
Naturally, this got me thinking, not only about the way that religion can become a set of blinders, but about my own experience, which had involved its share of personal tragedy. It also set me on a search for a faith that can encompass tragedy without reducing it to a meaningless episode, something left behind and forgotten in the larger story of redemption.
Over the intervening years I’ve become convinced that we all refuse tragedy at our peril, whether we are believers or not. The strange truth is that tragedy is largely absent from the pews and bookstores of the postmodern West. We study it in old books and plays, and we use it casually to refer to plane crashes and early deaths from cancer, but the full-blooded thing itself is gone.
The absence of the tragic sense of life is killing us.
In the culture I know best, that of the United States, tragedy is something that our founders believed they were leaving behind forever. They saw our shores as the new Eden. As it says on the back of the dollar bill, ours was to be a novus ordo seclorum, a “new order of the ages,” free from the dark and bloody entanglements of Europe. Farewell, ancien regime. At the opposite end of the scale from the finality of tragedy is the myth of reinvention.
To refuse tragedy is to refuse to live in history, for history is the story of conflicts and injustices that cannot be merely undone. Perhaps that is why America believes it can help to reinvent other nations: history is not an obstacle.
As I listened to the radio a scant six hours after the space shuttle Challenger had broken up over the skies of Texas, a NASA engineer came to the microphone and said: “We can fix this.” After 9/11 we pondered military strategies. Today we not only deny tragedy; we hardly pause to mourn. Not when the can-do spirit is on the line.
As tempting as it may be to lay the blame for tragedy’s demise at the door of an impoverished religious sensibility, I have to say that secular modernity is also indifferent to the tragic sense. Where are the great tragic masterpieces of modernity? Where are the symposia in the New York Review of Books on the death of tragedy?
My intuition (and perhaps the beginning of a mature response to my tutor)