Beauty is an aspect of God

We live in a beautiful world. Each season of the year has its unique way of displaying color, form and magnificence. The soft glow of dawn heralds a new day while the flaming embers of sunset slowly fade to reveal the brilliance of an ever- expanding universe.

Normally, we perceive beauty as a sentient experience through sight or hearing. But beauty, like truth and goodness, is also an attribute of God. It is difficult to conceive as beautiful something that is ineffable or indescribable. Perhaps some of the philosophical exploration of mathematics can be helpful in understanding how the pure spirit of God can be described as being beautiful.

Philosopher Bertrand Russell expressed his interpretation of mathematical beauty in these words: “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.”

On the other hand, mathematician Paul Erdos does not try to give an explanation of how the invisible can be beautiful but gives this intuitive affirmation, “Why are numbers beautiful? It’s like asking, ‘Why is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony beautiful?’ If you don’t understand why, someone can’t tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren’t beautiful, nothing is.”

An abstract application of beauty was much more common in the early church but is used so rarely today that theologians refer to it as the forgotten aspect of God. In the third century, St. Augustine, a bishop and doctor of the church, often began his prayers by addressing God with these words: “Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new.” Augustine believed that beauty has the function of manifesting the divine.

In 2005, Cardinal Danneels of Belgium wrote, “I ask myself if we are using sufficiently one of the doors that lead to God—the door named beauty.”

It is not only the intellectual abstraction of beauty that can lead us to God but also beauty that we experience through our senses. In his Letter to Artists, the late Pope John Paul II says, “In order to communicate the message entrusted to her by Christ, the Church needs art. Art must make perceptible, and as far as possible attractive, the world of the spirit, of the invisible, of God.”

One extraordinary example of being influenced by art was experienced by the Canadian priest, Yale professor and prolific writer, Henri Nouwen, through an en-counter with Rembrandt’s painting, “The Return of the Prodigal Son.” Nouwen was visiting L’Arche, a community residence for the disabled in France, when he saw a poster-sized print of the painting. It spoke to him so deeply that he wasn’t content until he traveled to the Hermitage in Russia to see the original.

Nouwen was given permission for a private viewing and for four hours, he sat before the painting undisturbed. Rembrandt’s style of painting is to cover most of the canvas darkly, or in the shadows, and only paint in bright colors what it was he wanted the viewer to focus upon. In “The Return of the Prodigal Son,” the focus is the outstretched arms of the father reaching to embrace the wayward son who had foolishly squandered away his inheritance.

Nouwen was captivated by the expression of immense love and forgiveness by the father that erased any thought of chastisement toward the son for his misdeeds. Nouwen knew that the parable is a metaphor for the heavenly father who, too, waits with love and forgiveness for our return. The intimacy of the embrace also unleashed yearnings that Nouwen never experienced in his family’s household.

Rembrandt was a lonely old man when he created the painting. He had outlived all the members of his family and had lost all of his possessions. Rembrandt especially mourned the loss of his only son. No doubt the father’s embrace with the son in the painting had personal significance for him as well.

Perhaps the real beauty of life is that, as poet T.S. Eliot wrote, “The end is just the beginning.”

Dr. Agnes Martinko attends St. Edward Church in Youngstown.