Blog 2 — Beauty and Divine Revelation
Divine revelation and beauty are so interconnected that you cannot have one without the other. Divine revelation is a human understanding of a religious truth made known to us by God, and the beautiful is that which evokes understanding. The pope was not born with his faith and understanding of God, but he came to know God through the beautiful tradition, Scripture, and ritual of the Church. Likewise, Scripture and ritual are not beautiful as just words on a page or a series of actions, but they are beautiful because they are infused with the spirit of God. As Balthasar says on page 116, ‘revelation is molded throughout with a single structure so that the person contemplating it perceives… the divine rightness of the whole’. Beauty is this mold of revelation, understandable by man, and because of its contents will always guide us towards the divine. Divine revelation is reached through beauty, and what is beautiful always points to the divine. In this way, the two are one-in-the-same.
Our notion of beauty changes and we reach divine revelation through the attunement of our faith and senses. As we come to understand more about God through a life of worship and study, we can better understand the messages of the Scripture and the activities of the Church. We become capable of understanding God on a deeper and deeper level, and we are capable of seeing God in all creation. While a non-religious person may struggle to feel God’s presence in nature, a devout and experienced Christian will easily feel God’s presence, like the analogy of an expert versus a layman viewing a painting (Balthasar, 119). Further, we are able to form these senses through constant work towards faith. On 119, Balthasar continues that this ‘joy’ of understanding is attainable in our lifetime, but it is ‘something in constant motion… the vision accorded to him must constantly submit to being obscured by the ordinary activities of life.’ This means that you cannot obtain understanding and never lose it, you must always be working to deserve and deepen your senses. One cannot study theology deeply for years, then never touch it for the rest of their life. Instead, to maintain a sense for the divine one must be always dedicated to their faith.
This dedication perfectly connects to Goizueta’s call for liberation and action. A disciple cannot develop a sense of beauty if they do not also commit to acting for beauty. Non-ethical followers of the Church, those who listen to the reading but do not live it out, like those Spanish who oppressed Natives, do not possess this sense. We must attune our sense of beauty both through learning faith and living it. This is why the Church calls us to become beautiful in our actions, so we may attune our senses, understand beauty, and reach divine revelation.
