Abyss as Presence
When you have an experience of the beautiful - I mean the deep kind - does the ache of it seem strange? Why does beauty sometimes make us weep? What is the strange power of the beautiful to thrill us and break our hearts simultaneously?
The experience of beauty is a three-fold revelation, according to Alejandro Garcia-Rivera, whose book The Community of the Beautiful: A Theological Aesthetics I've been raving about lately. The deep near-shock of aesthetic experience reveals:
1. That Beauty (read capital-B) is a source.
2. That we long to receive it.
3. That between Beauty as source and our reception of the beautiful, there is an abyss. This abyss is signaled by a longing - that ache I referred to above.
C.S. Lewis writes somewhere (I'll have to look it up) that this longing is something we don't like to talk about, that it embarrasses us to speak of it. That it's as if we intimate a distant country, a home we've never been to or seen, but that somehow lives in memory. If I were describing it with a parable, I'd say it's like discovering a long-lost love. In the instant of meeting, of seeing that face, the discover realizes he'd forgotten how much he loved her, and suddenly he longs for her again, but in that longing realizes that time and change has placed a near impenetrable barrier between them, so that in the very moment he finds his love, he loses it again. (Tom Hanks in Cast Away when he is reunited with his former fiancee. He gained her, and lost her all over again.)
But Garcia-Rivera's writing suggests that in this abyss between the objective origin of Beauty and its subjective reception, Presence (read capital-P) is suggested. What he means is that without the ache, we would not suspect that there is something - or Someone - we ache for. The ache, the breaking of the heart, is transformed from abyss to Presence by the embodiment of the divine, God breaking into the this world in flesh: the Incarnation of Christ.
Jesus has always answered the question of the true and the good. For the artistically wired, here is the call that also says, "If you seek the beautiful, follow me."
"Through him, all things were made..."
12:23:35 PM
