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Aesthetics/Ascetics
(Ephesians 2.4-10)
So, here we have a prototypical Pauline passage: i.e. a cornucopia of run-on sentences,
fugitive pronoun antecedents, confusing parenthetical asides, repetitive phrases,
undefined abstract concepts… all bewilderingly difficult to parse. Trying to untie the
knots of Pauline syntax has tried the patience of many a devout reader. Why doesn’t
Paul just get to the point? Why, in addition to inspiration, didn’t God provide Paul with…
an editor?
Well, of course, Paul wasn’t trying to write a good discursive prose that would earn him
a passing grade in freshman comp. Paul was speaking ecstatically, from the heavens,
as it were. He wasn’t doing Maureen Dowd: pithy, punchy, and clear as ice. He was
doing Emily Dickinson: elusive, allusive, visionary, always bending vocabulary and
syntax to her own intangible purposes. Like Dickinson’s poetry, Paul’s prose seeks not
so much to make you think rightly as to see rightly, to feel rightly, to love rightly. He
doesn’t want your agreement, your assent; he wants your heart to beat faster, truer,
more full of hope. In short, Paul is trying to get at goodness and truth through beauty’s
ecstatic utterance.
Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians is written beauty, made beauty… a work of art, or, as
Jacques Maritain would put it, a work of fine art... Whether wittingly or not, all fine
artists, Maritain asserts, operate as both God’s pupils and God’s associates, not
copying God’s creation, but extending it in works that cause splendor to shine through
matter. With his written art, Paul is thus following God’s own creative lead. “We are
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God’s handiwork,” Paul writes, or, as the Jerusalem Bible more starkly translates it, “We
are God’s work of art.” Is Paul talking about you and me? How could Paul ever see
ME, full of conflicting passions and ego-driven behavior, with hidden crevices in every
smooth, polished surface I attempt to show the world… how could Paul ever see me…
or YOU, for that matter… how could Paul ever see us as works of art, as beautiful, as
God’s own masterpieces?
Paul is certainly not speaking from the world’s vantage point. In the first verses of this
chapter from Ephesians, Paul identifies the world’s vantage point as the vantage point
of death, “following the ruler of the power of the air.” The world’s vantage point only
evaluates things and people as consumer items, as flimsy as the wind, to be used, or
profited from, and then tossed away. By contrast, Paul is speaking from the standpoint
at which God had situated him: “God has seated us with Christ in the heavens.” Paul is
clearly not speaking of the heaven we’re promised after the undertaker has done his
work. He’s speaking of where he lives right now, the vantage point from which he sees
right now… and from which he wants us to see. It’s the vantage point that reveals you
and me as God’s beautiful works of art, and enables us see to beauty, not here and
there, but underlying everything in Creation. For the eyes of faith, Maritain says,
“Beauty is scattered everywhere.”
In a particular way, monasteries, religious orders, the Church in general constitute a
sacramental Lenscrafters to humanity. The Church’s ministries aim at perfecting sight
with a new optics that results in our capacity to see beauty, nourish beauty, make
beauty. In all its manifestations, the Church just can’t help itself from fabricating the
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beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty, for faith is aesthetic at its very core. And
the tools of this aesthetic are ascetic tools, the tools whereby we discipline ourselves
to ascend the ladder to the heavens, where God wants to seat us, and begin to see
from that vantage point. Monasticism has always called this asceticism the “custody of
the eyes”… a discipline aiming at a perfect liberation of the senses.
… which is, of course, where Lent comes in. Like Advent’s patience, Christmas’ awe,
and Easter’s jublilation, Lenten penitence and self-denial pertain to every season of
Christian life. In other words, Lenten practice does not just entail special sacrifices that
we make for a season of forty days, although they may prove helpful. Rather, Lent
provides an opportunity to evaluate the sacrifices we should be making all the time. Are
we making any sacrifices? Are the ones we are making faith-enhancing? Do they
liberate our vision to see from heaven’s vantage point: to perceive, nourish, and create
beauty in our lives and the lives around us?
Christian sacrifice and self-denial do not aim at emaciated bodies, bereft of sugars,
carbs, and starch… and Christian asceticism certainly does not aim at skinny souls,
desiccated by an obsessive calisthenics of scrupulous religiosity. No. The purpose of
Christian asceticism lies in ecstasy, getting outside ourselves, taking our places with
Paul and Christ “in the heavens,” from which beauty becomes plain as day. As the
Anglican priest and poet John Donne put it in the seventeenth century, when
considering his own vocation of self-denial: “I shall never be chaste, except, O God, you
ravish me.” The target of Christian asceticism is never about less of anything; the goal
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of Christian asceticism is always about more of everything… by finding in everything its
core, its essence, its destiny… its beauty… even the beauty of our own souls.
At the Metropolitan Museum, one can see, until March 15, an exhibition of twenty-six of
the twenty-nine portraits that Paul Cézanne painted of his wife, Hortense Fiquet,
between roughly 1872 and 1892. He does not paint her as a great instance of classic
form or sensual elegance. He does not even paint her as his beloved. In fact, one gets
a “fix” on Hortense only with difficulty. She differs wildly from portrait to portrait, as if
Cézanne had painted numerous loosely-related female relatives, rather than one
woman. However, in some ways, I think that is the point, for Cézanne refused to reduce
his wife to an armature for the explication of conventional prettiness; he could leave that
to Renoir. Instead, he captured his wife’s dynamic integrity… something never fixed,
something always changing, something always unique in every moment, something
beyond his summing up in any one portrait, beyond his control; in short, Cézanne saw
and expressed his wife’s beauty. He did the same for apples, for his beloved Mont
Saint-Victoire, for the laborers on his family farm. In a word, in all his subjects, Cézanne
found beauty “scattered everywhere.” Perhaps his faith prepared him for this; he was a
devout Catholic, who attended daily Mass throughout his life, and fixed a Crucifix above
the work table in his studio. Such things serve as indices to Cézanne’s own brand of
Christian asceticism, through which he gained access to heaven’s vantage point and
showed the rest of us what beauty looks like.
One final note: In addition to teaching art history, I also make a painting once in a while,
but mostly I make photographs. In that pursuit, I experience what I call “blind days,”
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days when nothing stands out in my vision, where everything looks, well, banal, and
“sighted days,” when I discover subjects. It’s my attitude, of course, that makes the
difference. The blindness comes from my desire to control, my desire to get something
on film that will impress both me and others, my desire to find something new… all ego
issues. On the other hand, my eyes open when I manage ascetically to bracket my
ego’s ambitions, let the colors and forms and textures of the world wash over me until
one form or pattern or tactile surface says, “Here I am! Live with me.” Then I snap the
shutter. Then I have found beauty… and, when my eyes are open, “beauty is scattered
everywhere.” In fact, most of my photographs concern the beauty that hides from
ordinary view, in architectural and urban details that are beneath the serious notice of
mundane sight.
Encountering beauty thrills my heart with a kind of exquisite ache. From perhaps a
similar experience, the nineteenth-century French author Stendahl called beauty, not
happiness, but the promise of happiness. That works for me. For the discovery of
beauty, in a Roman alley, in a great museum, in the face of my wife, always does
present me with a promise of joy that fills me with a great longing… a longing that, on
this earth, I find only addressed in any final way as God addresses me in Christ in the
community’s liturgy. Consequently, if, when encountering some person, place, or thing,
I am filled with a longing that makes me want to go to Mass, I know I have encountered
the deepest beauty… and I know the kind of good works in which God has prepared me
to live, now and forever.