Can surviving among IKEA furniture and drinking coffee from an ugly cup be full human? Or: Is it average that a Catholic and Conservative does not care about a higher culture and does not appreciate the value Aesthetic experience? Let's face it, we have a problem with that. The pursuit of aesthetic quality of life seems to be a historical phenomenon, which we read about in books and which we see in works of art or architecture, but we no longer enjoy beauty all day. The highest of this aberration is the contemporary “sacral” architecture, as well as the appearance of post-sobor liturgical robes.
There are 2 things that come back all now and then in my "Cultivator" program on PCh24 TV. First, the triad of transcendentals (Truth, Good and Beauty), and second, the sad constating that right-wing and Catholic environments, for any reason, neglect culture and aesthetics, which are areas – sometimes not without success – take over the left-liberal side. So I thought that it would be worth giving a brief outline of how crucial beauty is in our religion, civilization and culture, which, by no means – which may be amazing – does not happen in isolation from fact and good.
The subject of beauty or explanation of aesthetics (which since the 19th century has been treated as a full-fledged branch of philosophy) is devoted to classical works by Władysław Tatarkiewicz, but besides to a book well known from our cracks and antennae by Fr Jan Strumiłowski. fewer people may remember that he wrote a book Beauty will save the world?, in which he simply states that "the cultivation of theology in forgetting the beauty of God especially present brings negative results".
Last year, the clergy took up the subject again, publicly. The quarterly Civitas Christiana reads: In the past of humanity, before Christianity we see a close relation between aesthetics and religion. Beauty was especially accompanied by spiritual things. In Christendom, this relation is inactive getting worse. The Scriptures on the first pages, describing the creation of the world, not only describe it in a poetic way, but God himself compares it to the Artist who creates and contemplates the beauty of his work. It is the category that illustrates God's likeness and trace in creation. As the Book of Wisdom says, it is from the beauty of creation that we can know the existence of the Creator. Beauty so speaks of Him who is in himself the highest and uncreated Beautiful. Therefore, erstwhile God imparts to Moses the principles of worship, at the same time it inspires the talent of the Israeli craftsmen to make the temple of God perfect and beautiful – according to the pattern that Moses received from God.
Oh. Strumilowski reveals the second bottom of the phenomenon of ubiquitous ugliness. From a spiritual perspective, we can clearly say that promotion, like moral relativism, is simply a symptom of fighting God. In a social position about which modern Christians are more aware, it is simply a sign of a fight against Christian culture or, more broadly, against the Church. In the position of a widely understood culture, this is the fight against the natural order of things – points out.
Norwid and Akwinata
Not the most lyrical, but surely the most philosophical of the large Polish poets of the 19th century – Cyprian Kamil Norwid – devoted beauty to, among another things, the verses of the poem-trace Promethidion. From there comes a celebrated quote about beauty being “the form of Love”. Looking for the most universal answer to the question of the essence of beauty Norwid writes:
Then I will ask the eternal man,
I'll ask you about the beauty confession:
The eternal man, due to the fact that he's not jealous,
An eternal man, for he waits without lust,
I'm going to ask you this without having a taste:
What do you know about beauty?
. . . . . . . The form is love.
Further verses express the same conviction that we find in Fr Strumiłowski, quoted earlier: beauty and He who is Love cannot be separated:
The form of love beauty is – and so much,
How many people have seen in the world,
In the large God or in the dust,
On this God, a dressed child;
So much about beauty a man knows and preaches –
Though each 1 carries a shadow of beauty
And each of us, with this beautiful dust.
A minute later, the Poet-Philozof adds an ethical component to aesthetic reflection, erstwhile he states in relation to this dust of beauty, or reflection of God in our human nature:
If he had kept it clean in his conscience,
And he said to the granite, Live as I lived –
It would make the granite feel like looking out,
And possibly his finger wiped his eyelids,
Like an awakened man from the distant land...
The author has no uncertainty that the dead stone will move, and this is the movement that the soul gives to the body (the rule of being) as shortly as we keep within ourselves the undefiled gift of the beauty of God's likeness. Now let's hear what Saint Thomas of Aquinas had to say about the beauty and his relation with good. W Theological Sum of we find the following paragraph:
Beauty and goodness are usually identified. They're just different. For what everyone desires is good. The concept of good so expresses the satisfaction of desire. The concept of beauty expresses the satisfaction of desire by viewing a beautiful object, or getting to know it. Hence these senses perceive in a peculiar way beauty, which is most cognitive, as serving reason, namely sight and hearing. So beauty adds to the good a certain attitude toward cognitive power: that is, what is rightfully pleasing to desire, and what is beautiful to us by knowing.
We see that Norwid's thought is actually profoundly tomistical. The acquittal followed the definition of Aristotle, who stated that beauty is “what is good is pleasant.” inactive in a cognitive context, St. Thomas added that beauty is “what pleases erstwhile seen”. It emerges from specified knowing an essential trait, namely, that actual beauty is known by reason, not only by senses.
Aesthetic endurance in the IKEA Age
The above - presented knowing of beauty was not the only one. From Pythagoras, beauty was seen primarily as proportion harmony (the mediate Ages frequently added a category shine). Mathematically, St Augustine defined them, stating that "it is only beauty that pleases beauty, in beautiful shapes, in shapes – proportions, in proportions – numbers" and adding synthetically the definition of 3 characteristics of beauty: "mode, form and order".
Beauty – understood both aesthetically and ethically – played a function in the lives of civilized societies. In Greek phase art, the rule decorum (which is wrongly associated mainly with the “school rule”) protected the essence of beauty in its external artistic expression. As a result, viewers experienced feelings and emotions, from pleasance to fear, which would lead to catharsis, meaning the purification of the soul.
From today's position – erstwhile we consciously participate in the sacramental life of the Mystical Body of Christ (experiencing forgiveness of sins and multiplying grace by accepting God himself fleshly and spiritually) – 1 can say that realistic doctrine and the thought catharsis were the highest forms of rapprochement by the Gentiles to a pure spiritual experience—and at the same time to the image which the Creator recorded in our nature.
In order not to plunge into theoretical considerations, it is worth asking: What is the value of aesthetic experience in the day of stories produced by streaming platforms and homes for which the material warp provides IKEA? Populism has become a drug that is intended to bring about the reproach of dopamine, and its content no longer expresses the human nature's quest for perfection, does not clearly separate good and evil, does not service good, and does not advance archetypical attitudes. The furniture and the applicable art cease to service us from generation to generation, the work of human hands replace machines, and the inspiration of nature (mimesis) dispels detached from reality, abstract and minimalistic (not to say primitive) imagination. We are simply talking about specified objects that they are deprived of “souls”.
When we take the concept of the soul as the 1 that gives life to the body and the 1 that reflects in man's products, we will realize how an aesthetic experience already on a regular level is crucial to separate us from animals that have no aesthetic needs, and only satisfy biological needs.
On the ruins of our anti-Christian civilization we are dealing with a unusual phenomenon of ignoring what is material. We live in an unattractive, soulless environment, frequently feeding only on the literature of fact (beautiful literature and poesy aside as a thing to do in school times), not going to the philharmonics or theatre (except for the authorship of today's repertoire), where the component of beauty is connected with the social context, and yet ignoring the rituals of everyday life referring to aesthetics (the care for good taste). In this way, we become strangely lacking beings, as if "biological-religious", i.e. stretched between the essential provision of needs and prayer and public worship, while between these 2 poles there is simply a deficiency of culture that gives the lifestyle a soul, colour and taste.
This is not a fresh phenomenon, and this is the approach to aesthetics (and not only to ethics) that distinguished civilized people from barbarians, while Plato even said that "life is worth something, if at all, erstwhile a man sees beauty in himself." Let us callback the visits to palaces, manor houses, and even the homes of the wealthier hosts we have seen in the open-air museum. We can see the attention to aesthetics everywhere. good furniture, many paintings, decorations, decorative objects. This made regular life a soul. It made us morepeople. It was not just a colorful past, but the essence of the cultural dimension of our humanity. Humanities that have been broken and in an unrepentant way impoverished with the emergence of a quiet dictatorship of vandalism and industrial production.
The Unbreakable Triad
But what precisely are these transcendentals? It's the kind of shots that stand above all categories. In colloquially, it could be said that these are the primary concepts, the first and at the same time the most common. That is, everything that is created by God is simply a being and unity, yet separate from another things, and is true, good and beautiful. If we call something bad or ugly, it is due to the fact that there is (in a thing or a person) a deficiency in the area of 1 of the transcendentals. 1 could most likely hazard claiming that transcendentalia are qualities that, under all limitations of our mind, are closest to describing the nature of God himself.
Although in doctrine there is simply a formal dispute over whether beauty belongs to transcendentals, and in the Treaty of fact Saint Thomas does not mention it, in many another passages Theological Sums – as Jan Kiełbasa points out in the article First and most common: unity, truth, good and another transcendentals in the metaphysics of St. Thomas of Aquinas – we find specified an knowing of beauty. Philosophically developed the view that beauty is inherently accompanied by good (precious) life. Plotyn says Every virtue is the beauty of the soulAristotle created the concept kalokagathia (i.e. “good and beautiful”) according to which the beauty of the soul is the consequence of virtuous life and these 2 features happen together.
But beauty is besides the glory of God. The Gospel says that the boy of God He will come in majesty., that is, in beauty (which, according to different definitions, besides causes us sacred fear). Similarly, it was on the Mount of Transfiguration, as well as after the resurrection. God created man beautiful and this beauty found her fleshly perfect in the Incarnate Word of God and in His Immaculate Mother. So, is it essential to imitate Christ and to forge in itself by the grace and suffering of God's image and likeness to include not only fact (a reception of revelation and natural law) and goodness (works of love), but necessarily besides beauty?
In philosophy, they talk about interchangeability the 3 transcendentals, which are the same, although differing characteristics. I don't know how correct this will be, but this reminds me of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, from which each individual is identical and yet distinct, and we presume that the Holy Spirit of the Father and of the boy comes, which could be the answer to the dispute over the position of beauty as transcendental, but that is my intuition...
It seems that he shared this intuition previously quoted by Plotyn, who, without knowing the actual God, derived beauty from the concept Some. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Behind Plato, he assumed that the soul, like the basic ideas (including beauty), had its preeminent existence. In this sense, beauty comes from God, and man is delighted (metaphysical exultation) erstwhile he perceives with his senses beauty, which is in fact a reflection of this beauty which he carries in himself, and which is in turn a reflection of the divine thought of beauty. On the ethical side, the philosopher pointed out that becoming good and beautiful on the soul means as much as becoming like God.
Referring to the regret expressed at the beginning that the broad right ignores beauty, let us conclude with an example of poetry. She is the first language of literature, as well as the spiritual language (let us note the poetics of Bible descriptions). She expresses in a way irreplaceable in a fewer words what prose would should be sacrificed a fewer sentences. She is simply a language simply beautiful and lowering her position proves a certain spiritual degradation of the modern man (similar to the mentioned disregard of literature—nomen omen—beautiful. Therefore, let us halt and think erstwhile we are tempted to think: Why waste time on poesy and fictional stories if they do not bring pragmatic values... Are you sure?
Filip Obara
See sections of the “Cultivator” program, which mention the importance of beauty, as well as the importance of stories (poetry, fiction) as a binder for human community:
