Art & Beauty in a Time of Evil & Ugliness

I was pleased to see Gianluigi Gugliametto’s recent daily meditations that pick up on Brendan Doyle’s insights about music, including liturgical music, in our time.

Of course, GG never met Brendan, but it’s nice to see different generations contributing to the recovery of creation spirituality where art and creativity play such an important role. I also deeply appreciated the musical selections GG shared in his DM.

As I pointed out in my video on Monday, looking back over Brendan’s substantial contribution to creation spirituality, including the interview from Bear & Co: The Little Magazine, I was struck by how Brendan took the four paths of creation spirituality and ran with them in a deep way by applying them to his love and understanding of classical music. (Which is not to exclude other kinds of music also.)

Other persons from other professions have followed suit over the years.  Science and cosmology by Brian Swimme and engineering by Bernard Amadei among them.  

I have often said that if we can reinvent work, education, and ritual, we can have a non-violent revolution that amounts to a new renaissance of humanity. There are plenty of pioneers out there engaging in such work. It is necessary and parallel to engaging and battling ugliness and evil.

Scientist Gregory Bateson posed an unsettling question some fifty years ago when he asked, “Is our civilization rotting its mind from a slowly deteriorating religion and education?” Having been involved in both those fields for over 55 years, I have attempted to address them and apply medicine to them.

Art plays a big role in my efforts. Partly because my mentor, French Dominican Pére Chenu, the very last time I saw him as we were saying good-bye, put his arm around me, wagged his finger at me and said: “Never forget: The greatest tragedy in theology of the last 300 years has been the divorce of the theologian from the artist, the musician, the poet, the sculptor, the dancer and the film maker!”

Obviously, that moment was a pivotal one for me and the track my future was to take in both theology and spiritual education. Art as meditation was born of that admonition along with the writings of psychologists Claudio Naranjo and Robert Ornstein, who wrote of how “extrovert meditation” or what I came to call “art as meditation” is “the way of the prophets.”

We cannot have a prophetic spirituality without the artist. Potter M.C. Richards wrote about developing “moral imagination,” and Hebrew bible scholar Walter Bruegemann wrote of the “prophetic imagination.”

Justice, after all, is a search for beauty, and liberation is very often a liberation from states of ugliness such as indifference, coldness of heart, not caring, and disempowerment.

And Beauty is another name for God. Thomas Aquinas teaches that “God is a Fountain of Total Beauty, the most beautiful and the superbeautiful.” God is “supersubstantial beauty” and is “called beauty because God bestows beauty on all created beings.” For Aquinas, beauty contains harmony, brightness, and proportion, and the “brightness” that he speaks of is the doxa or glory which I have written of in previous DMs.

“God puts into creatures, along with a kind of ‘sheen,’ a reflection of God’s own luminous ‘ray,’ which is the fountain of all light.” The Cosmic Christ is that ‘luminous ray.’ Today’s science tells us photons or light waves exist in every atom in the universe. Aquinas says the proper response to beauty is two-fold: 1) hold beauty in reverence and 2) share beauty, rendering it conspicuous. “To be conspicuous pertains to the nature of beauty.” All beauty yearns to be conspicuous. 

To be continued.

Banner Image: Syrian Refugee Mother and Children, part of “Refugee” series by Jennifer Hereth. Published with permission. Learn more about Jennifer’s work HERE.

Queries for Contemplation

Do you hold beauty in reverence? Do you render beauty conspicuous? Do you recognize divinity as supersubstantial beauty and rendering beauty in all things? Do you recognize injustice as ugly and justice making and compassion as something beautiful?

Related Readings by Matthew Fox

The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times, pp. 173-178

Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality

Naming the Unnameable: 89 Wonderful and Useful Names for God…Including the Unnameable God

Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth

Christian Mystics: 365 Readings & Meditations

A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice

Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ

Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society

Charles Burack, ed., Matthew Fox: Essential Writings in Creation Spirituality

The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance