Aurelio Porfiri
It is often said that our age is a time in which we suffer from a crisis of ideals, our young people no longer know what to believe. Why not offer them the ideal of beauty again? But not beauty only in an aesthetic sense, but as a profound value behind which they will always find God. The Church had understood this, promoting the most artistically valid sacred music, the sacred art of the highest level, literature at the highest levels: true beauty is the seed of holiness.
We know that ugliness exists, it is the shadow where the sun shines, and it is in a certain sense necessary: “Even ugly things are composed in the harmony of the world by way of proportion and contrast. Beauty (and this will by now be a persuasion common to all Scholasticism) also arises from these contrasts, and even monsters have a reason and dignity in the context of creation, even the evil in the order becomes beautiful and good because from it the good, and next to it the good shines better (see the Summa of Alexander of Hales, II, ed. cit .: 116 and 175)” (Umberto Eco, Arte e bellezza nell’estetica medievale). Of course, ugliness has a reason in creation because it highlights what is beautiful. But ugliness must not be put in power.
How many priests in our liturgies today are satisfied with the bare minimum, believing they are attracting us to the indispensable maximum? Beauty thus seems to escape us but it is there, ready to be grasped: “The diamond, that is the crystallized carbon, is by chemical composition the same and identical thing as the common coal. Likewise, there is no doubt that the song of the nightingale and the frantic meow of the cat in love are the same in their psycho-physiological foundation, that is, they are the sound expression of a particularly intense sexual instinct. But while the diamond is beautiful and is valued dearly for its beauty, not even the least demanding savage will want to use coal as an ornament. Thus the song of the nightingale was always and everywhere considered a manifestation of beauty in nature, while the cry of the cat, which no less clearly expresses an identical psychosomatic motif, has never brought aesthetic pleasure to anyone and anywhere. From these elementary examples, it is already clear that beauty is formally something particular and specific, something that does not directly depend on the material foundation of the phenomenon and is indeed irreducible to it” (Vladimir S. Solov’ëv, Sulla bellezza). Beauty always awaits us, even in the liturgy, but today we prefer the triumph of clericalism, the only thing that the Council has never managed to unhinge. Indeed, it has also strengthened it, endowing the priests with a false concept of creativity for which they have also extended to the liturgical rite the cravings and frenzies that previously, when diverted, directed to the social, philosophical or theological field.
The beauty is static, unchangeable, while the ugliness is stirred up: “The trouble is that the beauty is, instead the ugly advances, moves, speaks, does. Beauty is inert, passive, helpless, while the ugly advances, moves, and is agitated. Beauty is a legacy, a lineage, sometimes a ruin, however declined in the past or lost in the ancient, while ugliness is a language, a way of doing, of understanding and of wanting, between technique and administration. This is our economic and metaphysical, aesthetic and social, urban and literary tragedy. The beautiful is, the ugly becomes; the beautiful poses, the ugly is in perpetual motion. Beauty pertains to the sphere of being but not to that of the eternal and immutable. The ugly, on the other hand, pertains to the sphere of making and becoming, and is viral, expansive, progressive” (Marcello Veneziani, Lettera agli Italiani). If things go on this way, then nothing will remain.
(Photo: St Josemaría Parish in Gerona, Tarlac. Source: https://travelhabeat.com/top-things-to-do-in-tarlac/)
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