Benedict XVI mentioned beauty quite a bit, saying that it was an essential element of the liturgy. The iconoclasts like Rembert Weakland didn't think so highly of beauty.
Maybe they had a deeper problem than mere iconoclasm.
...The most precious, profound and important of the great ideas which the
Left has raped from us is beauty. I need spend no time on the
proposition that life without beauty is a nightmare: those who have seen
true beauty – sublime beauty, if even for a moment – have nothing to
which they can liken it except the ecstasies of mystics and the
transports of saints. Beauty consoles the sorrowing; beauty brings joy
and deepens understanding; beauty is like food and wine, and men who
live surrounded by ugliness become shriveled and starved in their souls....
....At any point before World War One, if you asked any philosopher or
intellectual what was the point of art, poetry, music, painting,
sculpture, architecture, all of them of each generation all the way back
to Socrates would have said the purpose of art is to seek beauty.
Socrates himself would have said that by beauty, by the strong love and
longing created in the human breast at the sight of something sublime,
we are drawn out of ourselves, and are carried step by step away from
the mundane to the divine.
The strongest argument against the atheism so beloved of the Left is
not an argument that can be put in words, for it is the argument of
beauty....If you see a sunset clothed in scarlet like a king descending to his
empurpled pyre, or wonder at the gleaming thunder of a waterfall, if you
find yourself fascinated by the soft intricacy of a crimson rose or
behold the cold virgin majesty of the morning star, much less see and
enter a cathedral or a walled garden, or you hear Schiller’s “Ode to
Joy” by Beethoven or see the David of Michelangelo, or become immersed
into the song and splendor and Northern sorrow of Wagner’s “Ring” or
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, if indeed you see real beauty and for a moment you forget yourself, then you are drawn out of yourself into something larger.
In that timeless moment of sublime rapture, the heart knows even if
the head cannot put it into words that the dull and quotidian world of
betrayal, pain, disappointment and sorrow is not the only world there
is. Beauty points to a world beyond this world, a higher realm, a
country of joy where there is no death. Beauty points to the divine.
Ari's trio: truth, beauty, goodness, have all been derogated or, worse, abrogated in most of today's liturgy. Chant is sublime, but unknown to 95% of Catholic children under the age of 12, and unknown to well over 80% of the Mass-goers between the ages of 25-60.
In the essay, the author posits that the atheist hates beauty because it's not egalitarian. Hmmmm. So, in their rush to 'egalitarize' the Mass--and we know that was the object--did the commissions and cooperating Bishops betray their real problem?
You decide.
Powerful
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