Art, Beauty and the Cross of Christ

Bob Denison

There exists an admirable list of modern artistic works of movies, poetry, music and painting that continue to move the human spirit. Art touches the human senses precisely to move us with its beauty to contemplate human realities that lie beyond the senses.

Nevertheless, art, at times without wanting to, expresses something of the spiritual condition of an age. The cultural dynamic today often presents art, music, movies and poetry that announce the triumph of the ugly. I do not want you to misunderstand what I am saying; I do not mean that all modern art that proposes to express the realism of human life lacks beauty. On the contrary, art has a responsibility to give expression to the truth, and the truth is that much evil and suffering exists in the world. The ugly exists. But what we do have to face is the lack of hope signaled in some way, even if only subtly, in the artistic world.

Yongsung Kim

As the Colombian writer William Ospina once said: "when it comes time to show forth the world, art demands realism not reality."^[i] With this phrase the poet wanted to say that art has a responsibility to point towards the marvelous in life, often present at the periphery of human perception, where the eye of the soul can perceive the noble present even in an ugly reality. An artist lives to point towards perceptible realities that exist at the margins of what is physically expressive. That is why I think that an artist of whatever kind-- poet, painter or musician-- has a gift and vocation from God, whether he or she realizes it or not.

Where does this artistic tendency to dwell in environs where the miserable dominates come from? Well, people today, in the deepest part of their soul, fear that under the light of scientific knowledge, so modern and sophisticated, when all is said and done, what appears in reality is a dirty world, bloody, miserable and extremely egotistical. The human being looks at an ugly world and begins to falter: maybe the ugly triumphs over our noble and beautiful dreams. This uncertainty is a kind of darkness, perhaps the most obscure darkness possible. To abandon hope in the triumph of the beautiful over the ugly is another way to describe what we mean by the word "despair".

Ivanka Demchuk

The darkness that continues to threaten human beings is the perennial fear; it is to live in the belief that between truth and lies, the lies win; between evil and goodness, evil wins; and between beauty and ugliness, in the end, only the ugly will remain. This fear looks to dominate us today. This shadow seeks to rob us of our strength of soul. The fear of the nothing, like an aggressive entity seeks to destroy the hope of the world.

Dinah Roe Kendall

This cultural sadness has another grave manifestation. The person without hope seeks to cover over the hole within, or to escape from reality. The contemporary fascination with images that are attractive purely on a physical level reveals itself today like a vain attempt to find a diversion, an experience capable of silencing or forgetting the fear that lives deep inside a man. Art that aims to cover the interior emptiness only serves to camouflage the lack of hope. And pornography, just like drugs, serves only to aggravate the hellish experience of despair.

Beauty is not understood only under a physical aspect. On the contrary, in its greatness the beautiful invites us to gaze on a truth pointed to by the image. From this perspective we understand better the importance of announcing and contemplating the image of Christ Crucified. There are few examples of cruelty and ugliness that could be compared to crucifixion. The ugly exists; a Christian neither wants nor can deny this. But the image of the Crucified invites us to perceive the reality that lies beneath the image, and that radiates a luminosity perceptible even in the midst of the cruelty of the Cross. Christ Crucified invites us to contemplate the truth of love. And because God embraced the human being precisely when he accepted to live and die what is ugliest in our condition, the Cross of Christ shows us the transformative power of love. The ugly is changed to the beautiful on account of love. Christ offers us this hope that truly disperses the darkness of our fears.

Giovanni Previati

The triumph of the Lord Jesus over death has freed us from the darkness. This evangelical announcement has always been a central part of the Church's preaching. See, for example, what Saint Paul says in the first chapter of the letter to the Colossians. Perhaps the darkness that most threatens human life today is the darkness of losing our ability to believe in the existence of the true, the good and the beautiful.

The Gospel continues to offer freedom from darkness. God came down from heaven and accepted the Cross to free us from this dark misery and spiritual depression that oppresses the human heart. He continues to invite us to contemplate the love that is capable of overcoming the lies, the evil and the ugliness of human life. It is a grace to contemplate this triumph present even under the sign of the Cross. Eyes fixed on the Cross of Christ will never want for light and they will never lose the evangelical hope that frees us from darkness.

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^[i] William Ospina, EL dibujo de América Latina: "García Márquez, los relatos y el cine".