O Precarious Ally - Part II
The Nuns Who Shut Their Windows
This is the second of a two-part series on beauty and our relationship to it. For Part I, click here.
When I was first discerning religious life, I remember a religious sister telling me of a monastery she had visited in France that had only high, narrow windows, so that the sisters would not risk looking out and seeing the beautiful countryside. Romantic (and almost incurable aesthete) that I am, my response was immediate, and it was violent. Protected from beauty?! Something revolted within. This wasn’t just quaint, it was wrong, distorted. Perverse.
It was a somewhat surprising reaction to me—a new convert zealous for radical piety and especially the romanticism of the Golden Age of Monasticism. How could I reconcile this devotion to beauty and, at the same time, the recurring theme of austere renunciation within the Christian Tradition? (And not just in religious life.)
The question ultimately boiled down to simple philosophy, a basic violation of the rule of non-contradiction: how can something good, also be bad? And if it isn’t bad, then why would the Church ask me to forgo it, nay avoid it at all costs?
For a while I went back and forth between a kind of aesthetic hedonism and a stoic puritanism, these two extremes setting off their chemical reaction within me. I would bathe myself in the glories of the arts, or the beautiful aesthetics of classic architecture, or the delicious agony of picking out the perfect summer ensemble. Soon oversaturated, I would feel again the tug toward austerity and, with it, a punishing sense of sluggishness and glut. Then the chastisement would begin, and I would impose a ban on fiction, on music, definitely on wine and good food, maybe even a total embargo on self-adornment of any kind. I went to work more than once looking like I’d spent the night in a manner more suited to the desert fathers.
It would last a week. At best, a Lenten Season.
But it never answered the question.
When I finally entered monastic life, the battle simply took on new forms: only certain kinds of books could be read. (I could sneak in Jane Austen because it was literature.) And if I did read fiction, I did my darndest not to enjoy it too much. If I found myself thinking about ‘themes’ or ‘character arcs’, I was just about ready to bring it to Confession.
Not even the old adage ‘everything in moderation’ was able to help me. What fiction fiend has ever been able read books in moderation?
Something had to give, and it wasn’t until I had lived the monastic life for a few years that I started on the journey to the beginning of understanding. I don’t say ‘to understanding’, because understanding is a lifetime’s journey, and one of the first things I learned as a postulant was that this thing would take time. God’s time. I had to learn that “[His] grace is sufficient for [me]…”[1], which meant that I didn’t get to take the shortcut to sanctity, even if the monastic life promised to make that a priority.
What I learned is that the monastic life is not about ‘more’ or ‘less’: it’s not about more prayer, more piety, more devotional exercises. It's not about less food, less money, less comfort. The monastic life is really about asking ‘for what’? Or better yet, ‘for Whom’?
When we make our vows as religious, as Saint Thomas Aquinas says in the Summa Theologiae, we are entering into a state of life that has the perfection of charity for its goal.[2] He goes on to say that the means to this end is a total adherence to God through imitation of Christ, and ultimately, in the language of giving ourselves up to God in a total holocaust of obedience, as Christ surrendered himself on the cross.[3]
With this in mind, we begin to see that ‘reading fiction’ or ‘not reading fiction’ is not really the right question. Similarly, ‘enjoying beauty’ or ‘not enjoying beauty’ is an equally limited one. For monastics, the question is less what we do with our lives and more for Whom we do it.
So, the question immediately becomes, can I love beauty for God’s sake? Is it really leading me toward Him?
Myriads of saints in the Church, at one or another time, honestly answered ‘no’ to that question! Saint Francis of Assisi had to give up his merchant life and wed Lady Poverty to really enter into his relationship with God. Saint Rose of Lima gave up fruit at a young age because she recognized that it held too much of her attention. Saint Dominic de Guzman, seeing the poor starving, sold his books—which in the 13th Century were worth a very pretty penny and were hard to come by for a preacher—in order that charity would reign in him, first for his neighbor and ultimately for God.
Now, it’s clear that there’s nothing wrong with a merchant’s life, or a child eating fruit, and yes, it’s even highly beneficial to have a good book or two! Provided that those things keep carrying us toward our goal, which is a total gift of self to God in Charity. For the nuns who shut their windows, or built them too high for the view, they determined that the pull was too much, that the kind of intimacy they wanted with God required a focus of heart and mind that was complete. They anticipated that the blessings of the intimacy with God they could cultivate in that manner was so superior to the view, even of the French countryside, that it was worth pursuing.
This, of course, is true for the average layman as well. The only difference is that the religious has vowed herself to this end, while the layman has not. We are all called to give of ourselves totally to God in Christ Jesus. So, what applies under certain circumstances in the monastery can certainly apply in the world as well.
So, what about when it comes to beauty? How do we apply this principle there?
As we began in Part I, it is clear that beauty is a powerful pathway to God, and therefore something the Church has long cultivated and championed in her Liturgy, her arts, and her daily life. The call to renew this passion is filled with all the promise and desperate need we feel for beauty’s vibrant touch in our spiritual lives and in the world at large. For those of us who are on the Via Pulchritudinis, however, we must be careful that the drive is always a forward one. We must never stop short to bask in beauty itself and miss the upward call.
As a Dominican Friar once pointed out to me, the opposite of an idol is not nothing—it is an icon. While the idol stops the gaze at the created image, calling us to invest our love in an empty thing, an icon has been called the ‘window to the Heavens’, and draws the gaze beyond itself, “further up and further in”, to put it in Narnian terms.
Beauty, for us, should always be an icon, and never an idol.
So, wherever we are in the journey of discovering God through beauty—whether it be through the literary arts or other sources—let’s make sure to check in routinely with the cause of our joy. Does this profound insight into the human condition make me want to reach out to Man’s Creator? Or am I simply content to marvel at my own complexity and intrigue? Is the beauty of human love a prompt to rejoice in the Love that is its very Essence, or am I tempted to wrap myself up only in the trappings of a happy ending? Am I looking everywhere for another ‘experience’ of beauty to fill an endless yearning, or am I, with Saint Augustine, open to a deeper exploration of the question?
“But what is it that I love in loving You? Not corporeal beauty, nor the splendor of time, nor the radiance of the light, so pleasant to our eyes, nor the sweet melodies of songs of all kinds, nor the fragrant smell of flowers, and ointments, and spices, not manna and honey, not limbs pleasant to the embracements of flesh. I love not these things when I love my God; and yet I love a certain kind of light, and sound, and fragrance, and food, and embracement in loving my God, who is the light, sound, fragrance, food, and embracement of my inner man — where that light shines unto my soul which no place can contain, where that sounds which time snatches not away, where there is a fragrance which no breeze disperses, where there is a food which no eating can diminish, and where that clings which no satiety can sunder. This is what I love, when I love my God.
And what is this? I asked the earth; and it answered, I am not He; and whatsoever are therein made the same confession. I asked the sea and the deeps, and the creeping things that lived, and they replied, We are not your God, seek higher than we. I asked the breezy air, and the universal air with its inhabitants answered, Anaximenes was deceived, I am not God. I asked the heavens, the sun, moon, and stars: Neither, say they, are we the God whom you seek? And I answered unto all these things which stand about the door of my flesh, You have told me concerning my God, that you are not He; tell me something about Him. And with a loud voice they exclaimed, He made us. My questioning was my observing of them; and their beauty was their reply.”[4]
[1] 1 Cor. 12:9
[2] Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, Q. 186, a. 1.
[3] Ibid, a. 3, & 6.
[4] Saint Augustine, The Confessions, Book X, Chapter 6.
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