Western culture, having spread all over the world, has become so stretched, so cut off from the depths, that it lacks the strength to contain this great upsurge of life and enlighten it. Today it wavers between speculative high refinement and chaos. Only a renewed Christianity can open the ways of beauty.
For beauty is one of the divine Names, perhaps the most forgotten, and the seal of the Well-Beloved on creation: ‘Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death … Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it’ (Song of Songs, 8.6-7). Of all the words for God in the Bible, the most common must be ‘glory’ – chabod: it expresses not an image but the great radiance in which the very life of God is diffused. There is nothing in existence which spontaneously glorifies God, by its being, its order, its beauty, except the human being: of the Father, through the Word, in the Spirit, whom we might call the Spirit of Beauty. God is the ‘Father of lights’; he is the light of beauty which penetrates to the root of everything. By the Word, imperceptible ‘matter’ is defined and ordered and made perceptible. The Holy Spirit, the ‘giver of life’, brings everything to full maturity. The first beauty of paradise, of the origin, the arche, is still reflected in the face of a child, and the splendid vitality of young creatures. But humanity has interrupted the circulation of glory, blocked the eucharistic dimension of creation. The light has become external to us, so that things now have an aspect of gloom and horror, the elements massacre the innocents. More and more we discover, in so many fields of contemporary art, that ‘we have the power to unleash the most cannibalistic images, the obsessional monsters of carnage and fornication’ (Pierre Emmanuel, The World is Within). Monsters of a magic beauty, for, as the Areopagite says, they turn their very desire for the absolute into a tyrannical force for evil. Man is revealed as a risk for God and the cancer of being in these images which in the end only spread ‘sadness for death’. The second beauty is the wistful longing of the fallen angel, his glorious purple already fading, at Christ’s left hand, on a mosaic at Ravenna.
The beauty to which we must bear witness can therefore only be that of the Cross, the cross of blood and the cross of light inseparably combined; it recaptures the innocence of the first beauty, but only by undergoing the test of the second. Easter is the inauguration of ‘ the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God’. From henceforth Glory shines from a face ‘made perfect through suffering’. In the Byzantine office we pray: ‘Christ, the true Light which enlighteneth and sanctifieth every man that cometh into the world; let the light of thy countenance be shewed upon us, that in it we may behold the unapproachable light’. According to St Cyril, the beauty of the Son has been ‘matured in time’ so that we might be ‘led as by the hand towards the beauty of him who engenders it’ (PG, LXVlII, 1034). The beauty matured in the time of the incarnation and the passion is the beauty of the face, bloodied and revived, of him who conquered death by death; the beauty of him who descended willingly into hell, so that the depth of his humiliation is the measure of the height of his love. This beauty is secret, comprehensible only to personal freedom and love. Seen through the tears of the returning conscience, the Man of Sorrows, who has no beauty according to this world, is revealed as the Transfigured Christ. The paschal cross, where the negative quest is swallowed up in affirmative Love, opens to us the fire at the heart of things, the icon of the face. Christianity is the religion of faces. Only the Face of God in humanity enables us to discern the face of all humankind in God, to decipher, in the communion of saints, the riddle of the faces that surround us today. We can no longer witness to Christ in the Spirit without this third beauty. The beauty of God without humankind, which is a consuming fire, so that Moses could not even approach it from behind unless his face was covered, is not enough; nor is the beauty of humankind without God, that negative way to a dead end, by which unknowing is turned into absence and the desire for the absolute into the appetite for destruction. The beauty we need is that of Emmanuel – God with us – and the Holy Spirit – us with God.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
