Paris: An Opportunity and a Warning
If there is any part of the Western, and thus Catholic, canon that has been under assault for over a century it has been the concept of beauty. I'm not talking eye of the beholder subjectivity. I'm talking about a concerted and intentional effort to debase and destroy traditional Western culture.
As Catholics we understand, as Roger Scruton said, that beauty brings us in touch with the divine. My own conversion to the faith had much to do with the aesthetics. The music of the Baroque, the art of the Vatican, the works of Aquinas, the sheer magnificence of the Latin mass render our faith a thing of sublime majesty and joyous delight. Kneeling, while the rapture of a solemn high mass takes place around me, brings me very close to a oneness with my faith. It actually happens rarely for me, aside from that conjunction of the aesthetic and the cosmic.
From its inception, our Catholic faith has led the way in an appreciation of the beauty of the human and the spiritual. Rubens, Donatello, El Greco, and Velasquez, among many more, capture the essence of man and God in a way to make the ideals both approachable and glorious. Actually, I've recently returned from Catholic Bavaria and the art and royal museums there testify to the eternal glory of Catholic aesthetics.
But since the early 20th century, in all facets of culture, traditional forms of beauty have been mangled into art of incoherent rebellion and just plain offerings of the gutter. From an unmade bed to a crucifix immersed in urine, modern art has sought to replace the inspiring with the ugly. Some of it, like Dada, were mere larks. However, the majority of it has a very serious agenda indeed.
In point of fact, it has largely and successfully appealed to the lowest common denominator of public taste. Though, in a self consciously egalitarian democracy, must art, to have any market value, do just that?
In the 1950 film 'The Third Man' the character Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, has this to say on the subject, "In Italy, for thirty years under the Bogias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
So are we capable of appreciating true beauty anymore? One look at the vast majority of the fare on cable television and hopes dim. But as Catholics, inheritors of perhaps the most vibrant and poignant tradition of beauty known to man, we are not chained to the culture of the plebs.
Go to a Latin mass, attend a high solemn mass, listen to Mozart, Verdi, or Haydn, appreciate the art of the counter reformation, read the Douai-Rheims Bible (our KJV), and release yourself from the chains of rampaging mediocrity that keeps you looking down at dirt while the divine and beautiful beckon. Thus, Catholics of the World unite! You have nothing to lose but your bad taste.