Sublimity and Beauty: The Chair of Peter

Towards an Incarnational Architecture:
Part V: A Phenomenology of the Sublime and the Beautiful

Author's Note: Originally, Part V was intended to be devoted to the Trinity, human and divine relationships, and their manifestation in architecture in order to help bring the soul to the ascent through sursumactivity. However, I realize that perhaps I should touch upon this topic first before continuing. [See Parts I, II, III and IV of this series].

Over the last three centuries, a debate has raged in the realm of aesthetics concerning the nature of beauty. The Renaissance spoke of beauty as a fixed, measured, and almost sacral thing, defined by the canons and traditions of the ancients and tempered by the love of God, a thing of contemplation. With the coming of Baroque in the Church, this abstract, almost Platonic view of beauty was replaced by a desire to seek an emotional and intellectual response from the viewer in grasping the whole sum of the building, the concetto or focus of the whole structure, and thus help lead them, by this half-artificial ecstasy, further towards heaven. However, by the time of the Romantics, neither Teresian ecstasy nor quiet Augustinian contemplation was the ultimate goal of art and architecture. Instead, it was to seek out the Sublime.

Chesterton once criticized the over-used word sublime, saying that saying "It is sublime" was inferior to saying "It is beautiful." One stated, truly, that the person viewing the object felt sublime, rather than appreciating the objective nature of the object, which is beauty, not "sublimity." Herein lies the problem with the search for the sublime that obsessed poets and artists from Wordsworth to Turner and beyond to even the Impressionists: it hinges on feelings, and feelings are notoriously slippery things in a fallen world.

The sublime was a feeling of great awe, sometimes verging on fear; there was a hint always of Thanatos amid the Eros among the Romantics with their invented Gothic claustrophobias and morbid ruinous mansions, from the perversions of Beckford to the grotesqueries of Swinburne. The sublime was, at heart, beneath the sacral trappings, a form of titillation, voyeurism: people wanted to be stunned and shocked. The same emotion that caused people to tramp through the Alps leads people to defy death in the neatly hermetic capsules of thrill rides at amusement parks today.

Awe is a wonderful feeling; however, except in the presence of the Divine it never remains steady. Humanity is fickle, and novelty is the only thing that keeps it thrilled. Thus, as the decades passed, the search for the sublime became an all-consuming search for the latest fads, both decadent and wholesome. It became obsessed with the Zeitgeist, with Impressionism and Art Nouveau riding the crest of popularity until they were forgotten. While at first much beauty came of that search--no man can stand before a Monet and not feel God's hand on his shoulder--humanity became bored with beauty, and soon sought to create the ugliest things possible to further thrill themselves.

This is why the art of our epoch includes sliced cows in formaldehyde.

This is a very difficult conclusion to stomach. Should we simply throw out all the good things that have come from this modernity? Certainly the more rancid fruit of the Sublime can be thrown out without a second glance, Jackson Pollock, Gehry, and whatever performance artist du jour is soaking the NEA. But do we cast Tolouse Lautrec's posters on the bonfire of the vanities, burn Degas's sweet ballerinas at the stake, take a wrecking ball to the Horta house? Are we morally obliged to turn our back on the last two hundred years of art?

Mercifully, no. Monet and Manet still had not fully taken on the consequences of this artistic fall from grace, and the residual ghost of beauty still hung over their works. As the centuries past, Beauty's spirit withered, and thus we got things like Francis Bacon and excrement sealed in jars, and scatological Virgin Maries.

This does not mean that rush, that holy rush of excitement we get when we first glimpse the Grand Canyon or see the mountain valleys at our feet is blasphemous. In art, the sublime is, at its core, still something worthy to seek, as is the beautiful. However, one cannot exist without the other. Pope John Paul II's Christian phenomenology speaks of a subjective response to an objective truth, and both are necessary to understand that truth. The man trained in virtue, to use an Aristotelian trope, will love truth with the intensity of the romantic, and he will see true beauty with the awe of the sublime.

The underlying objective rationality of good art is ratified by our subjective and deep response within our souls. Likewise, the sublime within our souls is given resonance by our scholarly and intellectual contemplation of an object. Faith and reason, justice and peace, ecstasy and silence. The concetto of the Baroque, the iconographies of Gothic: both unite truth and beauty, and only there can we find them in their most pure and complete form. It is to these we must look in the future in our search for an Incarnational Architecture.

The sublime seemingly responds to many things: chacon son gout. Taste is fickle, yes, and it is dangerous to tie it down to the timeless canons of classicism. However, even allowing that our minds, as well as our hearts, are marred by the fallenness of the world, there is an underlying frame to all that is beautiful. The pale Nordic maiden and the Asiatic beauty ultimately have the same harmonies and resonances in their proportions. Every human body follows a divine logic in the way it is knit: they even say that, by the scale of the length of our own feet, each one of us has the ideal height of six feet. Thus, the Renaissance philosopher and architect Alberti speaks of concinnitas, "sympathy and consonance of the parts" (ix, 5), and it is this that ultimately underlies the beauty in the earliest paintings of Lascaux to the last canvas of Gaughin, and especially all that lies between. And this beauty, however flawed, ultimately is a response to our own need for the most perfect "ancient Beauty" that St. Augustine sought.

Thus, it is right and just that we be moved by many different beauties in art, as long as we seek to see the links between them. Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto. I am a human being: nothing human is foreign to me. Nothing human is foreign to me because God created it and redeemed it by Himself taking on humanity. Let us search for the sublime, but let us never forget to return to see the beauty that lies beneath it after the thrill has been exhausted.