To experience beauty is to experience a deep-seated “yes” to being---even in its finitude and its moments of tragedy; and such an affirmation is possible only if being is grounded, borne by a reality that is absolute in value and meaning . . . The fact that God is the ‘horizon’ of every experience of beauty explains why even the tragic emotions can be experienced in art as beautiful, and why there is at the heart of every deep aesthetic experience . . . an intense feeling of striving toward something beyond the moment. . . This longing is intrinsic to the experience of finite beauty, for the joy of existence in any finite being can never be complete or ultimate but must point beyond itself to a final and infinite goal.
- Richard Valadesau, Theology and The Arts: Encountering God Through Music, Art and Rhetoric, pgs. 42-43.
The above quotation makes several interesting observations. First, because beauty is grounded in God the experience of it produces an emphatic “yes” to being itself even in the face of tragedy and death. Life is thereby affirmed in a way that transcends our immediate condition. Secondly, beauty’s grounding in God further produces an “intense feeling of striving toward something beyond the moment.” That is to say that beauty reveals a dimension of existence beyond our present moment and circumstance, for beauty itself cannot be contained in the moment of our apprehension of it. It captivates us while escaping us creating the desire for something more which is ultimately found in God’s self who is the “final and infinite goal.”
In short, both of the proceeding points illustrate something about beauty’s substantial role in eschatology. First, the role of art in the Church as the eschatalogically-oriented community of God should thereby be one of support for the Arts rather than the diminishment of them. It should be a place where Art, in every form, flourishes. Secondly, the Church’s responsibility to beauty also includes its responsibility to protect the natural environment. It should be the place where environmental beauty is ecologically prized and preserved as the supreme art of God.
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