“You shall create beauty not to excite the senses but to give sustenance to the soul.” – Gabriela Mistral
I have a number of obsessions: work as worship, the intersection of faith and art, the state of being both/and—chiaroscuro in art, light and dark, the tension of already but not yet, the pairings of seemingly disparate things in writing ranging from the Bible (I like that God is both/and rather than either/or.) to poetry and prose. A part of me immediately quickens when I happen upon those elements. I can’t help it. I become awake, alert to the presence of something “other.”
The same sensation happens when I stumble upon beauty and the subject of beauty. I am completely obsessed with how it can draw the heart, mind, and soul to the divine and prepare them for a meeting with it. I begin to think of people who discuss the subject: Paul Celan with his thoughts on encounter and the other; Eugene Peterson on the subject of Abigail; Henri Nouwen and his loaves and fishes; Luci Shaw and her statements about being alert to the presence of the Spirit and beauty…
Now I add Gabriela Mistral and Barbara Nicolosi to the growing mental reference section. Mistral says art is to give sustenance to the soul. It is not meant merely to excite the senses but to arouse the spirit, to feed it with beautiful things, to get it to wake up and pay attention to the world around it.
Nicolosi adds nuance to Mistral’s idea through Thomas Aquinas‘ definition of beauty. According to him, the beautiful is “wholeness, harmony, and radiance.” Those three qualities are sustenance for the soul. They rouse it to wonder and glory and to a sense of what’s missing and wrong in this world, sometimes simultaneously. They make the heart long for home, for the God who is perfectly whole, perfectly united, and perfectly radiant, and spur the recipient to act on behalf of the broken, the hurting, the fallen.
Beauty feeds the hungry, literally and figuratively. It should always prompt a response; it is never for my benefit alone. It is designed to give sustenance to the soul, to help it travel from this point to the next, to create a desire to know the God who is all things beautiful.
Image: Brian Gautreau (Creative Commons)