Brian Hamilton

Sabbath Beauty, Contemplative Witness

This paper was was written and presented for my senior honors seminar on prayer at Messiah College.

On the seventh day, God rests from the hard work of creation—a rest that begins with the delight of the sixth day, when God gazed upon everything he had created and found it very good. God’s reflection, God’s appraisal of his own creative artistry, occasions a quiet (yet certainly joyful) tranquility that overtakes creation and hallows time itself. So the Sabbath becomes a day of unbroken enjoyment, of uninterrupted aesthetic revelry, as even the morning stars sing together and all the heavenly beings shout for joy (Job 38:7). Creation itself, evidently, cannot help but return God’s aesthetic delight back to God, recognizing that the beauty in itself streams from the infinite beauty of the divine. It is right to recognize, with God at the end of that sixth day, the creation is very good, not just in moral or other terms but because it gives us pleasure. “God’s pleasure—” writes David Hart, “the beauty creation possesses in his regard—underlies the distinct being of creation, and so beauty is the first and truest worked of all that appears within being; beauty is the showing of what is; God looked upon what he had wrought and saw that it was good.”^{a id=“r1” href=”#fn”>1} To thus relate goodness and beauty is not to withdraw into hedonism; it is rather to take seriously that the surface of creation, no more than the depths, is the work of God. Even more, to thus relate goodness and beauty is to question whether the surface and the depths are at all such separate places. But still, the morning stars don’t sing at just any beauty. They sing at the true beauty of creation, beautiful precisely because God has made it and because creation points back to God (Romans 1:20). All fear of hedonism can subside now, for delight demands discernment. Failing to rightly celebrate creation at least partly misses the point: creation is a gift which God desires us to enjoy for all its aesthetic excellence.

Discernment does not end, however, at recognizing that the earth is in some sense beautiful. When the Romantics grant nature a capital N, they have recognized the beauty of creation without acknowledging that creation is creation—an acknowledgment that enjoying the aesthetic rest of the Sabbath certainly requires. Beauty is unimportant, perhaps even nonexistent, divorced from the creative work of God. Participating in the Sabbath, we have already hinted, involves being caught up in the exchange of desire and delight between the Artist and his living art; our affirmation of creation’s beauty is only an analogy to our praise of the living God. The Romantic enjoyment of earth falls dramatically short of the Sabbath care for creation at the point of prayer: the contemplation of beauty is the practice of attention and the response of delight, all offered as praise to the God who alone can be called beautiful. We can sense the committal overtone of such a definition; indeed, rightly contemplating creation calls for a certain artistic resolve toward creation in order to distinguish it from merely earth. Yet we do not make it much further in the biblical story before we find that such abstract artistic resolve alone is not enough, for our resolve, no less than creation itself, is fallen, estranged, in bondage to the intrusive reign of death. What we need is nothing less than a redeemed aesthetic key.

For Christian theology, this key is cruciform: Christ, in the words of Hans Urs von Balthasar, “is the Father’s fragrance in the world,”^{a id=“r2” href=”#fn”>2} the human embodiment of divine beauty who in resurrection exposes the lens of death that had clouded our vision of creation. In fact, Jesus Christ the incarnate Word of God mediates those originary creative words of the Father (John 1:3); thus we confess that creation is not even primary, but, in Hart’s words, “a new emphasis in the divine dialect of triune love, whose full, perfect, and infinitely diverse expression is God’s eternal word.”^{a id=“r3” href=”#fn”>3} Stanley Hauerwas is right to say that “moral and liturgical practice are a matter of taste,”^{a id=“r4” href=”#fn4”>4} and conversely, taste is a moral and liturgical matter. Because Jesus Christ precedes and mediates the beauty of creation, seeing rightly (which is to rightly respond in contemplative delight) requires “the moral [re-]education of desire.”^{a id=“r5” href=”#fn”>5} Christ is the beautiful truth, the fragrance of the Father, who breaks in from beyond history and recasts every artistic attempt in light of the heretofore unknown beauty of the cross.

Christian contemplation, with the beauty of the eternal Word as its standard and primary object, thus becomes a discipline uniquely able to witness and attest to the reality of divine agency in the world. As the resurrection was impossible, so David Toole calls the actuality of apocalypse “the art of the impossible,”^{a id=“r6” href=”#fn”>6} declaring the beauty of God’s action to be foreign, again intrusive, adventitious to the history we had imagined was a closed, causal system. The resurrection of Jesus points forward by demonstrating that history does not produce the kingdom of God, but rather the kingdom of God is something that happens to history. This astonishing reminder, that God remains in control of history, overwhelms our agendas and compels us to wait: God will arrive. And as von Balthasar notes, “this [eschatological] ‘waiting’ means that our life in the church is emphatically contemplative.”^{a id=“r7” href=”#fn”>7}

The apocalyptic surprise of incarnation and resurrection, moreover, changes more than only the way creatures see creation; it changes the shape of history itself. That the kingdom of God does enter as a surprise relieves history of the onus of creating perfection—and so grants the contemplative the ability to see time as time, time (like creation) as a gift, and so restores time to its original aesthetic glory. Hart speaks of time’s beauty as “rhetorical graciousness,”^{a id=“r8” href=”#fn”>8} highlighting history’s dependency on the creative words that God has spoken and retrieving the possibility of a history that mediates grace in its liberated beauty.

Of course, to abandon history to the aesthetic—that is, to abandon our own demands upon history—is to finally arrive at the possibility of Sabbath contemplation. And in the midst of arriving, the radiance of time has illuminated how contemplation functions as an integral piece of Christian witness. Just as contemplation earlier both demanded and constituted the discipline of open commitment, which we called artistic resolve, now contemplation both demands and constitutes witness to the God of Jesus Christ who yet acts in history, yet reconciles all peoples to each other and to himself. Indeed, contemplation demonstrates the central response Christians must make to such an astonishing intrusion as the cross: vigilant patience. While learning to see rightly, we have also learned to respond rightly to what we see. Von Balthasar adds to this witness the fascinating observation that contemplation doubles as the best Christian apologetics, for “all that we can show our contemporaries of the reality of God springs from contemplation: Jesus Christ, the Church, our own selves.”^{a id=“r9” href=”#fn”>9} So contemplation—which, we should note more explicitly, grows out of and is inseparable from the totality of Christian liturgy—is in no way an exercise in interiority (thought it requires an awareness of the self in Christ) nor private psychological self-correction (though it often happens in quiet privacy, and we cannot emerge unscathed). Contemplation, rather, pushes outward. Contemplation belongs to the mission of the church, because contemplation offers redemption: as von Balthasar faithfully anticipates, “we shall cause the whole of creation to radiate with inner meaning; through the mediatorship of the [person] of faith, every creature will be given a share in the ‘apocalyptic’ (i.e., manifest) truth.”^{a id=“r10” href=”#fn”>10} In the quiet contemplation of the beauty now so apparent to us in the light of the cross, Sabbath delight is possible. We, with the earth, stars, trees, and the heavenly beings, lift our voices and rejoice before all the nations: “The heavens are telling the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork” (Ps. 19:1).

Endnotes

1. David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003) 18. [Return]
2. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986) 67. [Return]
3. Hart, 255. [Return]
4. Stanley Hauerwas, “Suffering Beauty” in Performing the Faith (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004) 161. [Return]
5. Hart, 255. My employment and slight alteration of this useful phrase signals, perhaps, the beginning of an appropriation of Hart’s work that he would not entirely appreciate. In particular, my Christological emphasis in defining and maintaining the beautiful does not appear in his work with the same fervor or centrality, though he by no means explicitly disputes it; the accent actually seems to fit quite well into his construal of theological aesthetics. [Return]
6. David Toole, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1998) 210–212. [Return]
7. Von Balthasar, 142. [Return]
8. Hart, 397. [Return]
9. Von Balthasar., 105. [Return]
10. Ibid., 64. [Return]

9 December 2005 |
tags: Miscellaneous