Beauty and Matter in Relation to God

A transcript given by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom which resonates with Khouria Frederica Mathewes-Green's talk on Beauty and The Liturgy (http://orthodoxyisorthodoxy.blogspot.com/2012/10/beauty-and-liturgy.html )

"...beauty partakes of mystery, what beauty represents is something that can’t be put into words, we sense it with our whole being though it’s not something we can define. And that is true of our worship as well as we approach God, there is something that is so beyond our words, our ability to verbalize, that it requires the mystery of beauty around it in order to enable us to come into it at all."

+ Khouria Frederica Mathewes-Green

Beauty and Matter in Relation to God

by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom
http://masarchive.org/Sites/texts/1994-12-00-1-E-E-T-EM05-108Beauty&MatterInRelationToGod.html

Byzantine and Patristic Society Conference, December 1994

There is a link between beauty, and matter, and God, and I think I could start my talk by a quotation from Keats:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” — that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

And I think, this is a very important quotation, if we think of truth not as a system of intellectual statements but as something much deeper and essential: I am the Truth, — says the Lord. Jesus Christ. And. also, using an etymology which may be doubtful, the word 'alethia' makes me think of that which even the waters of Lethe cannot wash away, that which is absolutely stable, which cannot be removed. by anything created,And so, when we think of beauty, it immediately turns our mind to God Who is Truth.

And if we think of another quotation, this time of Dostoevsky, 'Beauty is ultimately communion with ultimate Beauty, which is God', and in another place he writes, 'To recognize beauty is to enter into mystical participation with the object in which we recognize it', — it is a very important kind of statement because it immediately links something which is directly, immediately accessible to us to what can become more than accessible, can become our life, our whole.

What is directly accessible, is what we see, what we perceive with our senses, and in that sense matter conveys to us beauty, or ugliness. But ugliness, whether in human behavior which is mediated to us by action, in others words physically, or in all the forms in which the world has become monstrous as a result of human sin, — even ugliness turns our minds to beauty; because to perceive ugliness causes us immediately to respond by a re-action, and say, 'No! Not that! Not cruelty; not hatred, not a caricature of the image of God; not a desacration of the Divine Image in man, or of the world He has made”.

And beauty can find expression in a variety of ways. I remember the passage in the works of the French writer Victor Hugo: a blank page, with a date, and the comment is, 'I can't write today, my grandchild has died'... There is more in this moment of silence than there would be in a poem full of emotion; and there is beauty in this silence.

There is also a passage from an English poet whose name I am not absolutely sure of, who says, speaking to his beloved, 'When we are silent together, you say at times — Our silence is as beautiful as a poem: how I wish you to say one day that one of my poems is as beautiful as silence'… And (this, these) quotation I bring to you not in vain, because there is a moment when the direct vision, the direct perception we have of beauty must find expression in forms, in words, in a way that makes it accessible to others.

And at times, the person who has perceived beauty may express it more or less adequately so that the experience can be almost easily read and perceived by someone else; but not always. There are moments when we cannot perceive directly through the object the beauty or the horror which is included in them; and I say 'horror', because of what I said earlier of the place, or role, of ugliness in our perception of beauty as a reaction against something which is its negation and its destruction.

I remember a young man who was sent to me number of years ago; he was mentally disturbed, and had made a painting. He was the pupil of a Russian lady who looked at the painting, could not read anything in it, and said, 'Go and see Father Anthony — he is as mad as you art and he may be able to explain it to you'. And when he brought me this painting, I saw nothing; it was a background of waves green, and blue, and dark, with a point of blueness, of fragrant blueness in a comer, and I could see nothing. I asked him to leave with me, and for three days I left it standing before me all the time I was awake. And suddenly, what I saw was that all those waves combined to the image of Satan which is above this point of light. And this was his experience of life; that was what he felt about himself, and about life around him.

When I gave him this explanation, — tentatively! — be looked, and. said, 'It is true! I feel that there is evil which is above me, ready to tear me to pieces'.. So, our two madnesses having met, it was a beginning for him of a discovery of self, which helped him later, under a guidance of a psychologist, to find his balance.

On the other hand, in order to perceive beauty, to understand beauty, we must be both involved and detached; involved, in the sense of being completely open to whatever impact we will receive; detached in the sense of being prepared to receive any massage, and be detached of self in order to receive it. I remember several examples; I believe that examples are at times more convincing than my words. there is a passage in the works of Professor Vysheslavtsev who introduced the little book which you all know, 'The Way of the Pilgrim', by saying that the difference between the Pilgrim looking at nature, and the vision of the peasant looking at the same field resides in the fact that the peasant looks at the field and immediately asks himself questions about its possible, potential fertility, of the work one must put into it, of the harvest that it may give. And all that prevents him from seeing the field in itself. The pilgrim looks at the field; he has no attachment to it; he has no intention to do anything about it; he looks at it with total openness of eyes, mind and heart, and he sees its harmony and. beauty. He can indeed see all the potentialities of this field, but they are not reduced to what one can get out of it. This is one example.

Another example is this; we may look at things either by looking at them and seeing them, or looking at them and ajusting them to our needs, very much like the pilgrim and the peasant. I received a number of years ago a visit of an American ecologist. He went round the world, asking two questions from his victims; the one was "what is silence" — and you had to answer immediately; and you can imagine, that being a clergyman, I had a lot to say about silence without even thinking. On the other hand ho asked. 'what is a tree?' At that moment, I had an answer; I bad. recently been in America and been impressed by the way in which the rich, un ... earth shot up grass, trees, and they were to me the expression of the life and. intensity of life which the earth possesses; and I explained, that to him.

And. then I decided to make experiments, and. I asked a young theologian, thinking that there I will got an answer that will be deep and convincing. His answer was: 'A tree? Building material!' — it killed me. I asked afterwards a young girl of our parish, not particularly educated., no genius, and she said., 'A tree? But it is beauty! Look at how it shoots upwards, opens up to the sky; listen to the sound of the rain, of the wind in the bows and in the leaves — to me a tree is beauty!'

Well, this indicates the fact that if you reduce things to a small dimension or to yourself, it becomes impossible for you to see things as they are. I have given more than once to children another example which perhaps is also worth thinking of; you go to a zoo, you stand in front of the cage, and you say, 'How beautiful the tiger! Look at his coloring! Look at his power (paws?), look at his movements!' Why can you say that? Because there are bars between the tiger andyou! But if by any chance the door be open, and. the tiger finds himself in the street, you will be quicker than you imagine on top of the lamppost, and at that moment you will not think that the tiger is beautiful, it will be a Tiger, Danger... And I remember also an inscription in the coach of tourist visitors which I was told about, and which said, 'When you go round on safari, don't leave the windows open because to the animals you are fresh meat'. It's again, another point of view.

And so, in order to be able to see beauty, to perceive it — I am not telling you these stories because they are funny, but because I think they are very meaningful in our attempt at discovering beauty and becoming able to see it and. to perceive it, and indeed eventually to commune with it.

There is also in Charles Williams the story of a girl called Lester who is killed, by an accident on Westminster bridge. She had never had any interest for anyone but herself and therefore, when she is physically dead her soul stands there and she sees nothing, because she never saw anything when she was alive. Crowds pass her — she doesn't see the people. She looks at the houses — they are black; there are windows that are lit at certain moments, darks at certain moments; and. it signifies nothing. And suddenly, her husband passes her; and he is the only creature to whom she related at all — in a selfish, in a greedy way but he existed for her outside of herself. And that starts her in the discovery of other things around her. And at a certain moment she finds herself standing on the banks of the Thanes; she had always had a revulsion against it — these heavy, polluted waters; because her reaction was, 'how horrible it would be to be forced to drink of it, to plunge into if'… Now she has not got a body that can have a revulsion; so, she sees these waters for what they should be: they are the waters of a big river that carry all the refuse of the great city of London: that is what they should be! And because she accepts them as they are, she can begin to see, deeper than this, things she never could see. She sees through the density and. opacity of those polluted waters, she sees clearer waters, cleaner waters, pur(er) waters, and at the heart of these waters, she sees a brilliant stream of water in which she recognizes those waters which Christ gave to the Samaritan woman.

Why? Because she was de-tached, and yet, she was nothing different And this happens with us in all our human relationships, and in all the ways in which we relate to the outer world. The outer world we see either as a tiger in a cage or a tiger in liberty. But as far as people are concerned., it is only if we can look at them with detachment, see them and not respond to their presence that frightens us or attracts us that we can see their beauty. And we can see then, first ofall, an outer shape, a physical vision, then, beyond it — thought, feeling, beauty and at the very core we can accept by faith, — and this is an act of faith we make, that there is the image of God imprinted in this person: however damaged, but it is there. It cannot be erased because God has put His stamp on each of us, and this stamp cannot be destroyed.

And then, we can approach every person with reverence; not be stopped by the danger they represent, not be stopped by the revulsion they provoke in us, not be stopped by indifference we may have with regard to them but look at them, and see ; see with the eyes of faith, not with our physical eyes. And I remember a Russian priest, Fr Evgraph Kovalevsky, saying to me once: 'When God looks at us, He does not see the virtues which we lack, or the sins which fill us; what He sees is His image which He has come to restore by His life, His teaching, His death and His resurrection'.

And this is also part of this mystery of beauty and of truth at the same time.

And so, there is silence, there is stillness which are essential to this vision of beauty; and you may find it strange, but I remember having read a book by an American mathematician called Hardy which is called “The Beauty of Mathematics”, in which he insists on the fact that the mathematics reveal to us stillness and depth. I cannot enlarge on this because I am no mathematician but think of it.

On the other hand we must be able to look, as I said a moment ago, beyond the visible to see the invisible. And there is a Persian story about a poet called (Medjnun) who wrote a number of poems about the exceeding beauty of his wife. And the poems were so beautiful, so convincing that the Shah called Medjnun and said, 'I want to see your wife! I am the Shah, I have a right to command her to take her veil off!' And she came, and she took her veil off, and the Shah recoiled in horror, because she had the nose of a camel, the ears of an elephant — and so forth. And the Shah said, 'Medjnun, how can you speak of the beauty of this woman? Leila is a horror!' And Medjnun answered, 'To see the beauty of Leila you must have the eyes of Medjnun'... And each of us should have the eyes of Medjnun when we look at one another or when we look at the world that surrounds us: at the ugliness of this world; because this world is not ugly by nature, in itself; it is distorted as a result of human sin.We were called to guide this world from the state of innocence, of purity into the state of communion with God, give it a dimension that will allow it to become what we are promised it will become one day — the vesture of God when God will "be all in all”.

And so again, we must be able to look at it. But it is conveyed to us not only by people and by what we see of the world around us; it is conveyed also by art. And here, we come to another problem; because art is the vision of agiven person projected either in words, or in sounds, or in color and lines by a person who has a perception, and expresses it — and at time we cannot understand, what it says. I remember a passage from the diaries of Alexander Blok, the Russian writer, who was asked, how he would interpret a given poem of his that was a symbolist poem, and his answer was, 'I can't; when I wrote it, I knew what I was saying, now I cannot remember'. But the poem stays beautiful despite of if, but we cannot find the root where it stems from. I remember Lanskoy who was an abstract painter saying to me, 'An abstract painter sees reality and expresses it on canvas; but it is only him who can see all of if and a few who have eyes to'. And in the same line, Stéphane Mallarmé, the French writer, being asked by someone what does such and such poem mean, and why does he write in such an incomprehensible way, answered , without exceeding kindness, 'I am sorry, you can't understand it, I write only for intelligent people !'

So, this is the background of beauty; you can find expression of seeing through things in more than one writer. I have (put) here a quotation from Gerard de Nerval 'Cleave a stone — and you will see there life which is within if'; Soloviev, writing, 'My friend — do you not understand that all that you hear, is nothing but an echo of a music which is beyond…' And so, all this means, that in order to be able to see beauty we must participate; there is a mystical dimension, in the real sense of the word 'mystical', not in the usual sense in which we use it laxly, but going back to its roots 'muen' — it means 'be spellbound', be made silent because there no words to express what I see, what I perceive, what I understand with all my being;but not simply with my intellect: remember what I said of this blank page of Victor Hugo.

And so, when Dostoevsky says, 'To recognize beauty is to enter into a mystical participation with the object in which we recognize it, and, beyond it — with the Maker,' — then we are brought to the ultimate; the ultimate being God,the One from Whom all beauty flows.

I will stop for one moment on an example, and then go into a field, which really frightens me in you presence, because you will tell me I am no theologian — which I know, but I wouldn’t like you to say that I am a heretic and I should beburnt — unfortunately it is not permitted in this country...

I want to give an example in a field which is not mine; I am deaf to music an do not appreciate it at all; I hear it — alas! — but it is only a disturbance to me, in church as anywhere else. But I have spoken to people, who are musicians, or were (musicians). I have roots in Russian music through my mother who was the sister of the Russian composer Scriabine, and I have heard enough about his perception of things and read what he wrote about it. Music reveals itself to us in a very progressive manner; we can take a sheet of paper on which music is written, a score; we can look at it and. see only the marks of a pen; if we are a musician, we can imagine the melody of it, and. yet, not in the way in which the composer, perhaps, had meant it; if there are more indications, if can be played, and. then the message is received, not with the eyes, not with the intellect but with all our being: our nervous system, our heart, all that is emotion in us, but also all that is understanding of music in us. And then, if we are more gifted, we can beyond the sounds we hear, perceive what the composer intended to convey through this music, to tell us through the sounds he has gathered together, composed. And. if our perception is even deeper than that, we may even, through communion with the composer’s experience of music, of beauty, enter into the field where he received. the message from beyond, his own self.

So, all that makes of beauty not an object of esthetic study, but an experience which belongs to each and all of us; it is one of the few words which carry meaning to everyone. I remember I was invited once to give a series of lectures in a course about Elliot; and I chose 'Beauty because it is the only thing I could say about what was his field of interest. And I remember how beauty, communion, understanding reunited us all; and the word 'beauty' makes sense to all of us while so many other things do not. When I was asked to give these lectures, I felt secure; I borrowed an Encyclopaedia Britannica, and thought, 'I will have it all there! ' I looked at the word. 'beauty', and it said., 'Beauty being a purely subjective reaction, there is nothing one can write about it; see 'esthetics'... Well, esthetics and beauty, in a way, have nothing to do with one another. Esthetics at best deals with expression, but not with the substance of it. An so now, going back to my early quotation 'Beauty is truth, and. Truth is beauty', I want to say something in which beauty, matter and God. relate to one another. And I see with horror that I will probably not be able to finish within 45 minutes, — but I will do my best! You can shut down if you are too tired of it.

First of all, I want to speak of the creation; but again, I do not contend to give an orthodox theological presentation, but a vision of things as I perceive them. A maker always puts his mark on what he makes; that is a platitude. But when it comes to God, He does not put a visible, tangible, physical mark; but whatever He creates, contains something of His thought, of what He is. And I remember Fr Serguii Bulgakov writing about the creation, and saying, 'When He creates, God flows out of Himself into what is not, into the nought; and the moment He flows into it, out of nought emerges ought'. Well, the imagery may be satisfying or not; I am not a disciple of Fr Serguii Bulgakov in that respect. But what I mean to say is that when God creates, He does something ad extra, but which will bear His mark. It is not something that afterwards can be dissociated from Him otherwise than by human sin that tears away from God what belongs together with Him.

Now, I remember a Sufi mystic telling me that sound, even inaudible sound, creates forms. And I have reflected on this, and I remembered several things. First of all, a passage in the writings of the XIV century Hebrew scholar called Maimonides in which he says that no-one knew the Name of God in Israel; it was confided only to the High Priest. And when the people were gathered in the Temple, when they sang Psalms and prayers, he leant over the banister of his place and whispered, inaudibly, the Name of God. And this name of God ran through the prayers which were been said and sang like blood runs through a body, and took them to the Living God Himself.

There is a remarkable passage also in an English writer whom I have already quoted, Charles Williams. In one of his novels he describes a painting; and the person who looks at the painting sees that from a corner of it light falls on the painting. And looking at the painting, he says: But the painting does not become visible because it is lit by light, no! I see now: light, pure, becomes color, and color becomes matter; and matter becomes the things which I see...

Isn't that the way in which we can think of the creative Word of God? God speaking a word, saying 'COME!', and this word, this sound becomes light, and the light becomes color, and the color becomes form, and the forms become the created world. This I leave with you, perhaps as a heresy, but perhaps something which you can think about, because even an erroneous statement may start you thinking in a better way, with the rightness that the statement does not contain.

And then, let us look at the chaos which is born of the creative word of God. When we think of chaos, we always think of an orderly being that has been destroyed; we think of the chaos resulting from the bombardment, the chaos resulting from a hurricane. But there is another meaning to the chaos. The original, the primeval Chaos is not something that was and is no longer; the primeval Chaos is the sum total of all the potentialities that God has put into the created world. And these potentialities will come into being, will become reality because we know from the Bible that this chaos was brooded upon by the Holy Spirit. And this Holy Spirit calls out of this chaos, which is all possibility, undestroyed, unharmed yet, one after the other, the beauty of the Cosmos — a Cosmos means beauty. Again, when you read the Bible, there is something which strikes me always: these six days of Creation. We see these six days evolving. But every day begins with evening, and becomes day. Because every day, with regard to the preceding day, is only a beginning, only a preparation; it is not yet fulfillment.

And so we see that out of the chaos, upon which the Holy Spirit broods, out of which He calls all its potentialities, one after the other emerge possibilities that become realities; and one after the other, from each other.

At that point perhaps it is worth saying that God has not 'created' things, made things like a workman that makes them and launches them into existence. He has created them free in their becoming. And — I am not going to make a discourse about freedom, but there is a Russian etymology for the word 'svoboda' which is freedom, which is 'being one's true self' — that is what God gives us in terms of freedom: not license, not an independence from either our own nature, or our calling, or Him; but a calling to be what we are called to be, what He hasdreamt of us, what He has called us to be and to become.

And then, another thing that strikes me forcibly is the fact that man is not emerging as a last term of a progression; he is not one who is the beat possible Ape that evolves, thanks to a little push by God, into a human being. God, to create man, takes the basic material of the created world: the earth, the dust — what is inherent in all that is created, all that exists. And man, because be is created of the dust of the earth, is akin to all things created; he belongs together with them; looking at him, all things created can recognize themselves already in motion to a greater perfection. I think this is a tremendous thing, and very important notion, because when God becomes man in the Incarnation, He becomes man in this basic sense; He becomes partaker of the dust of Creation that makes Him akin not only to mankind which He has come to save because mankind has fallen, but He is akin to the whole world, beginning with the smallest atom to the greatest galaxy who can look at Him, at the materiality of His body filled and pervaded with divinity, and see itself as it is called to be; itself in glory, itself already such as it will be when God shall be all in all.

And this, I believe, is an immensely important vision for us, not in terms of ecology, — which it does! — but also in the way in which we relate tothe whole world. Saint Maxim the Confessor said that man was created with a vocation to become one with God, and to become the guide of all things created from the material into the spiritual, in other words to communion, — and communion means community of life, oneness with God the Maker. And we have failed, — yes; St Theodore the Studite says that the world in its ugliness and its anarchy should be seen as a normal, good horse ridden by a drunken rider:we are the drunken rider, and the created world has not become evil — we have distorted its destiny…

But if that be true, then beauty, as I have tried to convey to you, unites itself inseparably with truth, which is the undestructible reality of God and the things in which God is at work. St Iraeneus says, 'A man perfectly fulfilled is an image of God'. We are not perfectly fulfilled, and the result is that the world around us is uglyfied, is distorted; but we, and the world, are called to become partakers of the mystery of Christ. And you remember probably this passage also of St Maxim the Confessor in which he says, if we want to understand the way in which the Divinity and the humanity are united in Christ, think of a sword plunged in a furnace; you put it in — it is cold, grey, lifeless; you take it out — it is glowing with fire and — Oh, mystery! — he says, now you can cut with fire and burn with iron. And this is what that beauty, which is God Himself, which allows us to contemplate Him in the mystery of His created world, contemplate Him in every single person around us, to contemplate Him even in ourselves, however incipiently: this is what beauty and truth are doing through the material world because everything is conveyed to us materially: we hear words, we see things, we commune with what is shown, and beyond it — to the One Who is the Maker of all things.

Question (missing) on something in Dostoevsky.

We apply to think that we use the word 'beauty', we apply it to things that create in us a strong emotion that elates us; but we do it without discernment because there is beauty in ugliness in a way; because otherwise uglinesscould not exist if there was not a substratum of beauty; it could not be simply 'nought' in front of us which we could perceive. And so, we would speak of the beauty of things ugly — pornography is one example, and Sodom is another, and so forth. We can speak of beauty because it is too great for us and we have no words to express if. There is a remarkable series of essays in Edgar Poe; rather two essays. The one called 'Domain of Arnheim' and 'Landor’s Cottage' in which he tries to express his view on beauty. And for him, a sin can be beauty only if it is on the scale of man and does not provoke in him fright, fear, horror. And he gives an example; he say, 'you cannot say that a thunderstorm is beautiful: it is horrible! And he gives an example of what should be beautiful: a garden with alleys that are not too long for you not to see that they end and that you must turn away.

Well, this to me is horrible, both. But what we can say, is that we can see that something appalling can have a beauty of its own. I will make a confession; during the war, at a certain period, I was in the French Resistance in Paris, and was in charge of two ambulances to go to places that have been bombed. One night we went to a place that was not yet been bombed; there was a circle of light falling down, and encircling a petrol factory. And then bombs began to fall. And the whole thing cane ablaze. And I remember, it was horrible, of course, on one level — there was no human lives engaged at that moment — but it was horrible to think of that destruction. But I remember, I sat down on a piece of a house that has fallen down, and looked! And a warden came up and said: Are you mad! They are dropping bombs!' And I said to him, 'Don't you see the beauty of it?!' I do not mean to say that I approved of it; I do not mean to says that I did not see the horror of it. But in a certain sense it was a beauty which I could not perceive otherwise, I had to perceive it otherwise on other occasions.

And so, one can at times see something which in its essence is evil, and where you can perceive (another) kind of beauty. I will make another confession; not quite a confession? No; it’s not mine. During the first part of the war I was on the front line as a surgeon; and one night a number of ambulances brought people to our medical point. Among them were two Germans, and someone said to me, 'You are the only one among us who speak German — go and speak to them'. One was dying and one could not speak to him, he was already beyond. hearing. The other one was at the gate of death. And I wanted to say something to him. And. I said to him: Do you suffer a great deal?.. And he opened. his eyes, the eyes of a dying man, and. with an effort to smile he said. to me, 'I can't suffer — we are winning the battle!' It was horrible historically; but it was a man who had given all his faith, all his life to something which I found monstrous, but who was paying with his life for his convictions. And. there was greatness — although, of course, it was ugliness, as well as the bombardment was ugliness.

So there is this element of a beauty that is at the core even of things monstrous and horrible. I don't think I can explain Dostoevsky better — Irina is a specialist in Dostoevsky, she should ask him!

Question ?

I think that at the root of all beauty there is the unsurpassed, incomparable beauty of God. And at that point beauty, truth, plenitude of life, crucified and sacrificial love coincide in one. And if we want to look at a core of beauty, that's where we must look. But we can see it only in the way it finds expression in the created world, unless, in a life of asceticism, of prayer, of communion with God we are faced with God Himself. But at that moment we do not see Him in esthetic terms; you see Him as greatness, we see Hip beyond words as it were: The Holy One that cannot be expressed in any manner. And at that level, we can remember what, I think, St Gregory of Nyssa says about the darkness, the tenebrae of God. And whether he says it or whether I read it in a commentary, I cannot remember now, the comment is that the light of God is so blinding that when we see if, we see nothing but darkness. It is not God who is dark — we cannot stand the intensity of the light. And so, we see a dinned light in the saints; we see a dimmed light in people, if we only open our eyes. There are moments when this light suddenly shines, and we may say, How is it that I have never seen it?. I remember teaching in the Russian school in Paris during the German occupation because I wanted to survive materially. And I remember a girl in the top form who was very ordinary, neither particularly intelligent, nor glorious in any way; and then a bombardment came; a bomb hit the house where she lived with her family and other people. They all escaped, they were counting one another — they were all there: NO! An old woman who was too old to move had not been able to come out!.. And this girl, who had been a nonentity, walked into the fire to bring out this woman — and never came back. So — the beauty was there, we were blind.... And then, of course, if we try to learn to look at one another, to look in order to see, to listen in order to hear, and to be in the presence of a person in order to perceive this person, we may discover beauty and not ugliness. Because the ugliness is the exterior that protects (itself) against us more often than not, or that which has been distorted, uglified by life. But there are moments when you look at a person — I have seen really innumerable people in danger of death and dying; I was a surgeon during the whole of the war; and I have seen people who were nonentities, of whom I have known as rather unpleasant characters, suddenly grow to the full stature of what they were, of being an icon... I don't know whether I answered anything in your question...

Question (Someone trying to be wise: the beauty of Incarnate God, the incarnation).

If I may add something that has been brought to my mind by what you said.. There is a cartusian of the Middle Ages who said something approximately this: If we speak of Christ — of the Son — as being the Word of God, we must realize that He is the perfect expression of the unfathomable, unplumbable silence which is the Father. And then, having said that, one can move on — and this is not his comment — one can move on, thinking, “All right, but the word is not simply speech, the 'word' is total expression, and the total expression is the Incarnation, as far as one can perceive it”. And what is at the (back), at the root of the Incarnation — the Divine Council which one of our Russian mystics of the sixteenth century described in a way that always strikes me; he says, "Before the world was created, the Father said to the Son, 'My Son — let Us create a world and man'. And the Son says, 'Yes, Father!' And the Father says, 'Yes, but man will desert Us, loose his vocation; and to bring him back and save him, — you will have to become man and die of it!'. And the Son says, 'Let it be so, Father' — and then the World was created.

Question — maybe on criteria of Beauty.. plus tiger.

I think I will give some sort of an answer, but I don't know whether it will answer your question. It applies to the Tiger beyond bars or outside, and our response to it. It is a story from the life of the Buddha. Once a dove pursued by a bird of prey, flew and hid itself in the folds of his garment; the bird of prey arrived and claimed it, and the Buddha said, No, I will not give it to you because it has a right to live… And the Bird of Prey answered, 'So have I: by saving the life of this Dove you kill me — what are you going to give me in exchange for it? ' And the Buddha says, 'An equal part of my body'. So they brought scales, put the dove on one side, and the Buddha began to cut pieces off his own flesh and put it on the other side and the dove was still heavier until he has put his whole self on one side, and then it equaled the weight of the dove. I think, we can face the Tiger in these two situations if we are ready to give ourselves as meat. And this is what Christ has done; He has faced mankind which was the sting of death to Him, identifying Himself with it, and dying of it in order to give a life that can no longer be taken away… I don't know whether there is any (shadow) of an answer in my pagan examples.

(Comment: “What a Bishop!”)

Question: Why, speaking of Divine Silence at the core of beauty, you didn't mention love which

I would have thought is the point of departure…

When I gave this example, I had in mind a very definite point which I was making; but going back to K’s question, God, ultimately, is unknowable to us otherwise than by communion, that is by acquiring a community of life with Him. But, in order to bring us to that community of life, He must reach out to us, and guide us, teach us, and, indeed, become what we are so that we can become what He is. And so that is why I insisted on Christ as Beauty, as Truth, I could say also, 'I am the Way'. He is the way that brings us to be sons and daughters of the Most High; I hope I will not betray St Iraeneus of Lyon if I say that I think he said somewhere that in Christ and in the Spirit, by transcending our estranged condition, we become not only adoptive children of God but the son of God in the Only-Begotten Son. It is not a quotation, I am indicating a thought which I have met in him… And I think we can meet with the Divine life, with the Divine love, with the Divine truth in the One who expresses it. And when we become one with Him — Baptism, the Gift of the Spirit, Communion, a life according to His example and teaching — then we enter with Him, in Him in that relationship with the Father which is His; but this is something of which I cannot speak certainly, and I don't think that anyone has spoken much; because that is the beyond. We may think, and we are right in thinking so, that in Baptism, in the Gift of the Spirit, in Communion we unite oneself to Christ so that He is in us and we are in Him, but it is not yet the plenitude. Saint Paul is quite clear when he says that he longs for death because as long as he is in the flesh, he is separated from Christ. And so, it is after our death that we will see as we are seen. But even that is not the end, because there is no end; there is only an eternal movement not only Godwards, which we do on earth, but into the mystery of God, which is expressed by the words 'God shall be all in all'.

Question?

I do not believe we should see beauty in what we think is satanic; but Satan attacks what is there, be is not a creator; there is nothing which is of his own making, all is God’s making. And when someone, or something falls into the power of Satan, there are two aspects in it; on the one hand there is the victim, on the other hand there is the horror. We can, we must perceive the horror, the degradation and the satanic dimension of certain things; but beyond them we must be aware that the person is not Satan, that the person is a victim that requires salvation, for whom Christ has died.

Question: Does the artist have to describe, define beauty...

I am not an artist in any field, but I think that an artist, when he creates, does not aim at creating beauty in one way or another; he pours out an experience of his, and then steps back, and looks at what he has created. I do not believe that someone sits down to say, 'I will paint the most beautiful face'. He will try to project on canvass his vision of the person, say, the Madonna Sistina, or an icon, or a portrait. So, in that respect, what he aims at, is truth, and truth proves to be beauty. When someone paints a portrait, be is not making an attempt of having a snapshot in colors; he looks at the face, and puts on the canvass all he sees of the person; even the colors are not the natural colors, very often. And then he looks, and at times he sees more than he was aware of. I have met someone who has painted. a portrait of someone, well known to him, and. who, having finished the portrait, sat back and. said., 'It's not at all the person I know...'

Question ?

I have no doubt that beauty can veil something more important than sound, color or movement. But that is the point, that we must be prepared not to reduce what we see or hear to ourselves. It's a question of saying, 'This is an expression; beyond this expression there is mere. Let me be pervaded with the experience of centuries or of an individual person as freely as it comes, but let me not consider that the expression which reaches me is the thing which is being conveyed'. I think, to take a caricature, I would say, you cannot stop at a score instead of hearing the music; and you cannot simply hear music for the sake of hearing a lovely lullaby and go to sleep: it's an insult to what had. been created by someone else. And the same is true about works of art; you must look, receive the message, and go beyond the lines and colors. And in that respect perhaps I could quote Saint John Chrysostom who says, 'When you pray, place yourself in front of an icon, then shut your eyes, and pray'. It sounds absurd — what is the point of putting an icon in front of me and not to look at it? — Because having received the message, you must go beyond this particular message into a meeting with the Living God.

…disagreement, that the peasant does look beyond the utility of the soil…

I am quite sure that you are right, and that I was wrong! I think the pilgrim shows detachment, and. therefore can see one aspect of things; the peasant is involved — not in a greedy way, but in a creative, active way in the life of this earth, he brings out of it all it is capable of bringing, and so sees and thanks God for it. And, if you pursue this line, it is a remarkable thing that in our Liturgy bread is brought for the consecration; well, bread begins with God creating the earth, giving it fecundity; by man making it bring harvest, and then, taking part of this harvest, and bringing a thanksgiving to God which will be accepted, in two ways: on the one hand, this bread will be partly consecrated., and will become, sacramentally, the Body of Christ. And on a simpler level, in slav countries there was in the Middle Ages a custom, that when a family was gathered, a place was left empty for Christ if He came; and a loaf of bread was deposited there. And. if a beggar or a pilgrim knocked at the door, he was put in this place, because he was an icon of Christ come to earth. And then, at the end of the meal this bread was broken and distributed between the members of the meal; not as a sacrament in the sense of liturgical communion, but as a sacrament of a bread that was given to God, and it was God's own bread, that one shared. So, I am very grateful for your correction.

I see three different concepts, of beauty and matter in relationship with God…does beauty have (ontological)…

You can’t be more confused about the title than I was and still am: it was so vast, and so deep that I tried to make the best out of my lack of understanding of it. Speaking of beauty in your terms, I would say there is no such thing as notions existing apart from God and apart from the created world; there is no such things as truth, or beauty which are not God Himself or the result of His gift of self to us; otherwise, there would be on the one hand a created world, on the other hand God, and then, a sort of empirea with nothing existing there independently of God or of the created world; that’s how I understand your question and try to answer it.

The tiger on the right of me will now decide to go back to his case or he will send people along the Strand, and we are most grateful to him for coming out and be with us, and we are not afraid…