The Paradox of the Beautiful

Orthodox Christianity challenges all man­kind by its constant reversal of what seem to be rational and self-evident queries: "What is truth?" Pilate asked (John 18:38), but in the Gospel of John, Christ had already revealed to his disciples that truth is a Who, not a what: "I am the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6). "How do we get to heaven?" is an ancient question, but Christ destroyed it when he rather rudely pronounced, "Re­pent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."

So many of the questions which have been argued for so many centuries in the religious polemic of Europe find a simple resolution within the Church; or, to speak more accurately, for Her they do not even exist as questions. ~Khomiakov

"What must I do to become holy?" we may wonder, but in Orthodoxy at least as much emphasis is placed on what we must not do-on learning how to get out of the way of a loving God who is sending us at every mo­ment the opportunities for sancti­fication, if we would only let Him act within us, for "I stand at the door and knock."

Orthodoxy is fraught with paradoxes and surprises, reversals and liberations from the traps of a merely rational approach to the world. In the arena of beauty, per­haps the biggest puzzle is how Orthodox Christianity manages at once to be the Christian faith that places by far the most emphasis upon art, image, and beauty-Orthodoxy's triumph," after all, is the icon while being the Christian faith that is also the most careful to stress the limited role of the imagination and the absolute necessity of imageless prayer.

If you think about it, its quite breathtaking, even cheeky, to go around proclaiming the absolute necessity of eliminat­ing all images from the mind during prayer and simultane­ously insisting that churches be filled to overflowing with sensitively depicted and composed paintings, with elaborate musical arrangements, and an overall choreography of color, light, smell, taste, and movement that make an Orthodox vigil still the best (and by far the cheapest, still coming in at around a dollar or two for admission in most markets) "per­formance art" around today.

Behind this duality between imageless prayer and image ­filled church lies a fundamental reversal in the religious imag­ination. Despite all its venerable tradition and long pedigree of doctrine, Orthodoxy remains an event; a happening-it remains something that still happens to happen. The Divine Liturgy is still as much or more God's gift to us as our gift to him; he's free, and the shape of things in worship is both the natural human response to the free gift of his person and the tender philanthropy of God in making sure that what we encounter is pleasant, therapeutic, inspiring, and above all bearable to us-for "What is man, that thou art mindful of him?" "A blade of grass: the wind passes over it, and we remember it no All of which explains why, although we might naturally wish to respond to the majesty of God through an aesthetic that would attempt to be one-sidedly grand, formulaic, and stiff, he won't let us. The aesthetic of the Orthodox Church is, more than anything else, humane. Church is the one place, when things are done in the spirit of the Orthodox way, where we can simply be ourselves. It is the one place where we can come to ourselves.

The beauty experienced within the Church is engineered to bring out the basic beauty within us, or to sweep us along to the beauty that is our future destiny in Christ. The beauty we encounter in the Church isn't some "high" culture im­posed on us, telling us to sit up straight, but a welcome re­minder of our original destiny, telling us, "Be beautiful as your Father in heaven is beautiful."

In Orthodoxy, however, it is not merely the answers that are different the questions themselves are not the same as in the west. ~Ware

To my mind, a single image in the Great Church of Christianity, the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, demonstrates the heart of the Orthodox approach to beauty. A display in the women's gallery on the far west side includes a schematic of the Church itself. When thinking about that rough sketch of the floor plan, tears come to my eyes. The drawing it­self has a mystical quality to it, such that you feel at once the perfection of God, the humbleness of man, and the impossible exchange and reten­tion of these attributes in liturgy. Even if nothing about the building but this plan had survived, a sensi­tive eye and heart would still have known that it was the most "beauti­ful" church in Christian history.

Orthodox art, finally, is attempting to save you, to deliver you-and one of its most central saving messages is that you were "fearfully and wonderfully" made by God. Orthodox art is designed to save you from the pitfall that you, that the world, that your fellow man are all somehow meaningless, formless, even ugly. The icon is beautiful because we are beautiful. Just like the saint, who becomes more human as he or she becomes more divine, the kind of beauty we practice in the Church is grand and natural at the same time.

Come to yourself in the sense of remembering who you are in Christ. Come to yourself-in the sense of sloughing off the disfigurement of sin that distorts the natural image of God within us. Come to yourself-come to your brother, who is your life, and to Christ, who is your archetype. But also come to yourself-come to the ordi­nary yet profound beauty that is you in your deepest self, as you are united with Christ.

Dr: Timothy Patitsas is Assistant Professor of Ethics at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology.