Recently while conducting a retreat my computer decided to teach me a lesson in panic. Not how to deal with it, how to remain functional while not dealing with it! Don't know what I did but after pressing some keys the entire screen inverted and I was looking at Vermeer's Girl with the Pearl Earring upside down. Now that's a problem when the first ten minutes of the retreat session were to be spent contemplating beauty, and reflecting on human creativity as a response to those deep longings that impel our hearts outwards and our minds upwards. It doesn't work if the masterpiece is upside down. And it doesn't help when a retreatant suggests we all stand on our heads, a spiritual discipline I neglected to develop. But once we had found a way round it, by showing the painting the right way round, we were indeed able to contemplate beauty and be impelled outwards and upwards beyond the usual limits of routine.
Yesterday, continuing my explorations of beauty and theology, I spent a while gazing attentively at another Vermeer, "View of Delft". This painting was drawn to my attention by a Vermeer enthusiast and I can see why she loves it. The simple and initial response to great art such as this painting is the least complicated and perhaps therefore the most significant. Admiration, wonder, joy, a sense that the painting does something to us, and then a growing appreciation of what the painting does to us. Not so much what the painting says, which may come later, but what the painting is, the sense of real presence, that first urgent intimation and initial invitation that we look, and be captured, not by force against our will, but by the more compelling persuasion of beauty whose summons to surrender is both irresistible and willingly answered.
Perhaps it's only after being arrested by beauty, taken unawares with all critical faculties stilled and silenced, that we are then able to look more closely and begin to understand what has happened to us. That's when we ask why and how beauty has such invasive and transformative power over us. It may be that the most important thing a great painting "says" is heard most distinctly through that summons to wait, to linger a while, to gaze slowly and to be affected, to appreciate and then reconsider, in the light of such an attended-to moment, what else relative to such commanding beauty, could we ever think was so important in our lives that we would so give ourselves to it.
The connection between beauty and God doesn't lie only with the obvious overlap of creativity between Creator and creature. When God looked on all that was made and thought it very good, was that the first such willing surrender of heart to created beauty? I find the thought of God as artist, and as One who enjoys aesthetic pleasure, intriguing. And it makes me wonder if in the painting by Vermeer above, there isn't an intentional underlying recognition of divine presence, the subtle pressure of beauty as intimation of God. The skyline with its churches, the sky itself showing the blue of heaven, and that blue reflected on the water; and the reflection of sky on water of blue and cloud, the given mixture of divine and human, heaven and earth, human longing and frustration, human joy and hurt. And there in the forefront, people going about their work and their lives, and reaching across to them, the reflected spires of the churches. A harbour scene from Renaissance Europe becomes in its detailed composition and through the medium of beauty, a way of both communication and communion, a glimpse of a world where God is present, not overwhelmingly, but with subtle faithfulness, there.
The divine in the midst of the human, the eternal mirrored in time, the surprise of beauty discovered in the ordinary, the composition of light and shadow, the juxtaposition of human bodies and human buildings and both as temples of God; such theological hints and clues may or may not have been in Vermeer's mind. No matter. Any theology of beauty requires the full range of height and depth, of simplicity and complexity, of concept and expression. Beauty and its transformative effects is a mystery profound, an experience of that which is Other and to which we are drawn without needing to know why, an encounter with the kind of truth that therefore requires of us adoration before analysis, and an inner surrender that is closer to contented wonder than frustrated intelligence. And as for the artist Vermeer, there is no need for didactic doctrine in paintings like his - the beauty of the human face, the loveliness of the world, the honouring of domestic life by portraying it, the contemplative care with which detail and story are told, are aspects of his art that should be all that the religious imagination needs. Any commentary on the paintings is all but superfluous - not useless, just unnecessary if the imagination is attuned to beauty.
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