IS BEAUTY AN ANCIENT HISTORY?

Lamenting the lack of beauty in modern life, author Alex Garcia-Rivera looks to the ancient cave paintings of Lascaux as evidence that irk through the beautiful that we truly experience God.

"I remember standing in front of the paintings of the horses facing the rhinos and being profoundly moved by the artistry. Tears were running down my cheeks. I was witnessing one of the world's great masterpieces."

Jean Clottes, France's foremost expert on prehistoric art, so describes his response to the Stone Age paintings found deep in a cave at Lascaux, France. Clottes' response rings true for anyone who has experienced a work of beauty. Interestingly enough, it also rings true for anyone who has had a deep religious experience.

Beauty and religion appear to have the same roots. Most theologians would go even further: God is beauty. And the beautiful is the medium par excellence by which we experience the love and knowledge of God.

A look around some contemporary churches, however, reveals few works of art of recent origin. Church after church interior presents a visual silence of stark function and hospital-like economy. Given the close connection between God and the beautiful, one can only ask: Why have the arts fared so poorly in the churches of our day? where are our Gothic craftsmen, our Michelangelos, Berninis, and Donatellos?

What has happened to the beautiful, not only in the church, but also in the fabric of our society?

Perhaps an answer can be found in another simple observation. What amazes most about the Stone Age cave paintings is not the fact of their great age, but that after scores of millennia, these ancient paintings still move another human being to tears.

The cave paintings at Lascaux demonstrate a truth our world seems to have forgotten. There exist values that transcend space and time. There exist realities that pervade the entire universe either through the vast reaches of unimaginable light-years of space or the vast journeys of unimaginable aeons of time. There exist presences that allow us an intimacy with God.

Theologians and philosophers have long spoken of these values, presences, and realities. These are the "transcendentals": the true, the good, and the beautiful.

The transcendentals provide a key in understanding a theological paradox. How can a finite human creature experience or even speak of the infinite God? How can the finite human creature name the nameless, perceive the imperceptible, make visible the invisible?

Theologians answer these questions through the transcendentals. Because God is truth, good, even beauty itself, an experience of truth, goodness, or beauty is also an experience of intimacy with God.

Because we depend on God for our very existence, we also depend on our experience of truth, goodness, and beauty for our very lives. Irenaeus, the great theologian of the second century, exquisitely phrased it: "The glory of the Lord is living human being, and human being lives for the vision of God." Irenaeus tells us that we were made to see God, our very life depends on seeing God, and thus in a sense our very lives depend on seeing truth, goodness, and beauty.

Beauty, wherefore art thou?

If Irenaeus is correct, then we are in deep, deep trouble. The transcendentals, you see, have fallen on hard times. The dearth of works of beauty in our churches is but one example. When was the last time you heard someone speak of truth? When was the last time you heard someone speak of the common good?

The human horrors of the 20th century--the lingering nightmares of two world wars, a cold war of unbelievable destruction, and the heartlessness of ethnic cleansing--have shaken our confidence in the truthfulness and goodness of our humanity, indeed, of the entire creation.

We have lost our faith in the transcendentals, I believe, because we have lost our faith in our humanity. No wonder the wise architects of the Second Vatican Council chose to emphasize the dignity of the human person. In a world that has lost its faith in the basic goodness of the human family, the Christian message that humans are made in the image of God is a needed reminder.

I believe this teaching will not be heeded until we begin to talk of the beautiful, the transcendental on which the others, the true and the good, hinge. Moreover, the key to regaining faith in the human is to wonder anew at the gift of making beautiful works that is uniquely human.

The stakes are high. The late Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar once put it: "No longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man. We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it.... We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past--whether he admits it or not--can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love." Von Balthasar, then, rings an alarm. We must learn to find beauty once again or we will find ourselves in a world "no longer able to love." But how is beauty once more to be found? It would do no good to simply say, "Look and see, beauty is all around you." For that is the problem. We have forgotten how to look and see.

I believe the key lies in learning to look at our humanity once again with new, fresh eyes. We have to be amazed once more at the most marvelous of God's creation, the human creature, and to find there once more the basis for what the church called to our attention, namely the dignity of the human person.

Dignity is destiny

What is this "dignity" of the human person, and how will it help us to see beauty again? The cave paintings of Lascaux give us a rich vein to mine. Just as the human capacity to experience beauty contributes to what is meant by human "dignity," so too does the human capacity to make beautiful works. To experience the beautiful depends on our ability to create things of beauty.

I am not saying that one has to be an artist in order to be an audience. I am saying that both the making and the beholding of a work of beauty emerge from the same human depths. The source of both art and the experience of beauty is one. If we can find that source, then I believe we will also find the source of human dignity.

So where and what is this source? The "where" is deceptively easy to locate. It is found in the deepest depths of the human heart. The "where" of human dignity, however, is inextricably intertwined with the "what." And the "what" can be found by visiting (in our mind) that little cave in the heart of the Burgundy region of France and descending its depths as if we were also descending the depths of the human heart.

The minute we enter the cave of Lascaux, the heart stops and then races as it recognizes itself in a marvelous profusion of incredibly beautiful images. Bears, horses, rhinoceroses, ibexes, and even imaginary animals prance, gallop, and stand in awesome majesty before our eyes. Perhaps the most incredible find as we begin our descent is this: Whoever created this incredible beauty was one of us, was human. And this human lived 30,000 to 50,000 years ago!

Our find grows even more mysterious if we take into account the work of innumerable anthropologists who tell us that it was exactly at this time when the human creature as we know him and her today emerged from the night of evolutionary chance into the dazzling light of the beauty seen now before us. Moreover, this period is memorable for what John Pfeiffer, the noted anthropologist, called the "creative explosion"--the profusion of works of art that marks what is known as the Upper Paleolithic Age. When the human creature entered this stage of history, he and she did so with a bang.

For the theologian, this fact ought to be of great interest. After all, the evolutionary emergence of the human creature coincides with Christian beliefs in the origins of the human creature. If the "creative explosion" marks the beginning of a new species, the human upon this earth, it also refers to the time mentioned in the Book of Genesis when Adam and Eve were created in the image of God.

Our misty beginnings

The Lascaux paintings may tell us something about the misty beginnings of our humanity. Indeed, the beauty of Lascaux may tell us something about the meaning of the Bible story of Paradise, our first parents, and even the Fall. This does not mean that Lascaux is the site of Paradise. (I suspect that the place of Paradise and the Fall is found in the human heart.) Nonetheless, the paintings of Lascaux will also reveal something to us about the makeup of our humanity as it first begins its tragic journey in this world.

Perhaps the greatest lesson to be learned at Lascaux is what truly marks a creature as human. A long philosophical and scientific tradition marks the rise of the truly human with the rise of the rational mind or a self-consciousness. A newer, more cynical tradition from the psychological sciences, however, marks the rise of the human with brutal violence--our humanity emerges from evolution by a brutal, calculated first murder.

Lascaux, on the other hand, offers a surprisingly different perspective: The mark of our humanity lies in works of beauty. That humans are rational may be questioned--and violence mainly points out our inhumanity--but there's no doubt that works of art mark that human presence. Indeed, what we find at the origins of humanity are not books of philosophy or murderous bands of savages but artists capable of incredible works of beauty.

A gaze at the lines that reveal the bison forms sees something more than intelligence at work. Such lines reveal a disciplined freedom, a gracefulness that is more than the work of a self-conscious mind. They are an epiphany of the human soul. Indeed, these graced curves of the bison reveal a mysterious and marvelous union of sensibility and creativity. It guided a human soul to shape a set of lines that still evoke, even 50,000 years later, a sense of childlike wonder and, yes, beauty.

We have labeled these first artists "primitive," suggesting their minds were not as developed as ours. Yet if intelligence is to be measured by its beauty, then these first artists may have been more intelligent than we who live today with little to show by way of the intelligence of beauty.

Lascaux suggests to us not that beauty is more significant than intelligence but that intelligence finds its true home in beauty. The dignity of the human person is not to be found only in rationality.

Another lesson from Lascaux is that religious experience and the experience of the beautiful are profoundly connected. The cave at Lascaux appears to be not simply an ancient museum of art but a religious shrine of sorts. The paintings throughout the cave are organized as a temple or as an ordered whole of religious significance.

There is a very special place in this stone temple, found at its deepest part. It is known as the crypt or shaft and is believed to be the "holy of holies" of this most ancient church. On its domelike roof, like an Eastern icon, is an amazing painting.

A "wounded hunter" with a birdlike head lies at the feet of an equally wounded bison eviscerated by what appears to be the spear of the hunter. Though some dismiss it as the depiction of a hunting accident, most serious scholars see this painting depicting a shaman, a holy man, lying in a trance evidently trying to unite with the spirit of the bison.

This painting depicts a profound compassion. It is as if the pain of the bison speared in the hunt moves the shaman, who, forgetting his own safety, goes into a trance in order to undergo a dangerous spiritual journey of compassion in hopes of uniting with the bison spirit. Such a union taking place, the shaman would then console and give thanks to the bison for its life.

Two elements appear to be at work here. One is a profound sense of the unity and interconnectedness of life. The first humans recognized that their lives depended on the life of the bison. The hunter lived because the hunted also lived. More interestingly, the wounded hunter depicts the ability of humans to transcend identity of self and identify with another. This capacity for what Joseph Campbell, the great scholar of religion and myth, calls a "transpersonal identity" lies at the heart of religious experience and also, it appears, of art. The ability to put oneself in place of another or, in the case of the artist, in place of the work of art, is a profound human act.

The wounded hunter depicts less a savage humanity than a profound compassion, an extraordinary human act of transpersonal identification with the life that must be given so that the hunter too can live.

The other element of the Lascaux religious experience is a great sense of awe. Meant to be seen in the deepest and darkest part of the cave, where sounds take on an eerie, mystical quality and torchlight brings forth spiritlike shadows, the wounded hunter gives rise to marvelous wonder.

By wonder, I mean the opening up of perception to a dimension of reality that is truly extraordinary. Such wonder, along with transpersonal identification, depicts extraordinary human abilities. Religious experience illumines the human capacity for making works of beauty. Such extraordinary human abilities, however, point to an even greater human depth.

French philosopher Jacques Maritain once made an extraordinary observation. In his classic essay, Art and Scholasticism, Maritain reasoned that delight in beauty is a human experience where intuition and intelligence become one. Experience of the beautiful, Maritain explains, is the union of the intuition of the senses and the pure intelligence of the intellect.

It is, he observed, what is left for us of Paradise. This is how Adam and Eve must have seen the world before the Fall. In other words, the experience of works of beauty is what's left of the original innocence of Adam and Eve.

Presumed innocent

Maritain's observation suggests that at the heart of the experience of all human works of beauty, of all that marks us as truly human, lies a marvelous innocence.

And so innocence, let me suggest, is the depth of the human creature. Only innocence allows the selfless loss of self-identity in order to identify with another. Thus, innocence allows wonder to be experienced by the human heart. Innocence makes possible an experience of beauty.

This innocence, however, is a wounded innocence. Human experience no longer supports a spontaneous and constant wonderment at beauty. What came naturally and spontaneously to our first parents no longer comes without effort to us.

Our sense of wonder and beauty must be constantly renewed. But works of beauty that give rise to childlike wonder and delight are still possible. Innocence, though wounded, still abides deep in the labyrinths of the human heart.

The suggestion that innocence is the depth of our humanity may come as a shock to many. Was there not a Fall? Aren't humans predisposed to strife and violence?

Yes, I believe there was a Fall. The Fall, however, means less an act of original lust than a loss of vision. When our first parents bit the apple, they opted for knowledge rather than vision. Too late, they realized that without vision there could be no real knowledge.

Nonetheless, through the graciousness of a merciful God, the Fall wounded but did not kill. Our capacity as children of Adam and Eve to experience beauty and wonder was not entirely lost. God left us our innocence that we may still know and love God. Indeed, it is God whose grace sustains and strengthens such innocence.

Human innocence, after the Fall, must now labor so it may not fall prey to cynicism. Human innocence must constantly be renewed by labor that gives rise to our sense of wonder and beauty.

Such graced labor is still capable of producing incredible works of beauty that inspire wonder in the human soul. Here lies the dignity of the human person; here lies the urgency in the call for the renewal of the arts in our churches.

For the arts are more than the luxurious pastime of the wealthy. They renew our sense of the dignity of the human person and our sense of wonder. Through God's grace, they strengthen in us that profound quality of innocence that is the depth of our humanity.

You can pay a virtual visit to the Lascaux cave at: www.culture.fr/culture/arcnat/Lascaux/en/

ALEX GARCIA-RIVERA is a professor of theology at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California. His most recent book is The Community of the Beautiful: A Theological Aesthetics (Liturgical Press, 1999).