Making Sense of the Claim that Beauty Is Knowledge
Updated: Aug 6
By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol
I am currently engaged in a project to gather Benedict XVI’s ideas on art and beauty, analyze them, and put them together in an aesthetic theory. In the process, I have come upon a particular claim of Benedict’s that is not easy to explain, although it is one I understand. I sense the explanation is to be found in Leonardo Polo’s work on thinking. My preliminary research into Polo is what I wish to report on in this talk.
In his message to the Comunione e Liberazione in Rimini in 2002, Benedict XVI, then still Cardinal Ratzinger—and let me call him by that name—cites Nicholas Cabasilas, the fourteenth-century Greek theologian who claimed that beauty is knowledge. Cabasilas makes the claim, referring to the beauty of Christ. Ratzinger appropriates Cabasilas’s definition and applies it to art, narrating a personal experience apposite to his point:
For me an unforgettable experience was the Bach concert that Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich after the sudden death of Karl Richter. I was sitting next to the Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann. When the last note of one of the great Thomaskantor Cantatas triumphantly faded away, we looked at each other spontaneously and right then we said: "Anyone who has heard this knows that the faith is true." In that music there was a power perceptible that was so extraordinary of present reality, although coming from the impact on our hearts, that it could not have originated from nothing, but could only have come from the power of the truth present in the composer's inspiration.
In this particular experience of Ratzinger’s, beauty is knowledge of the truth of the faith. This is a broad claim. The cantata Ratzinger listened to was “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme” (BWV 140), also known as “Sleepers Awake,” whose lyrics speak of the Bride and Bridegroom, their desire for one another, and their eventual wedding. The Bride and Bridegroom are traditional figures for the Church and Christ, the soul and Christ, Israel and the Messiah, but when Ratzinger says that anyone who has heard the cantata knows that the faith is true, he does not restrict himself to what the lyrics express. He refers to nothing less than Christian faith in its entirety.
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