WHEN my husband was a boy in the working class city of Chester, Pa., he was in the choir at St. Michael’s School. During Holy Week, the choir would sing, among other things, Giovanni da Palestrina’s Adoramus te, Christe, a choral version of the Latin prayer recited during the Stations of the Cross. St. Michael’s didn’t have many of the frills schools have today and my husband led a rough-and-tumble life with his friends on the streets, but he encountered one vital thing there: beauty.

Children need beauty. Even though they can’t fully understand it, beauty seeps into their souls and finds a permanent home there. It gives them a taste for the truth and the love that underlies all things.

Adoramus te, Christe
Et benedicimus tibi
quia per sanctam crucem tuam
redemisti mundum.
Qui passus es pro nobis,
Domine, Domine, miserere nobis.

We adore Thee, O Christ,
and we bless Thee,
who by Thy Holy Cross
hast redeemed the world.
He who suffered death for us,
O Lord, O Lord,
have mercy on us.

— Comments —

Stephen Ippolito writes:

I think about this issue of beauty in life: what it is and what it means for us as people and as Catholics- a lot.

Engaging with beauty occasionally is essential to a healthy human psyche and you are absolutely correct when you say that all of us, even little boys, instinctively sense that and so harbor a longing for it.

But what is beauty? It’s true that beauty can and usually does please our physical senses – a splash of colour in a prospect of flowers, a panoramic view of rolling hills, a delicious taste or smell, a pleasing face or figure or a great painting-  but the sensual stimulation doesn’t communicate the truth or essence of the beautiful object.To seek beauty purely through the senses and in order simply to please our senses is merely egotism and hedonism, no?

A truly beautiful thing has a much more profound truth behind it than just its physical or sensory manifestations. Though beauty can be communicated and felt through the senses it is much more than that and is surely valuable in and of and for itself alone. Beauty, I think, is at essence that which affords us a glimpse of the infinite and the divinely-ordered: which is God.

For Mr W it was choir music; for me it was as a university student when I first read a small but important scene that Wordsworth recounts in Book 4 of his semi-autobiographical work: The Prelude. He paints, many decades later, the experience as a young man on a country holiday walking home  along a winding path through the hills at sunrise when he was suddenly overcome by the sheer physical beauty of the scene laid out before him:

“Magnificent the morning was in memorable pomp, more glorious than I ever had beheld…the sea lay laughing at a distance; near the solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds…” and so on.

The scene as Wordworth paints it is certainly beautiful and worth hearing for that reason alone – but what is really important is what he has to say about how the vision  effected him in that moment:

“Ah! Need I say, dear Friend!

That to the brim my heart was full; I made no vows but vows were then made for me; bond unknown to me was given, that I should be , else sining greatly, a dedicated spirit; on I walked, in blessedness, which even yet remains”.

Notice that the great poet falls back upon religious terms to describe his experience of beauty in nature: “vows”, “blessedness”, “sin”. Although Wordsworth appreciated the physical beauty of the scene before him and communicates it effectively enough through visual description, the deeper truth behind the scene – its essence, if you like – can only be felt in the heart and can only be related in religious terms as a religious epiphany: a short, sharp, sudden revelatory moment of spiritual insight.

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