—Thomas Merton, letter to Dorothy Day
7
The Beatific Vision
BECOMING WHAT YOU BEHOLD
Every face has beauty, but none is beauty itself. Your face, O Lord, has beauty, and this having is your being. It is this absolute beauty itself, which is the form that gives being to every form of beauty. O immeasurably lovely Face, your beauty is such that all things to which are granted to behold it are not sufficient to admire it.
—St. Nicholas of Cusa, On the Vision of God
It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.
—Lamentations 3:26
Dietrich Bonhoeffer begins his book Christ the Center by saying, “Teaching about Christ begins in silence.”1 What do you think he meant? Why do you think that is? Take a moment to think about it. (Yes, now. Like, right now.) Pause. Breathe. Be silent.
If you’re like me, you’ll keep reading and forgo the forced exercise. But what does it say about us when we’re so reluctant to pause?
THE GROWTH OF PRODUCTIVITY AND THE FALL OF STILLNESS
I have a productivity problem. No, I don’t have trouble producing. I love getting things done and checking off boxes. I have a problem with finding my worth in what I accomplish. In the truth category, I can read my Bible and check off my daily devotional time. In the goodness category, I can focus on vices and the habits that cultivate virtue. But prayer seems useless because it is so unmeasurable. Experience with the divine can’t be manufactured. I rarely leave a prayer time thinking I’ve done anything at all. It seems like I spent time in my own mind saying things to a God I believe in who may not hear me or care about what I have to say. I can’t check anything off. The prayer time doesn’t seem to accomplish anything.
In a novel by Wendell Berry called Jayber Crow, there’s a character named Troy. He’s pursuing a love interest and is portrayed as a bit of an antagonist. He eventually marries her, but Berry contrasts Troy with his eventual father-in-law, Athey. Here’s what Berry writes: “Athey said, ‘Wherever I look, I want to see more than I need.’ Troy said, in effect, ‘Whatever I see, I want.’”2 These are two fundamentally different ways of seeing the world, and the latter comes with disastrous effects. The first one cultivates care, margin, and love; the second produces exploitation, efficiency, and apathy.
But doesn’t Troy have the modern mindset? Sure, we may not want more land, but we want more stuff. Or in my case, I want more time, more moments to be productive in.
There may be nothing more valuable and more needed in Christian spirituality today than to slow down, to stop trying to do something, and to attend. I’m guessing that if you humored me in the above exercise of silencing yourself, you found that taking a breath, closing your eyes, and sitting still for a moment felt refreshing. It does for me. In my world, I go, go, go, do, do, do, and I need moments when I stop chasing life. As T. S. Eliot eloquently says in his poem “Burnt Norton,” I’m regularly “distracted from distraction by distraction.”3
All theology starts in silence, because before we say anything about God or speculate about God, we need to be reminded that all knowledge of God comes to us by grace rather than by our own effort or our own pontificating about what we think God is like. Theology starts in silence because silence is where we meet God.4
This gift of silence comes to us from the mystical or contemplative tradition. Fred Bahnson has written a memoir about food, land, and spirituality. He spent time at a monastery in South Carolina where he asked his spiritual director about going deeper in prayer. Father Kevin answered, “Limit the input. . . . God pursues us. The challenge is to slow down enough to recognize it.”5 I can relate. In my early prayer life, I followed the ACTS plan: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication. These were the parts of prayer that were necessary for connecting with God. First, I adored God. I said things that are true about him. Sometimes I’d discover a new term, like “omniscient.” “God, you are omniscient,” I would pray. But I was limited to my concepts. Then, I would confess. Often the sins were the same as last time: the generic, run-of-the-mill things. Maybe I had gotten extra mad that week, so anger would be especially confessed. Then I would thank God. I was confused with this one. It seemed a lot like adoration. So, I would thank God for the same things I adored about him. Then I would make supplications, which meant asking for things.
As I grew older, I ended up with less to say. Words failed me. I thought maybe that was a bad thing, as if I were supposed to have an influx of spiritual language or insights to say to God. I needed to say true things about God. I ought to express my encounter with God, even to remind myself. To be fair, prayer needs theological insight, or else it would be vacuous and meaningless. Yet when explanations and understandings and descriptions ran out, I sat in the divine presence and wanted to experience God. My words were inadequate. They always were. In silence, Thomas Merton reminds us, God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience.6
The beautiful life, according to a mystic or contemplative, is not one of technique. I can’t offer you four steps to become a mystic. We live in a technological age in which growth can be condensed into steps. The temptation for me is to view the contemplative life as some sort of achievement or project. If I devote thirty minutes a day to quiet prayer, in six months I will have increased my spirituality by 25 percent, I think. But as Thomas Merton explains in his book on contemplation, “The worst disadvantage of contemplation is that it sounds like ‘something,’ an objective quality, a spiritual commodity that one can procure, something that is good to have; something which, when possessed, liberates one from problems and from unhappiness.”7 Contemplation is not a goal that one reaches. It is not a manufactured project. Christianity is an encounter with a person, not an idea.
As such, the beauty tradition requires learning to listen more than it requires knowing what to say. Perhaps I can call the first step to prayer a “sanctified shutting up.” In its essence the beauty tradition is about the practices of living more humanly. Rowan Williams recommends a slow life of listening as “living with less frantic acquisitiveness, living with space for stillness, living in the expectation of learning, and most of all, living with an awareness that there is a solid and durable joy to be discovered in the disciplines of self-forgetfulness that is quite different from the gratification of this or that impulse of the moment.”8 A beautiful life is in beholding the Beautiful One.
GOD AS BEAUTY
Describing God as beautiful may be new for you. It was for me when I first heard it done. I could imagine God as true. He could be known by a philosopher-theologian. I could imagine God as good. He could be studied by a practical or moral theologian. But beautiful? That seemed subjective, too personal. I would need to become a lover or mystic for that. Yet God is not just a being we know or react to; as the Beautiful One, he also compels us and draws us in.
Rather than define beauty according to what it is, I think it’s more helpful to define beauty according to what it does. Beauty demands attention. Beauty draws something out of us. Thomas Aquinas defines it as that which pleases upon being seen.9 Beauty stops us in our tracks and slows us down. If we think about beauty less didactically and more experientially, we’ll see beauty is a fairly good description of God. God, like a work of art, slows us, compels us, pleases us, draws something out of us.
And if God is beauty, then being unbiased or disinterested about the Beautiful One is impossible. It would be like trying to explain my wife cooly and rationally. I suppose I could. I could tell you facts about her. She has brown hair and brown eyes. She likes organization and tidiness. She’s servant-hearted. Yet as true as all those facts are, they don’t capture who my wife is. They don’t explain her. Someone who wanted to see what makes her lovely would have to know her, spend time with her. It’s similar with God. We should not be cold and analytical about God. We are experiencing a beauty, a love, that we cannot comprehend.
I said in the introduction to this book that the transcendentals are called such since they point to the Transcendent One, in whose image we are made. God, then, is the epitome of beauty. He displays his beautiful essence in his first creative act. Evoking the poem of creation in Genesis 1, Makoto Fujimura has written, “God the Artist communicates to us first, before God the lecturer.”10 God starts the Bible with a divine poem. In response to the creation of woman, man’s response is not a doctrine but a song: “Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh . . .” (Gen. 2:23). When Christ comes in the incarnation, Mary responds not with an email but with an ode.11 Quoting Saint John Chrysostom, Thomas Merton writes, “The angels do not ‘discuss the divine essence’ . . . , but they ‘sing triumphal and mystic odes.’”12 The whole of Christian witness is one in which people see beauty and respond as humans do to any beauty: with awe, wonder, contemplation, song. We don’t respond to a beautiful song or poem or artwork by explaining what it means. We encounter it, and we are changed by it in a way that’s difficult to express. Beauty transforms theology from articulation to contemplation. This is the theological method—not commenting dryly on a divine being but extolling, with the beauty due to his name, the praises of the One who reigns in beauty. Saint Ephrem the Syrian was an early monastic who wrote his theology primarily in poetry rather than prose because poetry opens people up to wonder and awe that invites contemplation. Theology is not a mere intellectual exercise in which one speculates about philosophical concepts. It is communion with the living God.
If God is the paradigm of beauty, then Christ’s crucifixion reenvisions what we consider beautiful, because the cross most clearly reveals God’s character. It’s where his love, his essence, is most evident. The Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar connects sacrificial love to beauty. His work assists the reader in seeing what exactly is beautiful and thus compelling. The vision von Balthasar unfolds is a beauty of the cruciform. If beauty is a transcendental founded in God, then the quintessential form of beauty is seen on the cross. The cross is the paradigm of beauty, as it is where love is most clearly seen. Glory is the experience of beauty, and the most glorious event in the history of the world, so argues von Balthasar, is the crucifixion of Christ for sinners. Beauty is seen in the gruesome reality of the cross.13 It’s this beauty that leads to goodness and truth. At the foot of a suffering Savior, the onlooker sees the pinnacle of goodness and the pathway to truth. Beauty is not prettiness but a revelation of the truest reality and love in the world. Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece—a work of art depicting Christ a little off-center, stretched out in inhumane ways with a greenish, ghoulish tint to his skin—displays divine love more than would a serene setting without anguish or pain. It’s beautiful and compelling. It draws us in. It’s awe-inspiring. It’s where we see love.
The church needs a recovery of its mission of portraying the beautiful in an ugly world. Art and poetry have been a spiritual discipline for me because the theology I grew up with deadened me to wonder and contemplation. I wanted explanations, not wonder. Art and poetry slow down my pragmatic and consumeristic ways. Sitting with a story reduces my production. A poem cannot be condensed into a punch line. Visual art draws me in and takes me outside of myself to focus on another. Often, we don’t allow the Bible to penetrate us because we’re after quick and pat answers. We ask what difference it makes rather than allowing it to make a difference in our imagination. Beauty may be uncomfortable to theological minds because it lacks clear explanations, tight rationale. It’s open to the mysterious and invites multiple interpretations. As Robin Jensen observes, “If we reflect upon something of beauty long enough, we should begin to be like it. If we study an image of horror or suffering, we will be moved to rage or pity. If these are only passing responses, we will not be truly changed. But if we are changed at all, if the images take root in us, we will act differently in the world.”14 Beauty has the power to change us if we attend to it.
Attending is the challenge. Amid the busyness of life, slowing down to contemplate, to attend to something we may not understand right away, is hard work. It requires the death of our ego; it requires us to get out of the way, to see from another angle. Contemplation requires a pure desire, an integrated desire, to see God. So often, our passions and desires disintegrate us and pull us in a thousand directions. Beauty awakens us to wonder, and it takes us further into beauty itself. C. S. Lewis writes, “We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”15 Being absorbed into beauty requires a slowness, a death of the desire to produce and acquire. Seeing portrayals of beauty by artists or in the material world can prime us to see the epitome of beauty, the Transcendent One. Throughout the entire scriptural narrative, we are invited to gaze upon God’s beauty. He wants us to encounter him in love and, seeing him, to become absorbed in him.
THE STORY OF BEAUTY IN THE BIBLE
In the beginning, God created men and women after his likeness and in his image (Gen. 1:26–27). Irenaeus describes glory this way: “For the glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists of beholding God.”16 The goal of our life has always been to be intimate with God—to walk with him in the garden (3:8), to see him—and through this intimacy to become more and more like him.
When the serpent enters the garden scene, he causes Adam and Eve to doubt the truth and goodness of God. But there’s also another temptation hidden behind the devil’s lies. Satan promises that when they eat the fruit, they will be like God (Gen. 3:5). But weren’t they already made in the image of God? What was the serpent promising—becoming Godlike apart from the presence of God? Whatever the case may be, the result of such a desire is not greater intimacy but alienation. They were created for intimacy with God, but in a moment, that closeness with God is robbed from them. A chasm erupts. Rather than know God face to face, Adam and Eve hide in fear. God asks a question: “Where are you?” (3:9). God still wants intimacy while they cower in shame, hiding from the One who loved them into life.
The rest of human history follows this pattern: God desires intimacy with his creation, and his creation perpetually hides from him in sin. At times in the story of Israel, different people get close. They desire to see God, but sin is still a major obstacle. We see this pattern in Moses’s leadership in Egypt and at Sinai.17
In Exodus 3, Moses sees a burning bush that is not being consumed and discovers it is the divine presence. God invites Moses into participation with him. He will use Moses to lead Israel out of Egypt. Then, after Moses receives the Ten Commandments (Exod. 20), the text reports, “The people stood far off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was” (v. 21). Here the theophany, or vision of God, is depicted as beyond knowledge or human comprehension—as taking place through a cloud of thick darkness. From a bush to a cloud.
God gives the details for building the tabernacle, which will replace the pillar of cloud and fire as the special place of his presence with his people (Exod. 26–27). While these details are being relayed to Moses, the people build a false god (32:1–6). Again, they choose intimacy with a false god, with a created image, rather than the true Creator God. God could, and perhaps should, destroy the people he recently rescued. Yet he relents. He will work with and in Israel. In the third revelation, God reveals himself again to Moses. Moses wants to see God’s face and to know his name. This time, God reveals his back as Moses is sheltered in the cleft of a rock (33:18–23). From bush to cloud to the back of God. Gregory of Nyssa comments, “And although lifted up through such lofty experiences, [Moses] is still unsatisfied in his desire for more. He still thirsts for that with which he constantly filled himself to capacity, and he asks to attain as if he had never partaken, beseeching God to appear to him, not according to his capacity to partake, but according to God’s true being.”18 Moses still has more paths to travel and more to know. The knowledge of God cannot be exhausted, even if Moses has experienced more in Exodus 33 than he did in Exodus 3.
In the fullness of time the final revelation of God comes in the person of his Son. No longer is God pictured in the priesthood or sacrificial system. God has spoken in various ways in different times through different means (see Heb. 1:1), but Jesus comes as the “radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (1:3) and “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). Anyone who looks on Christ has seen the Father (John 14:8–11). God finally comes to dwell among us, and we gaze upon his glory, “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). While death, sin, and nature separate us from God, Christ comes to reconcile us in reverse order. Vladimir Lossky references Nicholas Cabasilas, “a Byzantine theologian from the fourteenth century, who said on this subject, ‘The Lord allowed men, separated from God by the triple barrier of nature, sin and death, to be fully possessed of Him and to be directly united to Him by the fact he has set aside each barrier in turn: that of nature by his incarnation, of sin by His death, and of death by His resurrection.’”19 Christ tears down the dividing wall so that we can commune with God in himself.
Different saints in history have described seeing God in different ways but to the same effect. The term they developed is theosis, or “deification,” and it is meant to convey that, in Christ, our goal is to become gods. Saint Peter says we are to become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4). Saint Irenaeus puts it this way: “The Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ . . . did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.”20 Saint Athanasius more succinctly wrote, “He was incarnate that we might be made gods.”21 God comes down to make himself known in human terms (most notably in the incarnation) so that we may ascend to God.22 These early church fathers weren’t merely arguing that Jesus came to make us holy. They were arguing that he came to make us gods. Bold claims!
In Christ we become what we behold. Charles Taylor translates a passage from Saint Augustine as “Everyone becomes like what he loves. Dost thou love the earth? Thou shalt be earth. Dost thou love God? Then I say, thou shalt be God.”23 Looking at the God we love, “we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18). Since Christ has torn down the barrier that separated us from God, we are able to participate in the life of God in Jesus Christ. We are united to him and are being transformed by him.
This transformation is beyond knowledge or activity. We return to the core of our being, which is a truer image bearer of God, as we see the true image of God. Before we are a slave to sin or unique personality or success story or failure, we are divine creations. Even if that inner reality is twisted by our choices or shrouded by distraction, we are sacred beings living before our Maker. We make ever-increasing progress in this life with God, but like Moses, we are never satisfied in the desire to see him. There’s always more to see and experience.
THE LORD’S SUPPER AS SEEING GOD
