Pope: Reason Needs Beauty

The Holy Father called Saints and Art the great Defenders of the Faith and affirmed that reason must be open to the beautiful.

BRESSANONE, Italy (Zenit) - Apologetics has two great pillars, says Benedict XVI: beauty and the saints.

The Pope affirmed this Aug. 6 when he met with priests, deacons and seminarians of the Diocese of Bolzano-Bressanone and answered in German six questions they asked him. The Holy Father was on vacation in the Dolomites, where he stayed at the major seminary of Bressanone.

Responding to a question from a Franciscan priest, the Holy Father spoke about the complementary importance of beauty and reason.

He said that only when reason and beauty are united do they form a whole, "and precisely for faith, this union is important."

"Faith must continuously face the challenges of thought in this epoch, so that it does not seem a sort of irrational legend that we keep alive, but that which really is a response to the great questions, not merely a habit but the truth," the Pontiff clarified.

Recalling St. Peter's exhortation to "always be prepared to give reason for the hope that is in you," the Pope said the saint was convinced that faith is reasonable, not a "wonderful concoction, a fruit of our thought. And this is why it is universal and for this reason can be communicated to all."

Still, Benedict XVI continued, though the importance of reason cannot be undermined, "I did once say that to me, art and the saints are the greatest apologetic for our faith."

He explained: "The arguments contributed by reason are unquestionably important and indispensable, but then there is always dissent somewhere.

"On the other hand, if we look at the saints, this great luminous trail on which God passed through history, we see that there truly is a force of good that resists the millennia. [...] Likewise, if we contemplate the beauties created by faith, they are simply, I would say, the living proof of faith."

Epiphanies

The Pope pointed to the example of the cathedral where he was meeting with the priests. "It is a living proclamation," he said. "It speaks to us itself, and on the basis of the cathedral's beauty, we succeed in visibly proclaiming God, Christ and all his mysteries: Here they have acquired a form and look at us."

The Holy Father said great works of art "are all a luminous sign of God and therefore truly a manifestation, an epiphany of God."

"I think the great music born in the Church makes the truth of our faith audible and perceivable," he continued. "In listening to all these works [...] we suddenly understand: It is true! Wherever such things are born, the Truth is there. Without an intuition that discovers the true creative center of the world, such beauty cannot be born."

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Benedict XVI affirmed that reason must be open to the beautiful.

"When, in our epoch, we discuss the reasonableness of faith, we discuss precisely the fact that reason does not end where experimental discoveries end -- it does not finish in positivism," the Pope explained. "The theory of evolution sees the truth but sees only half the truth: It does not see that behind it is the Spirit of the Creation. We are fighting to expand reason, and hence for a reason which, precisely, is also open to the beautiful and does not have to set it aside as something quite different and unreasonable."

"Christian art is a rational art," the Holy Father went on. "[I]t is the artistic expression of a greatly expanded reason, in which heart and reason encounter each other. This is the point. I believe that in a certain way this is proof of the truth of Christianity: Heart and reason encounter one another, beauty and truth converge, and the more that we ourselves succeed in living in the beauty of truth, the more that faith will be able to return to being creative in our time too, and to express itself in a convincing form of art."

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