Some Christian Convictions: A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day ThinkingCoffin, Henry Sloane
Religion
Some Christian Convictions: A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking
Coffin, Henry Sloane
Christianity -- 20th century; Theology, Doctrinal -- Popular works
Again, our perception of beauty affords us a glimpse of God. The Greeks
embodied loveliness in their statues of the Divine, because through the
satisfaction which came to them from such exquisite figures their souls
were soothed and uplifted. They have left on record how the calm and
majestic expression of a face carved by a Phidias quieted, charmed,
strengthened them. Dion Chrysostom says of the figure of the Olympian
Zeus, "Whosoever among mortal men is most utterly toil-worn in spirit,
having drunk the cup of many sorrows and calamities, when he stands
before this image, methinks, must utterly forget all the terrors and
woes of this mortal life." The Greek Christian fathers often tell us
that the same sense of the infinitely Fair, which was roused in them by
such sights, recurred in a higher degree when their thoughts dwelt upon
the life and character of Jesus. Clement of Alexandria says, "He is so
lovely as to be alone loved by us, whose hearts are set on the true
beauty." Our aesthetic and our religious experiences often merge; our
response to beauty, whether in nature, or music, or a painting, becomes
a response to God. Wordsworth says of a lovely landscape that had
stamped its views upon his memory:
Oft in lonely rooms, and mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:--feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.
Shelley, while insistently denying or defying all the gods of accepted
religion, finds himself adoring
that Beauty
Which penetrates and clasps and fills the world,
Scarce visible for extreme loveliness.
Surely the God Christians adore is in these experiences, though men know
it not. St. Augustine believed that "all that is beautiful comes from
the highest Beauty, which is God." They who begin with the cult of
Beauty may have a conception of the Divine that has nothing to do with,
or is even opposed to, the God and Father of Jesus; but when His God is
supreme, inspirations from all things lovely may vastly supplement our
thought of Him. "Music on earth much light upon heaven has thrown."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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