We need our own “cultural revolution”

By Aurelio Pofiri

Rome, Santa Maria Maggiore. Festival of Music and Sacred Art, concert by the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra

As I write these lines, I have just returned from a Renaissance polyphony concert. In this concert, pieces from the Roman school were performed. The choir was a famous English group and indeed, there were a large number of people attending.

I was truly won over by the music (naturally, for me, even if I had some reservations regarding the way they performed it), but the whole atmosphere of the concert hall itself communicated some discomfort to me. It was wonderful to see people conquered by these beautiful and powerful harmonies, but at the same time, I felt like everything was out of place; the musical program was taken out of the context in which it should be found — that of the liturgy of the Church.

I felt a similar sensation in the Louvre in Paris (or for that matter, in any other museum) where the whole situation gave me the impression of bella ammassata, an overkill of beautiful things gratuitously amassed in one place. That beauty was not created to be enjoyed in a concert hall or a museum, but rather, requires a precise context, which today is in many cases denied it. Today the musical and artistic beauty of the Church, which apparently attracts crowds to museums and concert halls, is not permitted in our churches, because it is intended that people be attracted in some other way, rather than simply through the beauty and traditions built up over many centuries.

If this seems like a contradiction to you, I can assure you that in fact it is. It always surprises me to think how the Church in recent decades has squandered enormous artistic capital and today still does not realize that its initiatives in the artistic and musical fields have not made our churches or our liturgies more beautiful; on the contrary, they have impoverished us enormously. Yet those in control continue; it seems that they don’t want to give up. Or maybe they don’t want to accept that everything went wrong and that their efforts did not yield the desired results.

In the past, the Church has always wanted to use beauty as a means of attraction to the supreme Beauty, which is God. And it did so because it knew that, behind beauty as a reflection of divine Beauty, there is the Truth, also with a capital letter. Evangelization passed through beauty, that beauty that conquers us and that calls us to supernatural things.

An aesthetics professor, Professor Stefano Zecchi, offers us this important reflection, which helps us to understand how beauty also serves to re-integrate that which is disunited: “If beauty will save the world, what beauty will save it? What can it mean to associate the word ‘beauty’ with that of ‘salvation?’ The verb ‘save’ expresses the concept of wholeness and integrity. From an etymological point of view, then, the ancient Latin meaning of salvus was taken from totus. To ‘save,’ therefore, is to restore integrity between the parts that tend to dissociate, to recompose the whole. This idea of harmonization, of building order and balance, belongs precisely to the concept of beauty. But, we must add, to a conventional concept of beauty” (Stefano Zecchi, The Armed Artist).

A “conventional” concept of beauty? Perhaps conventional, but certainly one that has great importance and that we would do well to consider with great attention.

A thinker very attentive to the themes of beauty, the Russian theologian Vladimir Solovev, lets us understand something very important by taking an example from the animal world: “Among many species of birds, the complicated ornaments of the males not only cannot have any utilitarian value but are actually a direct hindrance because they develop to the detriment of mobility, they hinder flight and running and betray their presence in front of the enemy who chases them; but evidently for them beauty is more important than life” (Vladimir S. Solovev, On Beauty).

Beauty is more important than life: this is truly a beautiful image.

Beauty is more important than life because it gives fullness to life itself. Let us think about certain nations, like the Italians (grant me this covert patriotism!) who have invested so much in beauty. I think of my ancestors, who beautified the cities I now walk through, and which others will one day walk through. You will remember an old American film in which the Pope was shown arguing with Michelangelo — but also being careful not to give up on him.

This has an element of truth, because talent was valued because it was at the service of the Church for the glory of God and the edification of the faithful. They preferred to argue but keep the best artists close, because they were an asset to the Church.

And today? For the most part, people are promoted because they are obedient and don’t bother those in charge. You can be a perfect mediocrity as an artist, but that doesn’t matter to anyone. Indeed, no one is now able to distinguish a mediocre artist from a talented one. (I admit that I have particularly in mind what happens around the Vatican. If I hadn’t seen things with my own eyes, I would think they weren’t true. But they are true, of course!) The Church no longer promotes the best to give glory to her God; instead she is satisfied with foolish servants.

Maybe it’s the influence of my long stay in China, but I feel that the Church increasingly needs a “cultural revolution.” We need to throw away all the useless junk that has been handed out to us in recent decades, and we need to make it clear that there is no point in trying to get those who are part of the problem to solve the problem. We must ensure that God as Beauty regains His rights in the Church and that the abominations of the present are nothing but a memory, or rather a nightmare, that we prefer to think of as never having happened. We must rediscover that heroic sense of beauty, that is, beauty as a manifestation of virtue and virtue as a manifestation of beauty. We might think of that beautiful passage from Homer’s Iliad in which it is said: “And just as when the goat herders effortlessly divide the numerous flocks that have mixed together in the pasture, so the captains on one side and on the other lined up the men for the battle, and in their midst stood Agamemnon, similar in head and face to Zeus, lord of lightning, similar to Ares in figure, similar to Poseidon in chest. Like the bull that stands out among all the beasts in the herd, it stands out among the cows gathered around; such was the son of Atreus, that day, by will of Zeus, eminent and exalted among all heroes.”

Don’t we feel our hearts invaded by the beauty of heroism and heroism as beauty? For us Christians, beauty is also a manifestation of that heroism that is holiness, and we can only return to it by desiring it with all our hearts.

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