Post 146.  
 
Unlike friendship, Love (caritas) is offered to friends and enemies alike (Matthew 5:44; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II, Question 23), which seems to share similarity with Beautying. When a band records a new album, a sculptor puts their work in a public square, or a crafter offers a bracelet on Etsy, their artwork would fail if it only drew interest from friends. But other acts of beauty—a lullaby, a campfire song, a blanket knitted for a new baby—are almost entirely contained within friendship. Friendship involves eye-to-eye conversations, help in times of need, common meals, shared experiences of all sorts; and is therefore a particular kind of love. Perhaps the deepest: But love is bigger than friendship. In love we may buy a meal for a destitute stranger or give to a global charity that feeds the hungry. For Catholics and many other Christians, love is enacted through what are called the Corporal Works of Mercy—feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, visit the sick, visit the imprisoned, and bury the dead. These expressions of love cannot be limited to friendship—one must not only love those with whom they are friends. The Good Samaritan cared for the stranger, and so must we.

            Because we enact beauty from the limited consciousness of a human—we are not God—many of our beautiful acts have lives beyond our awareness. A painting may be discovered long after the painter’s death and find its way into an elite museum. My undergraduate music teacher professor, Vahe Barberian, worked extensively to produce performances of his deceased father’s symphonies. In the 21st Century, sometimes something as simple as singing Happy Birthday as a family might go viral, and touch millions of people’s lives—if only for an instant before they each swipe on. Like acts of love, the life and results of an act of beauty, given to a stranger are unknown by any but the Lord. Intention matters, likely more than results if only because results are beyond us, especially the omniscience needed to predict perfectly the results of any free act. 

            We enact beauty because God is perfect Beauty, the creator of Beauty—the cistern from which we draw our beautiful acts. To take the time to beauty is to have a certain kind of faith in the future—like planting a tree that will take a century to reach maturity, and may be cut down by someone else. Some musicians make money songwriting, but others live lives in obscurity, writing songs for some other reason. To create something beautiful and meaningful is to hope for relationship with both other people and something unknown and unknowable, the mysterious spiritual Being who is Beauty.

Daniel Shevock
 
Link to image (Jan Van Delen, Caritas): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jan_Van_Delen,_Caritas_(1673-80),_KBS-FRB.jpg

Post 145.

Remind me to bring earplugs next time I write at Starbucks. Perhaps being a musician, or my tendencies toward the spectrum, is why I notice the obnoxiousness of today’s corporate spaces. Not only Starbucks. When I get gas at a Sheetz, I pay for the gas—my labor traded for ancient sunlight—and I also am forced to endure songs and advertisements blasted at an unpleasantly considerable volume-level. It feels like a breaking of the social contract. I pay for the gas; I don’t pay to be advertised at.

            Problem solved, today anyway. I asked the cashier to turn the volume down a little. I feel awkward and assertive making the request, but nobody else has walked in for the 15 minutes I have been here. Online, customers indicate that corporations use loud music to keep customers from lingering. What an odd purpose for a business model, especially for the coffee house, which was borne in the Enlightenment and nicknamed the ‘Penny University,’ and where scholars, artists, merchants, and poets gathered to read, write, talk, and share ideas. But, as is well documented on the political right and left here in the U.S.—capitalism ruins everything.

            Every business model has, at its core, a beautiful sowing—universities were founded to fulfill the medieval need to conserve the ancient intellectual tradition and to understand God in His created universe (university) and the activities of humankind. Public and parochial schools were established to increase public literacy, so that everyday people, and not only clergy and scholars, could read, especially scripture. Hospitals were instituted to care for and protect the lives of the ill and injured. Public housing projects to shelter the working homeless; police forces to protect the community; carpentry guilds/unions to erect beautiful buildings that everyday folk could not, such as cathedrals; and robotic technologies to lessen dangerous labor freeing people to attend plays, musical festivals, and to make their own arts and crafts. The list goes on, and all these institutions—when they grow long in the tooth—in capitalism risk losing sight of their beautiful purpose and reduce their existence to imprudent quarterly profits.

            Most academics would understand capitalist institutions’ loss of their beautiful purpose within the historical writings of Marx—and they wouldn’t be wrong to do so. However, I am going to suggest writers who are otherwise at each other’s throats have identified this same problem. Russell Kirk’s 4th Principle of Conservatism is prudence—which is indeed long-standing virtue in our Christian and Greco-Roman history. “Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity.” https://kirkcenter.org/conservatism/ten-conservative-principles/ Most conservatives today might argue that many of these big businesses are private, when in fact the process of incorporation—a government policy—publicizes most especially large institutions, with their tendencies toward monopolization of markets. Rather than piecemeal argue against the squalor of modern public universities, schools, housing projects, and the like while ignoring the squalor of private gas stations and coffeehouses, I would rather apply this principle of prudence more consistently and generally.

            If a virtue is to truly be a virtue in the Christian sense, it is applied generally. Christians are not relativists. Prudence, the virtue of being as clever as serpents and as harmless as doves (Matthew 10:16), is the finem, or “end” of all moral virtues, according to Thomas Aquinas, directing human thoughts on all other virtues (https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q47.A6). Rash, inconsiderate and fickle people often lack prudence while cunning and anxious people have a distorted sense of prudence. I would argue prudence also guides the human understanding of Beautying.

            Prudent beauty is not a new idea. Medieval schools aimed to nurture harmonious people, the vir perfectus, through study of music as one of seven liberal arts. The ideal music was neither too harsh nor too timid; neither too loud nor too soft; neither too ignorable nor too striking. So too the harmonious people medieval schools taught (https://archive.org/details/didascaliconmedi00hugh). Today we may know more musical genres and have instant access, online, to more cultures’ folksongs, symphonies, improvisations, mantras, stories, raps, ragas and tunes, but a general application of prudence—fit within each culture’s ideal musical expression—can guide many assessments of the human formations of Beautying. I find, as I write this, I want to avoid falling into the trap of 20th Century aesthetic theory, which placed Western musics above non-Western musics, and classical musics above popular musics. I have no intention of flipping the pyramid on its head either, but rather appreciating all musics within context, and understanding that they are, in some way, an expression of that trinitarian reality impressed upon the whole universe (https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/bonaventure/). Beautying is prudent to the extent that all relationships best reflect prudence.
          
 ds 
  
Link to image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:12_La_Prudence_-_H._Pussey_Grand_Etteilla_Tarot_Deck.jpg 

Post 144.  

Often, I awaken and observe a watch in the night by studying the bible. Last night, I read Psalm 137, the beginning of which is known through the song, “Rivers of Babylon.” The psalms express the full range of human emotion—our full internal life. Good and bad. God knows it all—and there’s no reason to hide the truth of our thoughts. The psalm vividly takes us to Babylon, where in despair a musician reflects on the brutality his people have received from their Babylonian captors. Enslaved, the psalmist sorrows at being forced to sing cheerily for his slavers as they dance, eat, drink, and celebrate their victory over Jerusalem. “How could we sing a song of the Lord in a foreign land?” (Psalm 137:4).

            The psalmist then promises to always remember Jerusalem and curses himself if he would dare forget. Then the psalm turns dark. Perhaps the darkest moment in scripture, as he prays for Babylon’s desolation, and blesses whoever pays back Babylon for its destruction of Jerusalem. He prays, “Blessed the one who seizes your children and smashes them against the rock.” (Psalm 137:9). What a horrible thing to wish for. It is horrible also when we do this—and God sees our darkest hopes in us.  

            How bizarre it is to hear the German Reggae/Disco group Boney M’s 1978 cover of “Rivers of Babylon” become popular on TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Repeating only the first part of Psalm 137, and to upbeat-cheery rhythms, Boney M’s hit fails to plummet into the depths of despair voiced by the psalmist. And yet, there’s something in the paradoxical nature of it, a bubbly song in the shallowest of short-form internet rubbish with a finger pointing to a moment of earnest despair, hopelessness and misery. It could easily be dismissed as just another moment of postmodern audio- brain rot, but like any expression of beauty, even miscarried ones, the finger pointing is pointing toward Beautying. The involuntary cheerfulness of the psalmist expressed in trite baloney. Relationships are never perfect because people are never perfect, and even at our worse, any attempts can reveal Beauty—in all Beauty’s horror, false joy, and feeling.

DS 

Link to image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boney_M.#/media/File:Boney_M._(1977_Atlantic_Records_publicity_photo).jpg

Post 143. 

In the book of the prophet Jonah, God reveals His nature as Love. The Word speaks to Jonah, commanding him to speak words of forewarning to the Ninevites. Jonah, the devout Hebrew prophet, flees by boat toward Spain, at the remotest reaches of the known world. Why does he seek to escape the Lord? Jonah knows the Lord’s power, and that He is the single God who is actual. The Word then walking with Jonah is the God who walked with Adam in the Garden of Delight; who warned Noah to build and vessel; who gave Sarah a son when she was 90; who led the slaves out of Egypt, parted the Sea of Reeds, and fed them manna in the wilderness. Jonah, then, knew not only of the Lord’s power, but of His mercy. This is what he feared.

            In the 8th Century, BC, Nineveh was a large city in the Assyrian Empire, which had decimated the Kingdom of Israel, killed and tortured many, and captured all the educated and strong youth. Assyria was known for being cruel, devising what would become the foulest and most notorious mode of torture: crucifixion. Jonah lived in the Northern Kingdom, in the town of Gath-hepher, about two miles from what would become Nazareth. Jonah likely had family members who were killed, tortured, and taken into slavery. When the Word came to Jonah he knew of God’s oneness, of his strength, and of his clemency. It is clemency that vexed Jonah most, and he absconded from his homeland and the Lord.

            In his flight Jonah experienced God’s power over the sea, being forced to admit that the God of the Hebrews was Lord of the land and sea. Unnamed sailors were converted and offered worship to the one God as they reluctantly threw Jonah overboard. Jonah, consumed by a large fish, was taken to the depth of the sea—to Hades itself—and prayed that he would once again be allowed to be in the presence of God. After three days, Jonah was expelled onto the shoreline where the Word returned to him and commanded him again to prophesize to the Ninevites. He reluctantly did so, offering Ninevah the shortest prophecy shared in scripture: “Forty days more and Ninevah shall be overthrown” (Jonah 3:4).

            I say these eight words aloud. Were they spoken in a soft or loud tone? With abruptness or with gentle lovingkindness? Did Jonah speak to them dryly with a shade of joy, eager for Ninevah’s destruction and taking pleasure in it? This seems most likely, by what follows. Jonah retreats beyond the walls to await the city’s annihilation, rightful vengeance for the atrocities Assyria committed on Jonah’s nation, family, and friends. But the Assyrians pronounce a fast and repent of their many sins. In response, God relents, and shows mercy, just as Jonah dreaded He might. Jonah, the unwilling prophet, stews in his tent. Does God withdraw his lovingkindness from Jonah, this obstinate prophet? No, he educates Jonah, explaining that he loves the humans and animals that live in Nineveh. They too are His, just as the sailors are, and as Jonah is. Rather than retribution, He wants a relationship with them.

            Who is this God that is one, all powerful, sends his Word to his prophets, and who relents? Relenting is typical of loving relationships. My son asks to go bowling and I say no. Later he asks again and I relent. Do perfect fathers relent? Evidently. Many centuries would pass before this paradoxical question had a theological answer—the Trinity. The word—Trinity—is not penned in scripture, and yet, read in light of the Trinity, some of the most paradoxical scriptural episodes become less paradoxical. How is the face of God something humans cannot see (Exodus 33:20), and yet Adam and Noah and Abraham and Moses all walk and talk with Him? The Word of the Lord comes to all the prophets. For early Christians wrestling with the divinity of Jesus, most explicitly in the Johannine books of the bible, the Word is in some way God, but in some way a separate person. So too, the Spirit is a separate person, unified as part of the same God. God is one, God is three. Trinity. From the dawn of being, the Trinity was—three persons in loving relationship. For an internally loving God, God does not require our relationship to be perfected—He is not missing relationship, only to get it through his creation—but rather clemency is internal to God. Herein lies truth to the nature of Beauty, in God’s transcendent relenting. Beauty is never experienced except through relationship—an artist colony, a punk band meeting in a garage, a father walking with his teenager through a museum pointing out his favorite paintings, a DJ and an MC responding to each other’s improvised ideas, a child cooking a cake for the first time with their parents, a singer responding to an audience, a grandma crocheting a scarf for her grandchild, a congregation intoning psalms together, a barber discussing baseball while trimming an old friend’s hair, or a mother singing lullabies to her babe in a rocking chair. Every experience of beauty in this world is internally a relationship—so it would be inconceivable to imagine transcendent Beauty as lacking this essential characteristic of beauty-in-specific. Relationship.

DS 

Link to image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jonah_and_the_Whale,_Folio_from_a_Jami_al-Tavarikh_(Compendium_of_Chronicles).jpg

Post 142. 

God made us as logical creatures, as well as material, social, creative, and spiritual creatures. May I never have the hubris to say, when talking of my material reality, that it is my animal self in a way that implies it is less than other aspects of myself. God created the material as well as the immaterial. A dog is no less created by and beloved of God than the Pythagorean theorem. One material and one immaterial. No. This is a Platonic ordering of reality. Nonetheless, one ought not swing the pendulum too far in the other way, and reduce all to material—mind to brain, mathematics to the number of objects, music to soundwaves—and claim living the intellectual life is some sort of hubris.

            The intellectual life can indeed become hubris, if taken from a Platonic stance of ordering; things below forms of things, material below ideal. But from a scriptural perspective, there is no necessity of such hierarchy. Each are beloved creations of God. Both are also the right of everybody, regardless of job, class, race, intellectual ability, or sex. Every human has a need to wrestle, to their ability, with intellectual questions. There is, then, a humble intellectual life that can be lived by everybody. Whether or not witty folk can easily grasp those things wrestled with by those who are less quick is irrelevant to the question. Stay in your lane. Wrestle with your own problems. If you have a way to help, help. But don’t judge. The medieval hierarchy—nobility above aristocrats; above clergy; above soldiers and guildsmen; who are above peasants—appropriates too much space in our hearts today, long after our cultures have made a mockery of nobles, aristocrats, and clergy. Let us drop the hierarchical thinking and return to those grace filled needs of the human, which are not only material, but also intellectual, artistic, and spiritual.

DS 

Link to image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Intellect,_statue_by_Josef_Ma%C5%99atka.jpg 

Post 141. 

For Christians, a relationship is at the center of everything. This relationship—The Father Loving the Son, and the Son Loving the Father—is expressed through an oft puzzling word: Trinity. God is one. God is three—creator, spirit, word. Centuries before the first Christian theologian was born, the Greek philosopher Plato reasoned the first part of the Trinity, that God is one. Plato’s monotheistic One, the perfect form of the good, the source of all reality, is infinite, simple, and unchangeable. The One is the standard by which all are measured. Plato’s One harmonized well, for many Jewish and early Christian authors, with the Abrahamic God of Israel, who is one (Deuteronomy 6:4). The I am who is (Exodus 3:14). Not a thing but Being itself. However, a God who is One without also being a relationship is experienced as distant, cold, and fixed. This is not the God of scripture, who relents and is altered out of His good sympathy (Jonah 3:10). In scripture is uncovered a God who is love. Not one who merely loves, but who is love. The Trinity.

            In Plato’s most prominent myth, a man is chained in a cave, forced to watch shadows dancing on the cavern wall. For him, these shadows are the total of existence until one day, against his will, he is forced from the cave, past the figures and the fire in the cave, and out into the actual sun. He is in pain as he gazes upon the motionless but vivid sun. But eventually he comes to realize he has now seen the form of all light. The perfect form of light, the idea behind light that allows one to recognize imperfect light in the shadows of flames on a cavern wall. This light is flawless and frozen. This is the nature for all of Plato's forms—the form of dog, or the form of a chair—making up its -ness. E.g., dogness or chairness, which permit one to recognize a particular instance as a dog or as a chair.

            If the ultimate transcendent description of God is Trinity—that God is Love is above the Platonic One who is the fixed Good—then at the center of everything is relationship. Somehow a perfect relationship. A perfect relationship which cannot be frozen. This activeness of God is what inspired Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which he describes heaven as active, while in hell, Lucifer’s wings freeze everything. Ossified. Fixed. While Plato’s transcendental forms are frozen, with the full weight of that word, the Christian ideal transcendent must be the opposite—animated, stirring, everchanging, affectionate, and dynamic. While many authors have wrestled with Trinity as dynamic, few have gone beyond the Platonic ossified form of transcendent Beauty. Their descriptions of Beauty have more of Plato in them than the Trinity. As such, my recent work has aimed to understand what an ecological and praxial conception of transcendent Beauty—or Beautying as a transcendent verb—might mean for musicking and teaching.

DS   
 

Image Link: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cf/Plato_Cave_Wikipedia.gif/640px-Plato_Cave_Wikipedia.gif