"Beauty
will save the world." A beauty which shares our pain is
love and this love is most fully manifested in the glorious form of Christ
on the Cross. Beauty reveals truth, informs, discloses, instructs, and
embraces. There is a terribleness of beauty to be discovered in the midst
of suffering. Using the theoogical aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar
we see God's divine love on the Cross for our personal salvation. Rene'
Girard's theology takes a wider view and sees the salvific beauty of the
Cross as a univesal message of salvation. How do we recognize this beauty?
Beauty is charaterized by form, radiance, wholeness and harmony. The
center of Balthasar's theology reveals beauty through the form of Christ
on the Cross. Girard sees Christ entering the structure and form of mankind's
culture to reveal truth in the human form of Christ which becomes the
revelation of truth and demystification of mankind's violence. Christ's
failure as a scapegoat becomes victory, violence is absorbed through love.
My conversion to Catholicism came after the trauma of murder within in my family and setting foot in a Catholic Church to first lay eyes on a Crucifix. My conversion has been ongoing as Christ unveiled the violence to reveal His saving beauty. My thesis "The Beauty of Christ" is my own story of discovering a faith through the beauty of Christ. My experience is supported by the theology of Balthasar and Girard. The paradox and contradictions are held together in the unity of Christ: lies and truth, violence and love, death and life, darkness and light, chaos and form and ugliness and absolute unutterable beauty. It is Christ's beauty which will save each of us.
