Not beautiful?

 

It’s quite a leap from Pope Benedict to Jordan Peterson. But maybe not, since both have been given to pontificating;, although one did so by merit of his position, while the other, by individual conviction.

At hand is the recent Twitter remark by Peterson about model Yumi Nu’s cover photo in the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated. (I tried to include the photo here, but it may be copyrighted.) Jordan proclaimed the model “Not beautiful,” by some standard known to him, but presumably tapped in to the universal standard of what is beautiful.

 Like truth-veritas, beauty—bellitas—is a universal quality, a transcendent value, meaning that it stands above and beyond the particular manifestations of what is beautiful. Is this a mountain- top quality? I think we could use this metaphor, at least, to see what is at issue here.

After Peterson met with criticism over his now-infamous tweet, he doubled down, claiming that the SI cover was “a conscious attempt to manipulate and retool the notion of beauty, reliant on the idiot philosophy that such preferences are learned and properly changed by those who know better.” (Emphasis mine.)

The very use of the word “notion” here reveals the discrepancy in this, otherwise often wise, man’s reasoning. There are many notions of beauty. A notion is not universal, but very particular, centered in a culture or set of values that may not be shared by everyone.  In the case of beauty, there are myriad examples.  I will take some from my own recent experience.

 The music I chose to sing at mass this morning would be seen by some as too “folky,” not majestic enough to grace the Eucharistic celebration. (In fact, followers of Benedict might well hold this view.) I find it beautiful because it is melodic and voices words of Scripture in a memorable way. It doesn’t have to be Handel’s Messiah to be beautiful, in my view, although I love that too. I’m not trying to “retool” anyone’s idea of beauty here, but just to assert that this is what will lift the minds and hearts of the people I sing for. They would not work at a Russian Orthodox liturgy.

Recently a friend invited me to visit a display of the art of Leonardo da Vinci from the Sistine Chapel here in Denver. Now this art is universal, you might want to say. No. Beautiful, it is. Unparalleled, yes.  Masterful, undeniably. But what of the subjects from which he took his depiction of characters from the Bible and early times? Here is Leonardo’s “Creation of Eve.” Imagine Eve later on, clad in a bikini. She would bulge more from under its straps than did model Yami Nu.  Yet Da Vinci pictures her as the ideal of womanhood, God’s first female creation, at a size extra-large.

Would he have painted anything but a beautiful woman to grace the

Pope’s own chapel? Is this a “conscious attempt to manipulate and retool the notion of beauty,” as Peterson said of the swimsuit model?  Hardly! This was beauty as seen in the 16^th Century by a keen observer of the human form.

In others of his paintings, women are depicted as strong and muscular as well, but always much curvier than the typical Western model today.

What’s going on with Leonardo’s notion of beauty? In cultures where good nutrition is not a given, the poor tend to be thin as a result of their inadequate diet and life struggles; the well-to-do show their good health and comfort in their physique, well-padded. According to today’s BMI calculations, they would be considered obese. At that time, this was the cultural ideal.

In Iran, as in many other non-Western countries today, similar standards apply. Often the garb is designed to accommodate curves, as was that of earlier times.

Is this some “idiot philosophy” that asserts taste is different from universal standards of beauty? Is it idiotic to claim that tastes are, indeed, learned?

Again, from my own experience. I went to Iran as a Peace Corps volunteer in the mid-1960s—a person of taste, I thought. My family trusted my color suggestions for our home décor. I liked the typical subtlety popular in the West at the time—the beiges and grays with accent colors. When colors were to figure in, avocado, orange and turquoise were a popular trio.

In Iran, a country of vast deserts and lush river valleys, beige was not a favorite theme,  it turned out. A favorite Tehran restaurant, the Paprika, was decorated in red—like, red everywhere, accented by mirrors and sequins. Qashang was the word for beautiful in Farsi, and this décor was representative of Qashang.

 (I would add that the restaurant interior here is not that of the Paprika, but is similarly brightly colored.  Also, that in our global society, tastes have changed world-wide since the 1960s)

One of our favorite pastimes was to go rug shopping in the Bazaar, and we had to get used to the bright hues favored by the Iranians.  Seeing us, a merchant would haul out the “Western-taste” carpets, done in shades of grey and tan. Yes, they were appealing to me, but I began to try to see things through other eyes. I didn’t want to be typed as “Western,” as if that limited my standards of taste.

My roommate and I got tired of our dark little kitchen in the house we rented in the midsection of Tehran. The landlady gave us permission to paint the interior of the glass-door-ed cupboard, and we chose—you guessed it!—orange and turquoise. I will never forget the land-lady’s expression when she saw it. Maybe similar to mine when I first went to the  Paprika.

Is it not “proper” to suggest a widening of the concept of beauty? Is this authoritarianism: that another notion of beauty be presented? We are, after all, a country of many cultures, some of which do not easily conform to the one Anglo standard—for whom different shapes and colors and styles are appreciated.

I would simply suggest that holding one notion of beauty up as the only one a civilized person could possibly embrace is not a mountain-top idea.  I am disappointed that a man of wisdom would not see this, but it does seem to happen in our polarized world, that what would normally be recognized is now shrouded in a partisan drape, not open to the large view.

 

 

 

Witnessing to the Truth in love: how this plays out in our lives

 

Humility and Conviction

 

In his Introduction to Caritas in Veritate, Love in Truth, Benedict XVI provides the essence of his letter in a nutshell:

To defend the truth,

to articulate it with humility and conviction, and

to bear witness to it in life

are therefore exacting and indispensable forms of charity.

 

How often in this polarized age have you sat with a group of people from the Other Side, listening to their easy generalizations and ideological hooks, and finally had to speak up? “I’m sorry, but Netanyahu will save Israel from destruction!” you blurt out, after your friends have voiced the opposite sentiment from every possible angle. You think about how former President Trump moved the capital to Jerusalem, and how he brought about some important alliances for Israel. And Netanyahu was on the same, pro-Israel, path.

Or maybe you were in a What’s App conversation with people who were trashing Lula in Brazil, and you have to jump in to correct this idea you hear developing—that Bolsenaro really won the election. So you jump in with a long discourse on Lula’s history in bringing justice to the workers, on how the Right Wing trumped up charges against him to remove him from power.

And there’s a big argument, because everyone has heard a lot about the issue from their own media and are quite sure they have the story straight, while God knows where the other side is coming from. You feel it’s important to speak the truth, and if people are your friends they should appreciate the fact that this is an act of love, that you are saving them from the darkness of ignorance and the throes of error.

Speak the truth in love, you think. Ephesians 4:15.

Or Love in Truth, says former Pope Benedict XIV.

I find his nutshell version of this concept, above, to be instructive for all of us. 

 

To articulate the truth with humility and conviction.

First, articulate the truth. It’s hard to articulate, to express clearly, what you haven’t already thought through. Hearing the story on PBS NewsHour doesn’t always provide an articulated understanding of the issue at hand—especially not if you were playing Words with Friends at the same time. Nor is it necessarily helpful to search out the issue at Breitbart or at Mother Jones, where you know you’ll get support in your viewpoint. If it’s Lula vs. Bolsenaro, Reuters would give you a basic understanding of the issue; or, if you want to go more in depth, a story from Americas Quarterly, a journal focused on affairs in the Americas, has a story on Lula that differs from some of the opinion reporting issuing from popular media outlets.

If it’s an issue of faith you need to defend, make sure you have support for your position. If it’s a contemporary faith issue, the Religion News Service or Catholic News Service have fairly good coverage. I like to consult Crux Now with John Allen for a Just-the-facts reporting on the subject.

 

Humility

I know how I feel about various contemporary issues. While I was not a Trump supporter, I liked some of the things he did—like, moving the capital of Israel to Jerusalem. I mean, if you read the Bible, isn’t that where it belongs? So I guess that’s a side I might have come down on in a discussion. But what do I really know? It’s just how I feel.

So recently we had a Christian family from Bethlehem, whose ancestors go back to the time of Christ, selling their hand-made olive wood articles at our church. I asked one of them how things are in Israel right now. “Not good,” he told me. They said the prejudice against Christians is worse than ever, and from both the Muslim and Jewish sides. He went on about the ongoing conflict over holy sights in Jerusalem.

“And how do you feel about the capital being moved to Jerusalem?” I asked.

“Terrible!” he replied. He said it does not help having the capital be in the center of all the disputes.

That made a lot of sense. I never would have known that had I not heard it from one who lives there.

Humility in articulating the truth mean that you recognize what you don’t know. Own up to having an opinion that might not be founded on the real situation. Our understanding of the truth is limited. We see through a glass darkly (I Cor. 13), which is the premise of this blog. We tend to be in our valley-bottom place looking up at one side of the truth, but not seeing its entirety. That is okay. Humility means we ask questions. We listen to others who may know more, or even just to get their take on an issue, even if they may not be completely right. 

 

With Conviction

This is what conviction is not: being loud, insulting, mean-spirited, mocking, ridiculing, boasting, bullying. These are usually signs of a lack of conviction, which we cover up in ourselves by making fun of our opposition.

Conviction is the assurance that we have, in all humility, looked at an issue and have some certainty about it. It doesn’t mean that we know everything about it, or that we have no more to learn. But at this point we can say what we understand in love. This takes courage. Others may bridle and push back. It’s okay. Either they do not yet fully understand, or you don’t. You can assure them that this is what you understand without trying to make them agree.

 

Bear Witness

And this is the bearing witness part, that you summon up the courage of your convictions to put out there what you have already researched and learned to articulate and humbly accepted as undoubtedly inadequate in the grand scheme of things. You say what you are sure of, not what you are still just in the surmising stage on.

This is how we defend the truth.

Probably all of us would spend more time listening and less, speaking, if we operated according to this view of Love in Truth. Yes, love speaks the truth, but does so with humility, having made sure that it is truth we speak and that we articulate it so that it is understood.

 

For more on Caritas in Veritate, click here.

Pope Benedict XVI Saw the Whole Picture

 

 

 

What better example of a mountain-top man than the recently deceased Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI?

I confess I mistakenly saw him through the lens of the media, who wanted to dwell on his social conservatism, and of the American conservative Catholics who celebrated his liturgical embrace of traditional worship.  We saw Cardinal Ratzinger through the eyes of those who interpreted him, and that continued into his pontificate.

He was on the mountaintop, and neither the Left nor the Right, in their respective valley villages, got the full picture, myself included. I despaired at his papal election, and cried tears of joy at the news of white smoke for Pope Francis, not realizing how similar their basic theology was—how solidly situated in the post-Vatican II Church, along with his predecessor, Saint Pope John Paul II.  Situated, as well, in the over-100-year tradition of social justice teaching in the Church, beginning with Pope Leo XIII.

While all three popes have toed the line when it comes to the Church’s teaching on sexual morality, even if Francis emphasizes a pastoral approach over a legalistic one, all three have also held fast to a unified vision of social justice—a teaching sometimes ignored by both media and conservative Catholics.

I remember listening to Pope John Paul II’s talks at the 1993 World Youth Day in Denver, since my daughter was there among the thousands of youth from around the world. While the press besieged him with questions about birth control and abortion, knowing how their American viewers would be looking for cracks in Church doctrine or excuses to dismiss the Church as rigid and out of touch, I heard what he said about society and the common good, about justice and love of neighbor.

Did I imagine that? An article by Mark Engler and John Gershman for the Institute for Policy  Studies written a few months after his death assures me that no. They recall: “Particularly in his teachings about the global economy, the Pope advanced a vision of social justice that challenges the current, narrow political debate about ‘moral values.’“

Likewise, Pope Emeritus Benedict takes up the Church’s teaching on social justice in his encyclical letter Caritas in Veritate, Love in Truth, where he situates truth-based love at the center of the Church’s social teaching.  Unlike those who juxtapose charity and justice, Benedict fuses the two. Justice must be infused with charity/love, and love must take its place in the public sphere, where it joins justice.

The public sphere goes beyond the individual charity of a Mother Teresa, laudable as that was. I do not agree with those who downplay her work for not having changed systems of oppression, resistant as these are to bending. She did what she could, and established a ministry in the persons of women who would take her work to other communities, setting an example to thewhole world. But I think Benedict is calling for even more than that: a charity that will infuse the work of public entities—governmental bodies, corporations.

That his, and his predecessors’, words have been heeded can be seen in the way governments and private companies have begun to let love direct policy. That the U.S. government can recognize the need to treat immigrants with compassion,  that companies can willingly consider the good of the planet and its people, that states can reconsider capital punishment: these are all examples of how charity can join hands with justice in the public setting. Even if you cynically counter that industry chooses to signal virtue in these instances for the sake of good publicity, the fact of the matter—the veritas of it—is that in any case they point to a charitable response to public problems.

This concept of Love in Truth, as developed by Pope Benedict, goes beyond an either-or, black or white view, embracing the whole spectrum of truth. This is what makes it a mountain-top view, where the many sides of a topic are seen in relation to one another in a 360° panorama.

We all reside in our own cultural milieu, somewhat isolated by the very fact of our surroundings. From this standpoint it is impossible to see the other side of the mountain. Our reasoning follows from the situation we are in—a logic predicated on limited understanding. When the first propositions are biased, the conclusions will be as well.

This man climbed the mountain of truth. This is the price to be paid for seeing the whole view. This is not a lazy “let’s meet in the middle and call it good.”  This is, let’s get to the bottom of this, or to the top. Let’s do the work to understand what is really going on so that we can come together.

Love comes from truth,. “Truth, by enabling men and women to let go of their subjective opinions and impressions, allows them to move beyond cultural and historical limitations and to come together in the assessment of the value and substance of things, “ states Benedict. (Caritas in Veritate, p.4, #4) Subjective opinions are those mountain-valley views that don’t hold up at the summit.

Reading Benedict is not an easy task, but to do so thoughtfully, openly, is to make that climb with him as guide. Mountains are perilous places, where a guide is most helpful. Encouraging you to join him in the ascent!