But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.
(1 Peter 3:15)
I feel at no loss for answers when asked why I believe in Christ, although I prefer to reframe the question as why I trust Christ. That is because trust is more a question for the heart than the mind, and therefore has the connotation of what is central, the core of life and reality, and what is better experienced than explained and pulsates with life. It is with the heart that when we read the Gospels we apprehend more than just words on a page and see their deeper beauty, which is to see the further reaches of Christ who is our faith and our hope. The single reason then I will give here for trusting in Christ is that Jesus is beautiful.
Beauty as Mystery
In the movie First Contact, Jodi Foster’s character, Dr. Ellie Arroway, deciphers radio signals sent from the far reaches of space to earth enabling her and other scientists to develop a strange machine that enables her to travel through a series of worm holes to a world billions of light years away. The colors and abstract patterns she passes through and the unknown planet itself are stunning, overwhelming, in their beauty. When it is all over she thinks she has been gone for eighteen hours, but to all the observers and scientists at the launch site or control center on Earth it all happened in a matter of seconds. Well, actually to them nothing seems to have happened at all. What they thought was a space capsule that would propel Ellie into space and to this distant planet simply drops through interlocking hoops into the sea –– the whole thing appears to have been a complete failure. This is, of course, the way it is with most profoundly spiritual experiences; that is, to the outside observer nothing seems to have really happened. But to Ellie Arroway it is an ecstatic adventure of astonishing wonder and beauty. Speaking into her microphone in an attempt to chronicle her journey she stammers out: “No – no words. No words to describe. Poetry! They should have sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful. . . I had no idea.” She is right. Poets are better at capturing the subtlety and the mystery of experiences that scientists miss entirely with their diagrams. And many of the poets have known beauty as ultimate spiritual reality–– have felt it, tasted it, have seen it though there is more of it that is invisible than visible. Consider, for example, Keats, Jeffers, or the unknown Old Testament psalmist.
A thing of beauty is a joy forever
(John Keats)
. . . And we know
that the enormous invulnerable beauty of things
Is the face of God. . .
(Robinson Jeffers)
One thing I have asked from the Lord, that I shall seek:
That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
To behold the beauty of the Lord.
(Psalm 27:4)
To be touched by beauty is to be touched by God. Beauty is the path of the Spirit that leads to Christ and through Christ to the heart of God. The appreciation of beauty, astonishment in its presence, whether the natural beauty of the physical universe we inhabit, or the artistic beauty of painters, musicians, poets, dancers, singers and sculptures, or an idea, or the character of one who has lived life well and attained wisdom, emerges from something unfathomable within us. And that something, I believe, is the mystery we call God.
When we encounter beauty, when we experience it, the encounter or the experience is, at its deeper levels, a kind of epiphany, or intuitive insight into the essential reality of something. It is like we both grasp and are grasped by, lay hold on and are laid hold on by the “object” of beauty. We are pulled toward the Source of beauty. This is frequently experienced in contemplative practice as an ecstatic, mystical, or transcendent moment.
The famous Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthazar (1905-1988), who studied at the Universities of Zurich, Vienna, and Berlin before taking his Ph.D. in Philosophy and Theology from Munich, understood beauty as an attribute of God, like omnipresence, omniscience, justice or compassion. I think Balthazar was entirely correct. Beauty is not something apart from God. I believe that when I perceive beauty, partial though it may be, I am glimpsing God, for God is beautiful just as God is love (1 John 1:4)
Beauty as the Good and the True
A good deal has been written about how pioneering physicists and mathematicians, like Paul Dirac, spent their lives seeking beautiful mathematical formulas. Ramanujan, the brilliant Indian mathematician, credited his substantial mathematical insights to divinity. “An equation for me has no meaning,” he once said, “unless it expresses a thought of God.” If you believe in God then of course, it is entirely logical and natural to believe that in an elegant mathematical formula you are, in fact, seeing something of the grace and elegance of God.
There is a wonderful story of a graduate student whose proposal for a thesis in applied mathematics was rejected. The committee said what was being proposed was not true and would therefore be a waste of time for both the student and the committee. Somewhat frustrated the student wrote Einstein explaining the proposal and what had happened with the committee. Einstein replied saying that the research proposal was beautiful and that if the hypothesis was not true it should be. The committee relented and in the end the student’s thesis proved to be correct. What Einstein thought was that if something was beautiful, like a mathematical equation, it was more likely to be true than not. As the ancient Greek philosophers pondered the concepts of truth, goodness, and beauty they eventually came to the conclusion that these are best understood not as three separate things, but as one. What is good is therefore beautiful, what is beautiful is true, and what is true is good and beautiful. Because I believe, then, Christ to be good and beautiful, the very embodiment or incarnation of beauty and goodness, I also believe him to be truth.
Seeing Jesus as Beautiful
On our college campus there was a wonderful room used exclusively for art exhibits. One of the showings I remember most came to our campus early during my freshman year. It exhibited the work of an artist who welded metal into abstract sculptures. As I stood looking at a sculpture about forty-eight inches high made of very heavy steel salvaged from a dismantled oil derrick, another student, a young woman, standing next to me asked what I thought. “Well,” I replied, “anyone could have done this––could have just welded a bunch of metal together. I don’t think it’s art––it’s not anything,” I said. “Oh!” she responded quietly, “I think it’s beautiful. It is so heavy that both of us together could not move it; yet, it looks so light––like you could pick it up with one hand. All the angles are so elegant.” In that moment I experienced something of an epiphany. I saw for myself what she was describing – saw the sculpture was indeed a sculpture and not just pieces of steel randomly welded together. I don’t know when I first saw Jesus as beautiful, experienced him as beautiful, and not as a doctrine requiring my mental assent or an idea to be argued, but that continuing realization is inseparable from my faith in Christ.
When I look at Jesus I not only see beauty, but I see the One who is beautiful. I do not see as Marcus Borg did “one of the two most remarkable human beings who ever lived,” but one of incomparable beauty. Balthazar thought, (and I must confess and repent I am quite pleased with myself that this is something I felt, believed, and thought before ever reading Balthazar) that God is the Beautiful One whose beauty is manifested in the love, compassion, goodness, light, and grace of Jesus Christ; not only that, but is the beauty of God incarnate in a world of chaos, darkness, and ugliness.
Knowledge of the Beautiful
Some things I know by logical analysis, but this is not one of them. Beauty is detected more by the faculties of openness, wonder, faith and love than it is by analytical thought. Among the final things Jesus had to say to his disciples that final night in the Garden of Gethsemane was this: “Anyone who loves me will observe my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Anyone who does not love me will not follow my teaching” (John 15:23,24). Jesus then went on to say, John 15:10-12:
I’ve loved you the way my Father has loved me. Make yourselves at home in my love. If you keep my commands, you’ll remain intimately at home in my love. That’s what I’ve done—kept my Father’s commands and made myself at home in his love. I’ve told you these things for a purpose: that my joy might be your joy, and your joy wholly mature. This is my command: Love one another the way I loved you.
One more text and we are there. It comes from John 7:17: “Those who choose to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak out of my own will.” We see God, make our home in God, and God, the Holy Trinity, makes a home in us as we follow the teaching of Christ. This teaching is stated here in John seventeen once again as the two foundational precepts of the spiritual life and the path to knowing God––love God with all your heart and love others as Christ loved you. If we live the teaching of Jesus we will know, recognize, experience its source, see Jesus as divine Beauty, Goodness, and Truth. As they were walking from the upper room to the Garden of Gethsemane, one of the disciples, Philip, said to Jesus, “Lord, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.” Jesus replied, “Philip, have I been with you all this time and you still don’t know me? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father?'” So why do I believe in Jesus Christ, why do I trust him––give my heart to him? Because in the face of Jesus I see the beauty of God.
But this is the kind of seeing, the kind of knowing, that comes from experiential knowledge––what Michael Polanyi, the famous chemist, mathematician, and philosopher, called tacit knowledge, and what Abraham Maslow, the most often quoted psychologist in the twentieth century, called “love knowledge.” Maslow wrote this in his The Farther Reaches of Human Nature:
But I propose that there is another path to objectivity, that is, in the sense of greater perspicuity, of greater accuracy of perception of the reality out there outside of ourselves, outside the observer. It comes originally from the observation that loving perception, whether between sweethearts or as between parents and children, produced kinds of knowledge that were not available to nonlovers.
As a result of his own research, as well as that of others, Maslow noted: “In ordinary personal relations, we are to some extent inscrutable to each other. In the love relationship we become ‘scrutable.'” A sister and a brother, both junior high age, were in a class together. The teacher who had little experience in dealing with that age made a number of remarks that embarrassed the brother who then had something of a meltdown––the teacher was surprised because this was a consistently easy going kid. Later the teacher said, “I should have known because I saw his sister quietly reach over and touch his arm three or four times.” My point is that the sister saw what no one else in the room saw coming for the simple reason that she saw through the eyes of love and knew her brother in a way no one else did. The knowledge of analytical logic, as useful as it is, can never replace love, tacit, or experiential knowledge.
Returning to the Question
Now, for you none of this may be convincing. It may sound like just so much nonsense. But the question I have tried to answer here is not why you should believe, but why I trust Christ and why I have consecrated my heart to him––quiet imperfectly I must add. This is not my only reason, but it is one that holds considerable significance for me both intellectually and spiritually. You may be unable or unwilling to see the beauty of the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit. And that in a very real sense is your own business. But for me it is as Anthony J. Ciorra put it in Beauty: A Path to God, “Before the beautiful—no, not really before but within the beautiful—our whole person quivers. We not only ‘find’ the beautiful moving; rather, we experience ourselves as being moved and possessed by it.”
If you do not want to become a Christian, or are reluctant to deepen the faith you already have, my advice is that you stay away from Jesus, keep as much distance as possible between yourself and Christ. By this I don’t mean that you should avoid the professional academics with their numerous fantasies of what the real historical Jesus was like, or that you should stay away from churches expounding a philosophy of self-help as a way to “self-actualization,” but that you should keep away from the Christ of prayer, of actual Scripture, of spiritual worship, and of cruciform living, for that Christ has a strange and alluring mystical power to draw even non-believers to himself. And in that there is considerable danger that your life, as you know it, may be wrecked.