Unit 5: Medieval Christianity, Liturgy, and the Aesthetic
How did I end up taking a master’s level theology course at Notre Dame? What am I doing? What in the world am I going to write about for my Eating Beauty blog? Maybe I should just pray about it……
My mind can’t seem to settle as I sit in the Adoration Chapel for my Holy Hour. I finally just pick up the only little book on the kneeler in front of me and decide I’m going to open it to whatever the bookmarked page is to see if it speaks to me. I grab it, read the title (My Way of Life Pocket Edition St. Thomas), and flip the ribbon bookmark open to the random page that apparently the Holy Spirit is prompting me to read.
“The virtues of the practical intellect are art and prudence.” Really? These words jump off the page to me. They were what we read and discussed in our very first assigned text in this class, Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism. One of those moments of consolation that you feel God is right there with you or a little God wink you could say. What a treat! I guess I am meant to be taking this class. Of course I kept reading this tiny but jam-packed version of St. Thomas’s Summa. As I read this wonderful section called Striving for Happiness, I got to a part that I loved. “Some people think that if all men became virtuous all men would be the same and act in the same way. Humorists sometimes think that in a world of virtuous men nobody would ever be able to go through a door because everybody would be waiting virtuously for everybody else to go through first……If all men were perfectly virtuous they would all be good. But they would be good in different ways.” It was a image that stuck with me as I left the Chapel feeling renewed and went about my week reading and studying Sister Ann Astell’s Eating Beauty.
In Eating Beauty, Sister Ann Astell argues that “The saints upon whose lives I reflect in this book, frequently seem to have been conscious of themselves as artists at work to carve, polish, and refine their very selves through an imitable asceticism into the particular forma of Christ to which they were drawn through the Eucharist” (18). And in her book we see that this is why the Eucharist is so beautiful. It is beautiful not just because it is another beautiful thing to love, but because it helps us to shape ourselves into a form of the life that is beautiful. Sister Ann Astell says “That Christological paradise was lost through the first sin. Every spirituality therefore finds its way back to an original beauty through a pronounced virtue, which is eucharistically infused and nourished through aesthetical practice, and which is fitting to a particular, diagnostic interpretation of the primal offense against God” (257–258). The Eucharist is both the “living source of these remedial virtues and the artistic image of perfection to which they lead” (ix).
In Eating Beauty, we also find ourselves examining the four spiritualities of the High Middle Ages, a time period that saw the advent of a new type of saint and an intensification of the eucharistic cult (258). We look at the monastics and the art of humility, the Franciscans and the art of poverty, the Dominicans and the art of preaching, and last but not least we compare Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Michelangelo and look at the art of obedience. Sister Ann Astell analyzes these spiritualities “from the combined perspectives of their receptive understandings of the first sin, their receptivity to remedial eucharistic virtues, and their actualization of the entire life-forms to which these virtues give rise” and notes that these a just a few of the “infinity of Eucharists” that are possible (259). Each religious life form is able to recieve in the Eucharist a beauty that is appropriate to that religious life form.
And this is where my Adoration Chapel story ties in with Sister Ann Astell’s work. As I was reading my favorite section of the book about the art of obedience, Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Michelangelo, I could not help but think of Saint Thomas and how a group of perfectly virtuous people could walk through a door. How we are all just men and women on a path to be sculpted and formed to this Eucharistic beauty Sister Ann Astell describes. As Michelangelo believed, form is present in all things. Through God’s grace, the sculptor conceives a mental image and to the best of his ability cuts away the excess matter in which the form is obscured (207). So to with us. We are all being chipped away at, chiseled, and molded into each a unique creation as we strive interiorly for virtue. No two, even if perfectly sculpted, ever the same. We see in Sister Ann’s comparisons of different saints that they are all beautiful guides, but our real path to our holiness is truly “eating beauty” and drawing on our spiritual senses to make us into the perfectly virtuous yet all very different beautiful individuals that God created us to be.
Astell, Ann W. Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages. Cornell University Press, 2006.
