The Cross Must Be Deeply Ugly to Be Beautiful
I first venerated the cross when I was attending a high-school model UN conference that had been accidentally scheduled during Holy Week. The conference was held in New York City near Times Square, and the neighboring church was the Anglo-Catholic Church of St. Mary the Virgin—colloquially known as “Smoky Mary’s” for the odor of incense that fills your nostrils when you enter the immaculate gothic nave. Its vaults are painted blue with gold stars and lined with red and gold trim. Its interior is perfect. After the passion was sung, we took off our shoes, like Moses before the burning bush, and proceeded through two stations of veneration, each with a server instructing us to bow and proceed, before finally kneeling to kiss the cross itself.
Usually we kiss icons or relics, but why should we kiss an empty cross, and any old cross, at that? In classical literature, metonymy is a figure of speech whereby a part serves to represent the whole. The cross performs a similar function in Christian theology, for it means not only the historical cross of Christ, the two beams on which he was crucified between the thieves on Good Friday, but the event and significance of his crucifixion as a whole. When we say, “the cross,” we mean the fact that Jesus, as God and man, willingly offered himself up to an agonizing and humiliating death for the sake of our salvation. The cross is a metonymy for the theological mystery, this truth of the faith that will always exceed our understanding because it opens to us the heart of God, who will always exceed our understanding.
In this sense, we instinctively think of the cross as beautiful and worthy of veneration. But this is a paradox, for the cross is deeply ugly and must be so in order to be beautiful. On the one hand, something beautiful pleases our senses because of its color, proportion, texture, etc. This is an important part of beauty and cannot be diminished or overlooked. But at a deeper level, the German theologian Romano Guardini argues in his The Spirit of the Liturgy, beauty is the perfect expression of what an object is, of its truth: “Beauty is the full, clear and inevitable expression of the inner truth in the external manifestation. ‘Pulchritudo est splendor veritatis’—’est species boni,’ says ancient philosophy, ‘beauty is the splendid perfection which dwells in the revelation of essential truth and goodness.’”[1]
In this sense, beautiful objects are not only proportionate and unified, but excellent examples of themselves. They express the truth of good things that God has made, both in their parts and in their whole. Moreover, beauty makes the truth perceptible and desirable when it might not otherwise be. Beauty shows us that the truth is good. Take, for example, Canova’s famous sculpture of Cupid awakening Psyche with a kiss, now in the Louvre. We could examine this work in terms of its lines and accuracy, its proportion, the way Canova captures the folds of fabric and the filaments of feathers and the beauty of the human form—all of which are part of why it has become so famous. But what we find so compelling is the way it realizes truths of human love and desire: the tenderness between two lovers, their deep mutual affection, and the way that becomes physically expressed.
