Divine Beauty


As a focus for today’s post, I am linking to an excellent article written by Anamaria Scaperlanda Biddick in Our Sunday Visitor back in April.

I was honored to be quoted in this article, among so many colleagues who are so soulfully engaged in the art of the religious imagination and whose work I highly esteem. This article lives up to its title, showing how beauty, through the arts, indeed “points the way to the divine.”

To illustrate how beauty can throw back the veil between this world and the divine, here is some art, music and poetry that is so tangibly beautiful, it almost tears the veil in two.

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Bach - St. Matthew Passion BWV 244 (Karl Richter, 1971) - 1/22

The Ecstasy of St. Theresa - Gianlorenzo Bernini
The Ecstasy of St. Theresa – Gianlorenzo Bernini

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a branded cow
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins