Beauty is at the forefront of my mind every Lent. When I began the path to order my life around the Christian year, I struggled with Lent. I did not have a problem with fasting—I had a problem with flowers. In North Florida, spring begins early, and as Lent begins every growing thing has exploded in bloom. We remember our death on Ash Wednesday just as the earth has ushered forth life. It is jarring and incongruous. By the time Lent is over, spring has gone. A former priest made much of removing flowers from the church and the home during Lent. I love fresh flowers, and inexpensive bouquets on my dinner or homeschool table bring me great joy. It seemed silly; what is to be gained by denying beauty? Many years have passed, but each Lent I consider the role of beauty in fasting.
Several years behind the curve, I am at last reading Ethics of Beauty. Given the size of the tome, it isn’t as much a Lent book as it is an every season of the Christian year book. Ethics of Beauty is written by Orthodox ethicist Timothy Patitsas who seeks to return to a lost way of ethics and Christian theology: a beauty-first approach. His premise is that although now Christians begin with truth and move towards goodness, bothering little with beauty, Christians of old began with beauty, moving through goodness and, ultimately, to truth.
He begins with beauty’s antithesis: war and trauma. While he does affirm that good therapy exists, he acknowledges the obvious—the Western psycho-therapeutic approach to trauma simply doesn’t work. He builds upon Jonathan Shay’s work (particularly Achilles in Vietnam), which found that intellectual retellings of traumatic experiences by veterans lead to a rash of suicides. He affirms that “cognitive processing” is not what is needed, “but a listener who weeps where you can’t, a listener who feels your hurt in ways that you can’t yet.”1 Trauma is an excommunication, and restoration to communion is what is needed. In his characteristic conversational tone, he explains the connection between trauma and beauty as follows:
Well, a traumatic experience exactly reverses the process by which we were created and saved. The cause of our being traumatized is that we have beheld, whether briefly or for a prolonged period, some overwhelming vision of anti-Beauty, some naked ugliness. This ugliness then becomes our guiding black hole – if we experience this hell more powerfully than the real Beauty and theophany present in our lives.2
So, what does trauma have to do with Lent? Trauma is simply a more extreme form of the struggles that we all face—whether to be guided by Beauty or anti-Beauty.
In Lent, we remember Christ’s temptation in the wilderness. Immediately after Christ’s baptism, he was led into the wilderness, a desert. I vividly remember my first desert encounter riding on a bus through the Chihuahuan desert to what would be my new home. I fell asleep after the border crossing into Mexico and awoke surrounded by desert. “What happened here?” I thought. It was raw ugliness. “Did God get tired of creating so He left these ugly bits?” It seemed to be not a different landscape but an un-created space. The desert is a visual image of anti-Beauty, which is just another way of saying non-being.
Lent is not anti-beauty at all. The Ash Wednesday service in my parish has its own form of beauty. The nave is full of the holy smell of incense. The oil mixed with the imposed ashes has a lovely fragrance. Even the shroud covering the crucifix has beauty. Most importantly, there is the beauty of communion. An important distinction between Christ’s temptation and our Lent is another form of anti-Beauty: isolation. Christ was alone in the desert, cut off from communion. Lent was instituted to prepare candidates for baptism and to restore to the church those caught in notorious sins. Lent is corporate, as we join together with the communion of saints.
The ultimate expression of beauty for Patitsas (and for all Christians) is the crucified Christ and the cross. Through embracing this beauty, we become good, and our communion is restored. “Finally,” he says, “through these two steps we are brought to the gates of Truth, which is to say, to the tomb of Christ. And here we bow down and accept our own humiliation in a spirit of surrender, finding ourselves resurrected and renewed.”3 Though the language is a bit loose, I think that Patitsas is right. What can be more beautiful than the act (through the crucifixion) that defeated death? By defeating non-being, the crucifixion was the ultimate act of being. And this is far more beautiful than flowers.
1 Timothy G. Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty (Editorial: Maysville, Mo: St. Nicholas Press, 2019), 29.
2 Ibid, 89.
3 Ibid, 79.
