Movements

CHRIST, THE FAIREST
OF THE CHILDREN OF MEN
Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna

Where Christ is, there is beauty. Where the heart is, life opens up to Christ, beauty is poured out, like a life-giving current, on a world ruined by sin and defaced by evil. We find this to be still true after 2,000 years.
True, good, beautiful, are not exterior attributes of God–they coincide with God’s very being. God is Truth, Good, Love and Beauty.
All created beauty is a participation in the infinite beauty of God’s “being.” If this is true, we have to go a step further and say that the Word, in becoming flesh, has, as it were, “incarnated” God’s own goodness, love, truth and infinite beauty. Christ is “the fairest of the children of men” not because of particular aesthetic qualities, but because He is the incarnate beauty of God. His whole being is love and truth, goodness and beauty. Christ is the splendor of the truth, the splendor of goodness.
With His incarnation, Christ has brought a new “rule of beauty.” Not only has He re-established the original beauty of creation, lost and profaned by sin and evil, but He has brought, in His person, the source of all beauty. From Him, the living water of beauty spreads throughout the world. And all the beauty of the world, whether the beauty of nature or the beauty of virtue or of art, are irradiations of His Beauty… made accessible by His incarnation. There is nothing more beautiful in the world than holiness. Of the saints can be said what the Letter to the Hebrews says of Christ: they are like “the radiant light of God’s glory.”
Christ was fair in heaven and on earth, in His mother’s womb, and when held in her arms; He was fair on the wood of the Cross, and when He ascended to heaven.