Remember having to write essays about what you did during your vacations? I always hated that kind of homework. Most of the time I had done nothing; that's what vacations are for. Well, I tried this Christmas vacation to do nothing, but it was difficult. I went to some politically necessary Christmas parties and dinners with my New York liberal friends, and they never take vacations from their engagement with causes, so these gatherings rapidly become seminars on issues of the day, and if you show up in priestly garb (as I do in those circles precisely to provoke this) then you quickly become the party curiosity and the spokesperson for Reality, the Mystery, and the Cosmos to whom all sorts of ultimate intellectual-type questions are addressed. You have to be alert so as not to confirm suspicions that you are either an idiot or boring or a faker who just likes the company of exciting people. So I thought that I'd write this column in the spirit of that old homework about one of the gatherings I attended during this Christmas season. At this party, the discussion began when the hostess wondered why on a Christmas eve dinner she attended almost everyone present, including herself, was moved-many to tears-by a beautiful rendition of the classical Christmas carols by a guest from the NY Metropolitan Opera. The guests were mostly Jewish or agnostics, so she wondered: was the reaction pure sentimentality, or was there something in those songs and in the Christmas reality itself that evoked that reaction? Those present seemed to agree it was pure sentimentality, defined as a psychological reaction to the good memories, hopes, and ideals evoked by those songs. It was all right to feel this way, they said, as long as it did not distract one from the responsibilities of real life. Above all, they insisted, it is important to realize that even the most refined artistic sensibilities did not make you a good person. The perception of beauty, they thought, had nothing to do with morals, and morals, it seems, should be the mos t important concern of life. Then they wanted to know what I thought about this.
I asked them to examine their opinion "the other way around": does being a good person morally lead to a better perception of beauty? If beauty and morality could be separated, what was it that led us to be moral beings?
What sustained our morality? It was agreed that the perception of beauty and moral behavior could exist separately, but that one without the other was dangerous. A sense of beauty without morality becomes pure sentimentalism, or psychological self-satisfaction, or a "tenderness" such as Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy saw it, the "tenderness that leads to the gas chambers," because whatever displeases you aesthetically is destroyed if you cannot make it pleasing; it doesn't even exist for you; it has no rights. ("You cannot love what shocks you," says the wife in Hawthorne's The Birthmark.) On the other hand, without the attraction of the beautiful, without affectivity, morality becomes moralism and legalism, also intolerant of imperfection and weakness, ignorant of mercy and pardon. Many of the Nazi officials at the concentration camps were art collectors or deeply moved by classical music, and they considered what they did "good" for the race.
So I asked: what can keep them together? Where do goodness and beauty come together? No one seemed able to answer that. The usual possibilities were mentioned and recognized as insufficient: education, religion, cultural conditioning, adequate leadership, etc. Only an "attraction" that will totally correspond with reality, with the way things are can bring together beauty and morality. The force of the attraction itself will ground us, root us, tie us to reality so that our attitude toward it, our engagement with it will not violate its integrity, will be-therefore-morally good, since justice is fidelity to reality.
The problem is that we often experience a disharmony between the attraction and reality, and responding to the attraction, we violate reality-or, seeking to respect reality, we suppress, we do violence to what attracts us. (In this case the attraction is called temptation.) Only when we grasp reality as it is, in its relation to the Mystery at its origin and destiny, only then what we see becomes a sign of the Mystery, and thus sign and Mystery, justice and attraction, morality and affectivity will correspond. But to do this requires a change in perspective and attitude that is called "sacrifice." This sacrifice, in turn, is only really possible as an act of love, otherwise it will inevitably become the suppression of attraction or of reality.
Love occurs in response to love. We are loved first. Goodness and beauty are bound only by the experience of encounter with the Love at the origin and destiny of all that is real. That is what those carols were celebrating: the appearance of the grace and love of the Mystery, the birth of Jesus Christ. "In Christ," in His Presence, in the encounter with Him, sign and mystery coincide, and justice and beauty kiss.