ZENIT has recently reprinted this message that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) sent to a meeting of the ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation in August 2002. The letter is entitled, "The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty".
The encounter with the beautiful can become the wound of the arrow that strikes the heart and in this way opens our eyes, so that later, from this experience, we take the criteria for judgment and can correctly evaluate the arguments. For me an unforgettable experience was the Bach concert that Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich after the sudden death of Karl Richter. I was sitting next to the Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann. When the last note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor-Cantatas triumphantly faded away, we looked at each other spontaneously and right then we said: "Anyone who has heard this, knows that the faith is true."The music had such an extraordinary force of reality that we realized, no longer by deduction, but by the impact on our hearts, that it could not have originated from nothingness, but could only have come to be through the power of the Truth that became real in the composer's inspiration.
Thanks for this passage. When I read the excerpt, I thought: What about text? What about theological aesthetics? Well, it is all there (and more!) in the message.