Episode 94
You are marveling at a beautiful sunset, standing in awe before an Italian masterpiece, or gazing lovingly into the face of your beloved. These moments of beauty, however brief, impact our hearts, minds, and souls in a profound way. What exactly is occurring in these moments?
John-Paul Heil offers insight through a reading and discussion of his essay “Ekstasis and the Chicken Truck,” in which he offers insight into the nature of these experiences we all share, which are yet so individual to each of us. Heil explains the importance of attentiveness, offers a critique of Petrarch, and recounts how a truck full of frozen chicken led to a moment of transcendence.
00:00 Preview of the discussion to come
00:24 We will be doing things a bit differently while Ryan McDermott is on Sabbatical.
04:13 A reading of John-Paul Heil’s article “Ekstasis and the Chicken Truck.”
14:12 Ekstasis, is the experience of beauty, which has the capacity to wound us and is both objective and subjective.
18:18 “When you encounter beauty, there's something sort of wild about it… I can't contain it… Not only is it good that this thing is beyond me, but I need this thing that's beyond me in order, not simply to be myself and in my fullness, but to be called to an even greater level of being, namely, that of communion and community.”
26:39 Petrarch had an incomplete conception of beauty and its relationship with man.
32:28 If we see beauty as only imminent then we reduce it to pleasure, which is a reduction of nature and beauty.
36:08 True beauty elicits a childlike wonder and the desire to share it.
37:35 The positivist beliefs about beauty breed boredom. While the postmodern believe that beauty is a simulacrum. The experience of real beauty is higher.
45:00 The chicken nugget is a prime example of what happens when we separate man and nature’s beauty.
49:30 Practically, to engage with beauty means to practice attentiveness to reality and to the beautiful, often attempting to re-present it in order to grasp its form.
52:43 “if you're inattentive, that is a sign that there is something here that's lacking as regards your love.”
Links:
G.K. Chesterton’s novel which emphasizes ekstasis
Opening episode of Genealogies of Modernity which Heil references
Michael Krom on Petrarch, Augustine, and Mt. Ventoux
David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King on boredom in our society
Beauty and God as a relentless pursuer in “The Hound of Heaven”
”Josef Pieper and the Beautiful Uselessness of Church Buildings”