Norm Klassen

The subject of church unity can be approached through the nature/grace question. The Catholic and Orthodox communions are joined by their shared recognition of supernatural finality. It underscores their shared ontology (despite a recent assertion that they have become ontologically different). This paper takes up Rowan Williams’s implicit claim that their shared stance on the nature/grace question gives the two communions a common understanding of beauty as well. The approach to beauty of Catholic and Orthodox artists reveals ecumenically meaningful shared theological commitments. To reflect on beauty in the context of fraught ecumenical discussions is to resist modernity’s fact-value split, in which questions of beauty might well seem secondary to more practical and pressingly specific issues of difference confronting the two communions. Building on Williams’s conjunction of ecumenism and beauty, the paper highlights two instantiations of a Christian aesthetic: the emerging consensus that the Church needs a pope who sees himself as the servus servorum Dei; and the historic determination of the positive implications for the arts of the Incarnation. To reflect on beauty in the search for greater visible unity, as Pope Benedict and others have recently stressed, is to turn to a resource of encouragement and hope.

The doctrine of supernatural finality (the nature/grace question) is relevant to ecumenism, and understanding Christian aesthetics is relevant to understanding the relationship between nature and grace. The nature/grace question always alerts us to ontological issues. When Patriarch Bartholomew says, heartbreakingly, that the churches in the East and West have become ‘ontologically different’, he signals the relevance of reflection on the relationship between nature and grace.¹ In that context, we can talk meaningfully about aesthetics, and need to do so, even though questions of beauty can seem esoteric, while the challenges facing Orthodox-Catholic dialogue are, by contrast, practical and specific. Beauty is central to the Church’s self-under- standing.