Editor’s note: Because of its length, this column by Bishop Robert Barron is being published in a two-part series. This is the second part of the series.
Hans Urs von Balthasar observes that the beautiful elects the observer and then sends him on mission to announce what he has seen.
Not many years ago, Rolling Stone magazine asked a number of prominent popular musicians to name the song that first “rocked their world.”
Some of the responses were relatively banal, but the vast majority of them had a Joycean resonance: the respondents knew instinctively the difference between songs (however great) that had merely pleased them and songs that had shaken them out of their complacency and rearranged their vision things.
This kind of aesthetic encounter is the spiritual exercise that Irish Murdoch is speaking of.