It was a beautiful day—the sun overhead illuminating but not marring with scorching heat the midsummer day, the wind whispering through the trembling limbs of the trees whose boughs still boasted leaves of a luscious green, spring’s last spread. Yet it was one of the few places while on pilgrimage to Eastern Europe that I took no photographs. My fellow pilgrims and I found its beauty uncanny. One hundred years ago, it would have been nothing but part of a small Polish town, but eighty years ago, when World War II ended, we discovered to what horrific end it and other places like it had been turned. As survivor and psychologist Viktor Frankl put it, “Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.”
I had learned for years before that moment the stories of the terrible injustices done in the Nazi concentration camps, but being there at Auschwitz eighty years after its horrors were put to an end provided a new perspective entirely. What was most jarring was how, amidst a place where man had perpetrated such grave ugliness and sacrilege to the image of God in his fellow man, the land itself remained a testament to beauty. “Do you think,” a fellow pilgrim asked, “that the prisoners saw this beauty? Or did their sufferings obscure it from them?” It’s hard to imagine what the answer would have been. But on the way out of the museum, hoping to find more insight into the question, I stopped and bought a copy of Frankl’s short book Man’s Search for Meaning (1946).
We were on the bus driving away as I read his story of his time in Auschwitz and the several other camps in which he was imprisoned, a story he set out to write not of “the great horrors” but of “the multitude of small torments,” in an attempt to reveal how “the everyday life in a concentration camp [was] reflected in the mind of the average prisoner.” In his account, Frankl makes no attempt to speak of the major villains or heroes (such as Maximilian Kolbe, who, in a 1984 postscript, the Jewish Frankl did not hesitate to call a saint), but rather of the many prisoners (including himself) struggling to find a reason to persevere under such circumstances. (His own postwar perseverance in bringing his experience and his psychology of logotherapy to the world may have faltered, had it not been for the encouragement of a Jewish leader in the United States, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known as the Hasidic Lubavitcher Rebbe.)
Isn’t it this glorious capacity of God to bring light out of darkness that brings hope to the world?
That reason to persevere he found through beauty: the beauty of his wife’s image, which opened up for him a new vision of the beauty of nature and helped develop his inner life. Marching out to a work site in the icy cold with his fellow prisoners, the chance words of a neighbor proved to be an inspiration: “If our wives could see us now!” This brought the men to silence, and Frankl recounts, “Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.” Even imagining the person of his beloved, a human being like him, created in God’s image, brought into his heart a light that dispelled the darkness—as Frankl cites several pages later, describing the beauty of nature, “‘Et lux in tenebris lucet’—and the light shineth in the darkness” (John 1:5).
Isn’t it this glorious capacity of God—accessible to us even in the existential darkness of suffering that so many of us encounter, even in much more fortunate circumstances than Frankl and his fellows—to bring light out of darkness that brings hope to the world? God has allowed us as human beings to imitate his great work of beauty through artistry of so many varieties. Pope Benedict XVI, in his 2009 meeting with artists in the Sistine Chapel, asked: “What is capable of restoring enthusiasm and confidence, what can encourage the human spirit to rediscover its path, to raise its eyes to the horizon, to dream of a life worthy of its vocation – if not beauty?” And how does beauty possess this capacity? Because of authentic beauty’s intrinsic relation to the inspiration of love: As Benedict said, it “unlocks the yearning of the human heart, the profound desire to know, to love, to go towards the Other, to reach for the Beyond. If we acknowledge that beauty touches us intimately, that it wounds us, that it opens our eyes, then we rediscover the joy of seeing, of being able to grasp the profound meaning of our existence, the Mystery of which we are part; from this Mystery we can draw fullness, happiness, the passion to engage with it every day.”
It was this thought that united the German Jew—Frankl—who survived the camps, and the German Catholic—Benedict—who survived his country being dominated by totalitarian, anti-semitic, anti-Christian paganism: that even as human beings, in the camps or in the cities, approached despair, the sight of beauty could spur them to hope in love for salvation instead. As Frankl put it, “A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. . . . In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honorable way—in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, ‘The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.’”
What was jarring for us in our visit to Auschwitz was that which presented the possibility of hope and survival to Frankl and his fellow prisoners: the perseverance of natural beauty in the presence of human brutality. But Frankl notes that this beauty was not a magic cure, and that some did despair; what differed between those who did and those who did not was the development of interiority, inner life, true self-knowledge. “As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense,” he wrote, “he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before. Under their influence he sometimes even forgot his own frightful circumstances. If someone had seen our faces on the journey from Auschwitz to a Bavarian camp as we beheld the mountains of Salzburg with their summits glowing in the sunset, through the little barred windows of the prison carriage, he would never have believed that those were the faces of men who had given up because of it—we were carried away by nature’s beauty, which we had missed for so long.”
What a contrast this bereftness presents to our twenty-first-century existence, where too many of us miss nature’s beauty, not because we have been deprived by force, but by our own too-willing acquiescence, heads brought low before the glow of so many screens that blot out the brightness of the sun! That the phrase ‘touch grass’ has become a real insult or word of advice for the terminally online suggests that the Catholic formation of youth ought to begin again with an encounter with God’s first book, the natural world with which a young Polish priest named Karol Wojtyła (later Pope St. John Paul II) would seek to acquaint his spiritual sons and daughters, such that they might know the love their Father in heaven demonstrates for each of them, day in and day out.
Even now, beauty remains to wound our hearts and stir us up to seek God.
In recounting his experience of beauty even in the camps, Frankl was not content to rest in the abstractions of the scientific language he had used in his psychological work but turned to speak poetically about the concrete experiences of beauty he shared with his fellows. “One evening,” he recalls, “when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset. Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, ‘How beautiful the world could be!’” Even in the depths of his exhaustion, this prisoner could grasp the potential for beauty that presents itself in the expression of the sky above, the reflection of the puddles below, and wanted to share contemplation of it with his fellows.
Even amid the serious challenges of the digital age in which we live, we can make this choice as well, but it requires making the active choice to contemplate the beauty of the world and to share it with others—not through posting to Instagram but by living in community with others such that we can see creation shoulder to shoulder and discuss how the Holy Spirit is moving our hearts. As Frankl said, his time in great suffering reveals the truth of our quotidian existence: “The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.” If man can find hope even at Auschwitz, what is our excuse for not escaping despair? Even now, beauty remains to wound our hearts and stir us up to seek God.