Book Review:
God is Beauty: A Retreat on the Gospel and Art by St. John Paul the Great
The first new book from Theology of the Body Institute Press brings Bishop Karol Wojtyła’s 1962 retreat with artists to U.S. readers
How can you look in the mirror seeing both “beautiful” and “ugly”? We have different “looks” — God alone is beauty itself.
“The torrent of beauty flows through you, but you are not Beauty,” poet Zygmunt Krasiński shows. St. John Paul the Great, an artist, actor, and poet, built a critical yet little-known retreat around that reflection.
John Paul’s friend Stanislaw Grygiel explained, “Every human being is an artist, through whom Beauty flows. We have received a talent that allows this ‘torrent of beauty’ to flow through us. To a certain extent, we are this torrent. We identify with it and are responsible for it. The torrent of beauty that flows through us draws from us what is beautiful and rejects what is ugly, and hinders its flow. It does this, however, on the condition that we collaborate with Beauty itself.”
St. John Paul cites Jesus’s teaching, “no one is good but God alone” (Mark 10:18, Luke 18:19). So then, John Paul concludes: “Analogically, we can also say of him that he…
