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Responding at last, in April of 2002, to see past. The Pope likes venerable ideas.
the scandal created by the revelation of And beauty, as a term signifying (like
innumerable cover-ups of sexually pred- health) an indisputable excellence, has
atory priests, Pope John Paul II told the been a perennial resource in the issuing
American cardinals summoned to the of peremptory evaluations.
Vatican, “A great work of art may be Permanence, however, is not one of
blemished, but its beauty remains; and beauty’s more obvious attributes; and
this is a truth which any intellectually the contemplation of beauty, when it is
honest critic will recognize.” expert, may be wreathed in pathos, the
Is it too odd that the Pope likens the drama on which Shakespeare elaborates
Catholic Church to a great–that is, in many of the Sonnets. Traditional cele-
beautiful–work of art? Perhaps not, brations of beauty in Japan, like the
since the inane comparison allows him annual rite of cherry-blossom viewing,
to turn abhorrent misdeeds into some- are keenly elegiac; the most stirring
thing like the scratches in the print of a beauty is the most evanescent. To make
silent ½lm or craquelure covering the beauty in some sense imperishable re-
surface of an Old Master painting, blem- quired a lot of conceptual tinkering and
ishes that we reflexively screen out or transposing, but the idea was simply too
alluring, too potent, to be squandered on
Susan Sontag has been a Fellow of the American the praise of superior embodiments. The
Academy since 1993. Best known as a novelist and aim was to multiply the notion, to allow
essayist–her books have been translated into thir- for kinds of beauty, beauty with adjec-
ty-two languages–she has also written stories and tives, arranged on a scale of ascending
plays, written and directed movies, and worked as value and incorruptibility, with the
a theatre director in the United States and Europe. metaphorized uses (‘intellectual beauty,’
In 2000 she won the National Book Award for ‘spiritual beauty’) taking precedence
her novel “In America,” and in 2001 received the over what ordinary language extols as
Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work. Last beautiful–a gladness to the senses.
year, a new collection of essays, “Where the Stress The less ‘uplifting’ beauty of face and
Falls,” was published. Her next book, “Regarding body remains the most commonly visit-
the Pain of Others,” will appear in early 2003, ed site of the beautiful. But one would
and she is also writing another novel. hardly expect the Pope to invoke that
sense of beauty while constructing an
© 2002 by Susan Sontag exculpatory account of several genera-