Beauty is an event; beauty happens when the Whole offers itself in the fragment, and when this self-giving transcends infinite distance.— Bruno Forte, The Portal of Beauty: Towards a Theology of Aesthetics

In his book, The Portal of Beauty, Archbishop Forte explores a variety of Christian expressions of the human experience of beauty. He asks the question:”How can the limitless inhabit what is little? How can the everlasting ‘abbreviate’ itself without ceasing to be? And how can immensity become small and still exist?”

“The answer offered to these questions by an important strand in Western thought is that all this can indeed happen, in one of two ways: either through the form of the fragment, the way, that is, that it makes present here and now the harmonious proportions of the Whole — so beauty is formosus! — or through beauty’s brightness, where the splendor of the Whole bursts forth in the fragment, and lays hold of the beholder: this bright loveliness is speciosus! In the first case, the Whole finds a home in the fragment inasmuch as the latter lets itself be the particular dwelling-place of the infinite in space and time, by reproducing here and now in an analogical way the harmony which always exists in the Whole; in the second, the Whole breaks forth, as it were, from within what is intimate, opening a window on to the unlimited, and so making the fragment a place where eternity shortens itself in time, and infinity pours itself out into the finite.”

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