“What we do not love, we will not save.”

 

W

hy does Pope Francis place such emphasis on beauty? One possible answer comes from recent insights in neuroscience, particularly the work of psychiatrist and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist.

McGilchrist argues that the two hemispheres of the brain attend to reality differently. The left hemisphere tends to focus on parts, categories, analysis, and utility. It sees things in abstraction, detached from their wider context. The right hemisphere, by contrast, attends to wholes, relationships, context, and living realities. It is the hemisphere associated with empathy, wonder, emotional understanding, and our capacity to form bonds with others.

As McGilchrist writes: “The right hemisphere sees things whole, and in their context, where the left hemisphere sees things abstracted from context, and broken into parts... The capacities that help us, as humans, form bonds with others–empathy, emotional understanding, and so on–are largely right-hemisphere functions.”

He then makes an even more striking observation: “Attention is not just another ‘function’ alongside other cognitive functions... The kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world we attend to.”

In other words, how we look at the world affects what kind of world we experience.

This insight sheds light on Pope Francis' ecological vision. Much of the ecological crisis can be understood as a crisis of attention. We have become accustomed to seeing forests as timber, rivers as resources, mountains as mineral deposits, and animals as commodities. We look at creation through a narrow lens of utility. We see parts, but not wholes. We see functions, but not relationships. We see price, but not value.

Beauty helps to restore a different kind of attention.

When we stand before a sunset, listen to birdsong, walk through a forest, or gaze at the sea, we are not calculating usefulness. We are contemplating. Beauty invites us to slow down, to wonder, and to recognize that we belong to something greater than ourselves. It reawakens our capacity for relationship.

This is precisely what Pope Francis seems to be aiming at in Laudato Si'. Before we can protect the earth, we must learn to see it again. Before we can save creation, we must recover our ability to be captivated by it.

Pope Francis writes: “Those who contemplate in this way experience wonder not only at what they see, but also because they feel they are an integral part of this beauty; and they also feel called to guard it and to protect it.”

Beauty, therefore, is not an aesthetic luxury. It is an ecological necessity. It restores the kind of attention that makes love possible. And as Wendell Berry reminds us, “What we do not love, we will not save.”

The movement is simple but profound: beauty awakens attention, attention awakens wonder, wonder awakens love, and love awakens care.

Perhaps this is why the word beauty appears forty-two times in Laudato Si'. Pope Francis understands that ecological conversion begins not with information but with perception. The first step in caring for our common home is learning to see it once more as beautiful. 8thworker.us