“Beauty isn’t this casual thing that you might choose to be interested in or not, just as someone might choose to be interested in chocolate or something.”
                                                                                                                    —Sir Roger Scruton

Scruton made the comment in 2016 while speaking with Alicja Gescinska for her television program Wanderlust, and it came to mind as I read the Feb. 2 post-synodal apostolic exhortation of Pope Francis, Querida Amazonia.

Perhaps because Sir Roger died in January what struck me upon reading Querida Amazonia were its words about beauty. Scruton wrote about aesthetic values in a distinctive way, for which he became widely noted.

In Querida Amazonia, Pope Francis articulates four dreams that he has for the Amazon region. To my mind, the Pope thereby evokes memories of Martin Luther King Jr., who inspired many with a beautiful moral vision.

Reverend King did so most notably in his famous “I have a dream” speech of 1963. Likewise, Pope Francis engages our moral imagination and asks us to envision a world that (1) cares for the poor, (2) protects culture, (3) preserves nature, and (4) implements an inculturation of Gospel values.

This fourfold act of the imagination is no idle daydream. Instead it calls forth our ability to be attuned to the highest values. If we live within this vision, we can attain a beautiful life.

When the Pope’s exhortation first articulates two of his dreams, he explicitly speaks of beauty. Preserving the cultural riches of the Amazon region, he says, will allow us to attain the goal in which the “beauty of our humanity shines forth in so many varied ways.”

But this goes together with ecological attention to the Amazon and its “overwhelming natural beauty and the superabundant life teeming in its rivers and forests.” The preservation of this natural beauty needs to be joined with that of the human cultural riches just mentioned.

The Vatican shorthand to describe this union of nature and culture is “integral ecology.” Yet I think Sir Roger best explains the simple and compelling idea summed up in that rather abstract phrase.

“One must open one’s eyes to nature and to the human world and see, as it were, the immanence of value,” explained Scruton in the television interview as he walked with Gescinska across his farm.

In other words, value is not a merely abstract concept, but something we can actually see in things. If we learn to look at things properly by paying attention to beauty, we can see their value shining at us.

“When things speak to you, shine at you, when the light that is present in everything shines through, that’s essentially what we mean by aesthetic values, or what we ought to mean,” says Scruton.

Seeing this light is a profoundly transforming act of mind and vision. It is not a private, individual act of irrelevant daydreaming. Instead it is what opens us up to being truly at home in the world and to connecting with others.

That’s why Pope Francis says, “In each land and its features, God manifests himself and reflects something of his inexhaustible beauty. Each distinct group, then, in a vital synthesis with its surroundings, develops its own form of wisdom. Those of us who observe this from without should avoid unfair generalizations, simplistic arguments and conclusions drawn only on the basis of our own mindsets and experiences.” (Querida Amazonia, Paragraph 32)

To fully express the beauty of the Amazon region, the Pope has recourse to poets, even quoting two of them in Paragraphs 46-47. Is this not wonderful, when we can read a Church document and find ourselves enriched by its offerings of literary insights?

He concludes with his fourth dream about the inculturation of the Gospel. With inculturation, we must integrate the social and the spiritual: “In this way, we will reveal the true beauty of the Gospel, which fully humanizes, integrally dignifies persons and peoples, and brings fulfilment to every heart and the whole of life.” (QA 76)

Again, I am struck by how the Pope’s prophetic vision is guided by his careful attention to the shining value of beauty.

Scruton similarly emphasized the importance of beauty in his colloquy with Gescinska: “It’s the thing that attaches us to the world in the first place.”

For Scruton as well as the Pope, attention to beauty goes hand in hand with attention to the sacred.

As Sir Roger says, beauty “is the thing that is telling us, you belong here, and you in response saying, ‘Yes, I do belong, because you are here.’”

Thus the Pope’s prayer to Mary (Paragraph 111) nicely expresses how we too can follow “the path of Mary.” In the words of Francis: “Tenderly care for this explosion of beauty.”