T
O
B
EAUTIFY THE
G
AZE
THE HUMAN GAZE IS NOT THE CLOSED, FIXED VIEW OF A CAMERA but is creative and constructive. Both the gaze that sees and the object that is seen construct themselves simultaneously in the one act of vision. So much depends then on how we see things. More often than not the style of gaze determines what we see. There are many things near us that we never notice simply because of the way we see. The way we look at things has a huge influence on what becomes visible for us. If a house has been closed up for a long time, a film of dust settles on the windows. Decayed residue gradually manages to seal out the light. When we go into such a place, we smell the dankness of sour and fetid air. The same thing can happen in the rooms of the mind. If one has become stuck in a certain narrow or predictable way of seeing, the outside light cannot bring colour into one’s life. Eventually the windows of the mind become blinded by an imperceptible film of dead thought and old feeling so that the air within becomes stale, life lessens and the outside world loses its invitation and challenge. When no fresh light can come into the mind, the colour and beauty fade from life. There is an uncanny symmetry between the inner and the outer world. Each person is the sole inhabitant of their own inner world; no-one else can get in there to configure how things are seen. Each of us is responsible for how we see, and how we see determines what we see. Seeing is not merely a physical act: the heart of vision is shaped by the state of soul. When the soul is alive to beauty, we begin to see life in a fresh and vital way. The old habits of seeing are broken. The coating of dead dust falls from the windows. Freed from their dead forms the elements of one’s life reveal new urgency and possibility.
We have often heard that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This is usually taken to mean that the sense of beauty is utterly subjective; there is no accounting for taste because each person’s taste is different. The statement has another, more subtle meaning: if our style of looking becomes beautiful, then beauty will become visible and shine forth for us. We will be surprised to discover beauty in unexpected places where the ungraceful eye would never linger. The graced eye can glimpse beauty anywhere, for beauty does not reserve itself for special elite moments or instances; it does not wait for perfection but is present already secretly in everything. When we beautify our gaze, the grace of hidden beauty becomes our joy and our sanctuary.
‘B
EAUTY
, E
VER
A
NCIENT
, E
VER
N
EW
’
Beauty was a reversion to the pre-divine lingering in man as a
memory of something that existed before his presence . . .
prior to the Gods.
HERMANN BROCH
ST AUGUSTINE TESTIFIES TO THE PERMANENCE AND ETERNITY OF beauty when he writes: ‘Too late came I to love thee! Beauty, ever ancient, ever new, too late came I to love thee!’ Yet beauty is never stale; it is never the same. Beauty is always new in every different presence and it quickens distinctively each time. When we gaze at the faces we love, we often notice how the days and years continue to enrich these faces with ever new textures of presence. The experience of beauty always resembles a beginning. A clearance opens in the heart for something new. Perhaps this is why it always seems to embrace us completely and satisfies something profound in us. Beauty touches and renews our hope when it takes us out of the grid of ordinary time and brings us to another place, a place where history ceases and the weight of memory relents, a place ever ancient and ever new. For a while our hearts become young again, inspired with new vision and possibility. Meister Eckhart says: ‘Time makes us old. Eternity keeps us young.’
It is quite fascinating how beauty touches the mind. No-one is immune to beauty. Regardless of background, burdens or limitations, when we find ourselves in a place of great beauty, clarity, recognition and excitement awaken in us. It is never a neutral experience. Despite all our disaffection with what can sometimes seem a harsh and cynical world, there is an eternal beckoning at the heart of beauty that touches what is still innocent in us. This sense of beauty was classically expressed early in the Western mystical tradition by Pseudo-Dionysius in his book The Divine Names. This work was to exercise a profound and continuous influence on all subsequent philosophical mysticism. He writes poetically of the flowing light of beauty and how it fills and brightens every form:
That, beautiful beyond being, is said to be Beauty – for
It gives beauty from itself in a manner appropriate to each,
It causes the consonance and splendour of all,
It flashes forth upon all, after the manner of light, the
Beauty producing gifts of its flowing ray,
It calls to itself,
When it is called beauty.
To behold beauty dignifies your life; it heals you and calls you out beyond the smallness of your own self-limitation to experience new horizons. To experience beauty is to have your life enlarged.
L
IKE THE
M
OON ON
B
REAKING
T
IDE
:
T
HE
G
LIMPSE OF
B
EAUTY
There is nothing as beautiful as the sadness of one
who is blind in Granada.
SPANISH PROVERB
TRUE BEAUTY IS NUMINOUS. WHEN A PERSON HAS BEAUTY, HER presence is full of radiance. In German, they say such a person has a ‘grosse Ausstrahlung’, literally, ‘a flowing forth of radiance’. The individual is no longer confined within the frame of her own identity. There is a light in beauty which no frontier can limit or contain; it has a distinctive dignity. Like consciousness, beauty shines with a light from beyond itself. In medieval thought, Albert Magnus spoke of beauty as the brilliance of an object’s form shining forth in its sensible presence.
Beauty is not to be captured or controlled for there is something intrinsically elusive in its nature. More like a visitation than a solid fact, beauty invests the aura of a person or infuses a landscape with an unexpected intimacy that satisfies our longing. True beauty cannot be invented or manufactured. We ‘cannot bear very much reality’. Neither, it seems, can we bear very much beauty. The glimpse, the touch of beauty is enough to quicken our hearts with the longing for the divine. Beauty never finally satisfies though she intensifies our longing and refines it. Were the human person simply soul, beauty would be an absolute embrace. We are, however, threshold creatures of deep ambivalence and when beauty touches the matrix of human selfhood, it can only be just that: a touch.