Many of the most intimate presences in our lives dwell within us in the form of thoughts. Though you might live with the one you love, he remains only physically adjacent to you; however, the thought of him can enter into the centre of you and become as intimate to you as yourself. In one of his poems, Rumi explores the approach and encounter of two lovers but then concludes: ‘We were inside each other all along.’ The suggestion is that ‘being inside each other’ is what brought them together outwardly in the first place. The converse is also true: when a relationship between two people dies, they stop being inside each other though they may still live side by side. The same is true of family, friends and God: all enter us and remain with us through thought. Thought is more penetrating than light, it can travel further inwards to create an intimate world within the mind. This is at once the terror and the beauty of thought. Indeed, beauty itself can enter us as thought. In his poem ‘The Arrow’, Yeats says:
I thought of your beauty, and this arrow
Made out of a wild thought, is in my marrow.
A prophetic thought claims its own future; it awakens, disturbs and brings transformation. Such a thought is a gift of the imagination. It is not an abstract ghostly cipher. In such a thought, spirit and sensuousness cross at the frontier of their richest tension and exposure. A great thought is a sense–spirit object. It takes on a life of its own. We are familiar in our history with certain frontiers where such thoughts awakened. At a personal level, each of us is aware of certain threshold times in the lives of our hearts when such thoughts arrived and changed everything.
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BEAUTY EMERGED EARLY IN HUMAN REFLECTION AND HAS BEEN the inspiration and passion at the heart of human creativity ever since. Some of the most profound reflection on beauty was developed during medieval times. The secret dream of thought is to enfold everything within the contour of the idea. This is the Eros of thought: to desire everything. It wants to leave nothing out. Thought is curious and is driven by the desire to know. It wants to draw aside the veils of illusion and see what reality conceals. Words, images and ideas are its instruments of illumination.
Yet each individual who thinks is limited and confined within his own mind. The poignancy of thought is that it can never bridge the distance between the self and the world. The medieval mind filled in that interim distance with the interesting presence of the five Transcendentals: Being, the One, the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Being is the deepest reality, the substance of our world and all the things in it; the opposite would be Nothingness, the things that are not. The One claims that all things are somehow bound together in an all-embracing unity: despite all the differences in us, around us and between us, everything ultimately holds together as one; chaos does not have the final word. The True claims that reality is true and our experience is real and our actions endeavour to come into alignment with the truth. The Good suggests that in practising goodness we participate in the soul of the world. The fifth is the Beautiful.
Every act of thinking, mostly without our realizing it, is secretly grounded in these presences. If the One, the True, Being, the Good and the Beautiful were to vanish, the thought in the mind would have no pathway out to the world. Put simply, these presences guarantee our sense of meaning and sustain the sense of order, truth, presence, goodness and beauty in our world. For the medieval mind beauty was a central presence at the heart of the real. Without beauty the search for truth, the desire for goodness and the love of order and unity would be sterile exploits. Beauty brings warmth, elegance and grandeur. Something in our souls longs deeply for that graciousness and delight. When we advert to the presence of beauty, the direction, rhythm and energy of our lives become different.
The medieval mind did not believe that beauty was either the result of a mental attitude that longed to see beauty or a surface presence in Nature or a product of the artistic mind. They did not believe that a human person could simply create beauty. In the medieval view reality was a series of symmetrical levels issuing from God and culminating in God’s perfection. All beauty derived ultimately from the beauty of God. Thomas Aquinas was the towering figure in the thought world of the Middle Ages. His system of thought is a magnificent architecture. In saying that beauty was a transcendental, Aquinas was claiming that beauty dwells in the depth of things. The same notion is also put memorably by Yeats in his poem ‘The Rose upon the Rood of Time’:
Come near, that no more blinded by man’s fate,
I find under the boughs of love and hate,
In all poor foolish things that live a day,
Eternal beauty wandering on her way.
Come near, come near, come near – Ah, leave me still
A little space for the rose-breath to fill!
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Each object is in reality a small virtual volcano.
HÉLÈNE CIXOUS
THE MEDIEVAL WORLD LOVED SYMBOLS. IT OFTEN PROBED THINGS so deeply to discover their supernatural reality that it ended up losing sight of the sensuous presence of the thing itself. But the thought of Aquinas is remarkable in its continuous insistence on the real, sensible presence of things. Each stone, tree, place and person was in its depths the expression of a divine idea. Consequently, each thing had a unique form. No thing is accidentally here. Nature is not dispersed chaos but a series of individual forms. The form is at once the structural principle of a thing and its essence and vital source. Aquinas had an understanding of nature and experience as dynamic, as constantly unfolding. His philosophy is a hugely intricate poetics of growth and becoming. Beauty was to be understood as the perfection of a thing. Perfection is not static or dead, it is the fullness of life which a thing possesses: this is what constitutes the adventure of knowing in the system of Aquinas. To know a thing is to awaken to its depth, complexity and presence. According to him, each thing secretly and profoundly desires to be known. Consequently, his notion of beauty is grounded in that deep knowing. This is how the beauty of a thing shines out in claritas of form. Beauty is magnetic because it calls forth a thing’s presence.
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Part of what it means to be, is to be beautiful. Beauty is not
superadded to things: it is one of the springs of their reality. It is
not that which effects a luscious response in perceivers; it is the
interior geometry of things, making them perceptible as forms.
FRANCESCA ARAN MURPHY
For Aquinas beauty also included the notion of integrity, integritas. He understands that each thing is alive and on a journey to become fully itself. Integrity is achieved when there is a complete realization of whatever a thing is supposed to be. Integrity is the adequacy of a thing to itself. There is here a sense of achieved proportion between a thing and what it is called to be. Creation is always in the heave of growth and becoming and when a thing journeys towards its own perfection or fullness of life, it is also secretly journeying towards the divine likeness. The integrity of beauty is that inner straining towards goodness and completion. There is a wonderful urgency within things to realize the dream of their individual fulfilment; nothing is neutral, everything is on its way.