The light of a great thought is eternal. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of years after it dawned, it can still illuminate our world. Aquinas insisted that goodness, truth and integrity belonged essentially to beauty. In light of this, we can see that much of the current cultural breakdown can be understood as failure of vision with regard to beauty. Imagine: if the mind of the politician and developer could awaken to the ancient integrity of landscape, it would become more and more difficult to damage the beauty of nature. If architects and planners could recognize how ugly surroundings damage and diminish the mind, then building might recover a sense of beauty. If religion could put the beauty of God at its heart what refreshment and encouragement it would give and what creativity it would awaken. If the beauty of kindness were to become attractive, it would gradually create an atmosphere of compassion which would help the weak and wounded to transfigure their lives. Plato expressed this pithily: ‘The power of the good has taken refuge in the nature of the Beautiful’ (Philebus, 65A). Aquinas’s notion of beauty as the integrity and completion of a thing offers us both a wonderful lantern and a generous mirror to glimpse how we might bring the great ideas alive through our love of beauty.
Aquinas is careful not to overlook the sensuous element in the beauty of things. He says: ‘Pulchra sunt quae visa placent’, i.e. those things are beautiful which please when they are seen. He speaks of delectatio, the surge of delight and joy we feel when we experience beauty. We are taken beyond the dullness of habit and daily familiarity. Something breaks through the shell to release excitement in us. When we see beauty in sensible things, we are grasping their secret, living form. While the experience of beauty has a wonderful immediacy, it is not something that simply happens. Because the medieval mind had such a refined sense of how deeply complex even the simplest act of knowing is, experience was never understood as a sequence of non-stop epiphanies. The task of true knowing is slow and difficult; yet when pursued, it often opens us to the delight of being surprised and overtaken by beauty. This is where Aquinas speaks of the peace that beauty brings. Peace is the tranquillity that comes when order is realized. Struggle and desire are deftly subsumed in the experience of harmony.
B
EAUTY
E
VOKES
E
LEGANCE
A
ND
D
IGNITY
Radiance belongs to being considered precisely as beautiful; it
is, in being, that which catches the eye, or the ear, or the mind,
and makes us want to perceive it again.
ETIENNE GILSON
THE MEDIEVAL MIND RECOGNIZED THAT WHILE WE CAN participate in beauty, we can never possess it. If we attempt to own beauty, we corrupt it. When soiled or damaged, beauty can turn negative and destructive. It is ultimately a sacred manifestation and should not be trespassed on by our lower hungers. In the presence of beauty, we are called to be gracious and worthy.
Beauty makes presence shine. It brings out elegance and dignity and has a confidence, an effortlessness that is not laboured or forced. This fluency and ease of presence is ultimately rooted below the surface in surer depths. In a sense, the question of beauty is about a way of looking at things. It is everywhere, and everything has beauty; it is merely a matter of discovering it. The most profound statement that can be made about something is the statement that ‘it is’. Beauty is. The word is is the most magical word. It is a short, inconsequential little word and does not even sound special. Yet the word is is the greatest hymn to the ‘thereness’ of things. We are so thoroughly entangled in the web of the world that we are blind to the unfolding world being there before us. Our sleep of unknowing is often disturbed by suffering. Abruptly we awaken to the devastating realization that the givenness of things is utterly tenuous. Even mountains hang on strings. The ‘isness’ of things is miraculous: that there is something rather than nothing.
‘B
EING
H
ERE
I
S
S
O
M
UCH
’
THE HUMAN MIND IS IN ITSELF A WORLD WITH HUGE MOUNTAINS, deep valleys and forests of the unknown. Given the private depths, deep strangeness and wonders of our interior life, it is amazing that we can reach out towards the world and to each other with such intimacy and understanding. More amazing still is our ability to make everything so familiar and normal that we actually succeed in forgetting how strange and wondrous it is to be here. Rilke said: ‘Being here is so much.’ We turn the mystery and strangeness of this world into our private territory. We make a home out of the world. Life becomes predictable and we function automatically within our frames: route to work, colleagues, friends, patterns of thinking and feeling, the faces of the family, etc. Without sensing it, we become lost inside the automatic traffic of functioning. It is only when something goes wrong that we are hauled back to the edge. Quite abruptly the familiar map has melted and territories that were sure ground an hour ago don’t exist any more. Heidegger said that it is only when a hammer does not work that you suddenly realize that it is a hammer.
It is tragic that something has to go wrong before we can realize the gift of the world and our lives, gifts we could never have dreamed or earned. When something goes deeply wrong, the realization it forces is inevitably learned at the grave of loss. If we were able to live in a deeper state of awareness and wisdom, our days on earth would find a new frequency: spaces would open naturally for beauty to touch us and we need beauty as deeply as we need love. Beauty is not an extra luxury, an accidental experience that we happen to have if we are lucky. Beauty dwells at the heart of life. If we can free ourselves from our robot-like habits of predictability, repetition and function, we begin to walk differently on the earth. We come to dwell more in the truth of beauty. Ontologically, beauty is the secret sound of the deepest thereness of things. To recognize and celebrate beauty is to recognize the ultimate sacredness of experience, to glimpse the subtle embrace of belonging where we are wed to the divine, the beauty of every moment, of every thing.
Beauty loves freedom; then it is no surprise that we engage beauty through the imagination. The imagination always goes beyond the frames and cages of the expected and predictable. The imagination loves possibility and freedom is the ether where possibility lives. Uncharted territories are always beckoning. Beauty is at home in this realm of the invisible, the unexpected and the unknown. It emerges from its own depths, sure in poise and generous in possibility. Yet there is a certain disturbance in the call of beauty, a displacement. As T.S. Eliot says in ‘Journey of the Magi’: we can no longer be at ease in the old dispensation. We are forced to recognize something new, something that shows up the limitations we have accepted and our subtle but deadening compromises. Beauty calls us beyond ourselves and it encourages us to engage the dream that dwells in the soul.
One time in Atlanta, Georgia, I noticed the constant presence of a certain weed by the roadside. I asked what its name was. I was told that it was the ‘kudzu’ weed which could grow a foot long in a day. When I returned home and reflected on my trip, the kudzu struck me as a precise metaphor for consumerism. Most of us move now in such a thicket of excess that we can no longer make out the real contours of things. Where there is entanglement, there is no perspective or clarity to make out the true identity of anything. We need to make a clearance in order to begin to see where we are and who we are; then we can discover true proportion. And without a sense of proportion, we cannot recognize beauty.