just one did I cling to
for it was the essence of all desire:
to know beauty.
B
EAUTY
: T
HE
R
ADIANCE OF THE
E
TERNAL
The nature of love is this, that it attracts to beauty and links the
unbeautiful with the beautiful.
MARSILIO FICINO
WHILE BEAUTY GLADDENS OUR HEARTS, IT MAKES US LONELY TOO for what cannot be. True beauty is woven through the heart of life and is ever engaged with forces of ignorance, darkness, ugliness and negativity; yet domination and power are not beauty’s way. Beauty works from within these conflicts of forces and her brightening may or may not appear. Where beauty seems absent, she is often hidden and still at work in the slow industry of transformation. So much of beauty is not immediately apparent and indeed it could take a long time before it becomes visible. It often takes a lot of struggle and committed attention and generosity, even sacrifice, in order to create beauty. This work of beauty is slow and patient; it is the transformation through which the darkness of suffering eventually glimmers with the learned refinement of true radiance. The soul that struggles for the emergence of beauty reaches towards God and labours on that threshold between visible and invisible, time and eternity. The possibility and promise of this threshold is caught wonderfully by Marguerite Porete, the twelfth-century mystic:
Such a Soul often hears what she hears not,
and often sees what she sees not,
and so often she is there where she is not,
and so often she feels what she feels not.
For thousands of years this theme has inspired artists. The dark, haunted image of Jesus on the cross is made to yield some shimmer of its incomprehensible light. Dostoevsky suggested this too, when he said: ‘Perhaps it is beauty that will save us in the end.’
G
OD
: K
EEPER OF
T
RANSIENCE
THOUGH WE LIVE IN TIME, BEAUTY SEEMS TO VISIT US FROM outside time, from eternity. Beauty turns vanishing time into something precious; it makes the moment luminous and indeed timeless. Yet one of the most agonizing aspects of beauty is that it does vanish. What we do not know or feel barely touches us, does not sadden us when it vanishes. However, beauty awakens, envelops, inspires and delights us; an experience of beauty turns a certain sequence of time into something unforgettable. Yet it still vanishes. The Japanese have the word aware to describe the ephemeral nature of beauty. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins is haunted by the same vanishing:
How to keep – is there any, any, is there none such, nowhere
known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or
catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, . . . from vanishing away?
‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’
This is always the pathos at the end of autumn as colour dies into winter; it is also the pathos of each life whose moments of beauty are forming and dissolving like music. If we see God as the Keeper of Transience, then somewhere in the eternal world there is a door without our name on it, the repository where the unfathomed beauty of our chain of days still lives. If eternity is the deeper nature of time, then the vanishing is not a final loss or emptiness. Vanishing is disappearance through visible surface into eternal embrace. We cannot lose what is eternal. Meister Eckhart is trenchant on the limitation and falsity of time: ‘Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time.’
T
HE
V
ISIBLE AND THE
I
NVISIBLE
IN BEAUTY WE WERE DREAMED AND CREATED, AND OFFERED A LIFE in a world where beauty arises to awaken, surprise and call us. The outer unfolding of our lives is internally sustained and ordered by this invisible beauty. Furthermore, whenever we awaken beauty, we are helping to make God present in the world. Consequently the rituals and liturgies of religion can be occasions where beauty truly comes alive. The beauty of God is reachable for everyone and can be awakened in all dimensions of our experience. This also calls us to love and respect the world and to care for the earth.
On the surface, beauty confers grandeur on order, attractiveness on goodness, graciousness on truth and Eros on Being. Thomas Aquinas and the medieval thinkers wisely recognized that beauty was at the heart of reality; it was where truth, unity, goodness and presence came together. Without beauty they would be separated and inclined towards destructive conflict with each other. Accompanied by beauty, truth gains graciousness and compassion. Beauty holds harmony at the heart of unity and prevents its collapse into the most haunted chaos. In the presence of beauty, goodness attracts desire and beauty makes presence luminous and evokes its mystery. There is a profound equality at the heart of beauty; a graciousness which recognizes and encourages the call of individuality but invites it to serve the dream and creative vision of community. Without beauty the Eros of growth and creativity would dry up. As Simone Weil says: ‘Desire contains something of the absolute and if it fails . . . the absolute is transferred to the obstacle.’
B
EAUTY AND
C
REATIVITY AS
B
IRTH
Who would have thought my shrivelled heart
Could have recovered greenness?
GEORGE HERBERT, ‘The Flower’
ONE OF THE MOST LUMINOUS DOCUMENTS OF CLASSICAL antiquity is the Symposium of Plato. It is a reflection on the notions of love, goodness and beauty. For Plato beauty was not a private experience of self-indulgence or pleasure. Beauty was internally related to love and goodness. The basic human drive is the desire for the Good. In the beginning Love was born of beauty, ‘from then on the ability to love beauty has created all the good things that exist for gods and men’. Plato understands love as a spirit that works on that threshold between the divine and the mortal. At the heart of the Symposium there is a constant recognition of creation as the urgent arena of creativity. The heart of human identity is the capacity and desire for birthing. To be is to become creative and bring forth the beautifuclass="underline"
All humans are pregnant, physically and spiritually, and when we reach our prime, our nature desires to give birth. Nature is not capable of giving birth in the ugly, but only in the beautiful. Now this is a divine act, and this pregnancy and birth impart immortality to a living being that is mortal. But it is impossible for these things to come about in the inharmonious. The ugly clashes with all that is divine, while beauty is in harmony with it. Therefore the role of the goddess of childbirth is played by beauty. And because of this, whenever something pregnant approaches the beautiful it becomes gentle and pours out gladness both in the begetting and the birth. But whenever it approaches the ugly, it shrinks into itself, sullen and upset. It turns away, is repelled, and refuses to give birth. It holds back and carries the burden of what it has inside itself with pain. In fact, within the pregnant one, who is teeming with life, there is a violent fluttering before the beautiful, through which it will be released from the great pain of childbirth which it has . . .
Beauty is the goddess of birth. In her presence the passion and inner fullness of the gift flows forth in confidence and sureness. And it is through love that we reach a deeper perception of the true nature of beauty. In the Phaedrus, Plato has that remarkable passage where he describes how the soul awakens in the presence of beauty and recovers and grows her eternal wings; gravity and finitude can no longer contain her. According to Plato beauty encourages and invites creativity to unfold. When the soul reaches beyond all fragmentation and entanglement God will come to birth in it. Meister Eckhart says that it is of little consequence whether God exists or became incarnate if he does not come to birth in the soul.