Anam Cara

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.

‘W

HEN

N

IGHT

H

OLDS

S

WAY AND THE

F

OREST

I

S

F

REE OF

S

TRANGERS

’ – B

EAUTY

C

OMES

BEAUTY ENJOYS A PROFOUND AND ANCIENT AUTONOMY. TRUE beauty is from elsewhere, a pure gift. It cannot be programmed nor its arrival foreseen. It never falls simply into the old patterns of what is already there nor is it frivolous or burdened with leaden solemnity. Frequently, beauty is playful like dancing sunlight, it cannot be predicted, and in the most unlikely scene or situation can suddenly emerge. This spontaneity and playfulness often subverts our self-importance and throws our plans and intentions into disarray. Without intending it, we find ourselves coming alive with a sense of celebration and delight. The pedestrian sequence of a working day breaks, a new door opens and the heart recognizes the silent majesty of the ordinary. The things we never notice, like health, friends and love, emerge from their subdued presence and stand out in their true radiance as gifts we could never have earned or achieved.