Anam Cara

The world of the senses is intensified with beauty that is meant to recall us to the higher and eternal forms of beauty. The physical thing in itself is not independently beautiful. Its beauty is made to shine through the elegance of its form: ‘In visible things . . . the beautiful thing is essentially symmetrical, patterned. Symmetry itself owes its beauty to a remoter principle.’ The force of invisible beauty infuses the visible object. This is the reason for ugliness: ‘An ugly thing is something that has not been mastered by pattern.’

For Plotinus beauty is never merely external. Beauty is ultimately an elegant, inner luminosity; it is bestowed by the soul: ‘For the soul . . . makes beautiful to the fullness of their capacity all things whatsoever that it grasps and moulds.’ Beauty is not simply surface appearance intended to indulge us or bestow temporary pleasure. Following Plato, Plotinus advocates the cultivation of a sense of beauty; this is a work of the soul, it is the cultivation of virtue and the clarification of the heart. The life-journey can be a journey of ascent to beauty. The longing at the heart of attraction is for union with the Beautiful. Not everything in us is beautiful. We need to undertake the meticulous work of clearance and clarification in order that our inner beauty may shine. The radiance of the Good makes beauty real:

But how are you to see into a virtuous Soul and know its loveliness? Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smooths there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue . . .

R

EVERENCE

: A P

ATHWAY TO

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EAUTY

IN ORDER TO BECOME ATTENTIVE TO BEAUTY, WE NEED TO rediscover the art of reverence. Our world seems to have lost all sense of reverence. We seldom even use the word any more. The notion of reverence is full of riches that we now need desperately. Put simply, it is appropriate that a human being should dwell on this earth with reverence. As children we became aware of the word ‘reverence’ as used to describe the way a person is present in prayer or liturgy. When a priest celebrated the mass with a sense of reverence, you sensed the depth of his presence to the mystery. Though the church was full of people, he was absorbed in something that could not be seen. Ultimately, reverence is respect before mystery. But it is more than an attitude of mind; reverence is also physical – a dignified attention of body showing that sacred is already here. Reverence is not to be reduced to a social posture. Reverence bestows dignity and it is only in the light of dignity that the beauty and mystery of a person will become visible. Reverence is not the stiff pious posture which remains frozen and lacks humour and play. To live with a sense of reverence is not to become a prisoner of a dull piety. Playfulness, humour and even a sense of the anarchic are companions of reverence because they insist on the proper proportion of the human presence in the light of the eternal. Reverence is also the companion of humility. When human hubris intrudes on or manipulates the sacred, the consequence is inevitably humiliation. In contrast, a sense of reverence includes the recognition that one is always in the presence of the sacred. To live with reverence is to live without judgement, prejudice and the saturation of consumerism. The consumerist heart becomes empty and lonesome because it has squandered reverence. As parent, child, lover, prayer or artist – a sense of reverence opens pathways of beauty to surprise us. The earth is full of thresholds where beauty awaits the wonder of our gaze.

2

W

HERE

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OES

B

EAUTY

D

WELL

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HE

A

FFECTION OF THE

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ARTH FOR

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Listen. Put on morning.

Waken into falling light.

W.S. GRAHAM, ‘Listen. Put on Morning’

THE BEAUTY OF THE EARTH IS THE FIRST BEAUTY. MILLIONS OF years before us the earth lived in wild elegance. Landscape is the first-born of creation. Sculpted with huge patience over millennia, landscape has enormous diversity of shape, presence and memory. There is poignancy in beholding the beauty of landscape: often it feels as though it has been waiting for centuries for the recognition and witness of the human eye. In the ninth Duino Elegy, Rilke says:

Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,

bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window . . .

To say them more intensely than the Things themselves

Ever dreamed of existing.