Anam Cara

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

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