beauty & wisdom

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"Plato once remarked that if wisdom were visible, the whole world would fall madly in love with it. Although wisdom is not visible, beauty is. And this is why, for Plato and many other philosophers, in loving beauty, people are moving in the direction of wisdom. The important implication here is that we human beings simply cannot do without beauty . . . If beauty will save the world, it is because beauty presupposes love and points in the direction of wisdom." (Donald DeMarco) Read more here.
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"The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things--the beauty, the memory of our own past--are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of the a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited." (C.S. Lewis)
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Thinking about the difference between an ascetic life and a life intentionally surrounded by beauty. So often the gospels seem to encourage a life of an asceticism, of giving up everything, of stark plainness. But then--how does this seemingly innate longing for beauty fit in? And I always come back to the woman with the expensive perfume. And these words of his: "She has done a beautiful thing to me . . . " (But then there are his words to the Rich Young Man.)
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Considering G.M. Hopkins' struggles between his monastic life as a priest and his work as a poet, I think I might have more in common with him than just a birth date.
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whispered prayers,
Jessina
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