Beauty: A door to another world

A bright star at the center of NGC 3132, Southern Nebula Ring, viewed by Nasa's Webb Telescope. See in full below.

God is a better everything than we are; therefore, He is also a better artist. That is why nature provides such heartbreaking beauties: sunsets, storms, seas, mountains (Fuji to the Japanese, the Matterhorn to the Swiss). These heartbreaks are usually milder than those brought on by poetry or music, probably because nature is slower, less sudden, and less surprising.

But hearts do leap suddenly into throats when an impossibly glorious vista suddenly appears around a corner or from behind a cloud. This, too, is largely personal, but not wholly: everyone loves stars, seas, and sunsets, and no one gets misty-eyed over worms. (I foresee getting an angry letter from a worm lover and forestall it by admitting that there is indeed a glory even there. I draw the line between art and non-art only where God does, i.e., nowhere.)

For me it is a great crashing wave of the sea that melts and glues my soul to it. (See my The Sea Within.) For many, it is a woman’s face. (This is not an erotic but an aesthetic falling-in-love.) For Dante, it was Beatrice, whom he saw, not as an entity in the world like other entities, but as something like a hole in the world through which the light of Heaven shone. Dante’s door in the world’s walls was shaped like Beatrice. (See Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice, and Mary McDermott Shidler’s The Theology of Romantic Love.) 

What was said of cathedrals above could be said of Beatrice, too, and vice versa. They are not merely things in this world but doors to another. They seem to the lover to be not natives to this world but otherworldly visitors. The Iroquois called the quality such visitors emit orenda. They found it especially in rivers, oceans, stars, trees, and mountains. It is the spiritual sugar that lures us to places we cannot live in but only look at and love. 

The wonder and awe can also come from the discoveries of science, especially astronomy and astrophysics, as well as genetics and cell biology; from the astonishing and often literally unimaginable picture of the universe and the human body and brain that it reveals. Surely the most magnificent work of art of all is the universe itself: endlessly mysterious yet perfect in its order, even in its mathematical harmonies. As Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote: “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.”

Ω From: Doors in the Walls of the World: Signs of Transcendence in the Human Story  by Peter Kreeft.

While prominent when viewed by Nasa's Webb Telescope in near-infrared light, the bright star at the center of NGC 3132, Southern Nebula Ring, plays only a supporting role in sculpting the surrounding nebula. A second star, barely visible at lower left along one of the bright star's diffraction spikes, is the nebula's source. It has ejected at least eight layers of gas and dust over thousands of years. Credit: Nasa, ESA, CSA, STScI

Ω Leave a comment and, if you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified by email when a new post is published.