Beauty

"Heat cannot be separated from fire, or beauty from the eternal."

—Dante Alighieri

A little over two years ago my mother died. She had been struggling with cancer, almost continuously, for over ten years. Finally it caught up with her. As we were preparing for the memorial service, my sister and I began sorting through photographs of my mom, some recent, some taken years earlier. One in particular caught our attention. Or perhaps I should say it gripped our hearts. It was a photograph from a trip my mother and father had taken to Hawaii from the early years of their marriage. My mom is wearing a cocktail dress and is clutching a small purse; she looks like she is ready to go out to dinner or to a party. But the most striking thing about the photograph is her radiant smile. Her beauty. My father had always spoken to us of our mother's beauty, how beautiful he found her, right up to the end. Without his saying so explicitly, we knew he meant not simply her outward beauty (which the photograph revealed clearly and which we also had our own experience of) but the beauty of who she was, the beauty of her soul. This was what moved him most about my mother, from the time of their first meeting to her last breath.

Can beauty save the world, as Dostoevsky suggests it can? Or is this an illusion, a naïve idea born of a refusal to reckon honestly with the way time works its ravages on everything? Does it perhaps reveal an inherently destructive myopia, a willingness to promote beauty at the expense of goodness and virtue, or an attachment to an aesthetic vision that sees beauty only in that which is pure, fresh, and unsullied, and an inability to find beauty in anything marked by time or injury or loss? In promoting the saving power of beauty, are we in danger of creating a fetish out of the very thing we believe can save us? This is a very real danger, one whose consequences we witness continuously living in a culture that promotes myriad images of beauty detached from any moral value.

This is not the kind of beauty Dostoevsky had in mind. Nor is it what William Blake envisioned in his great poetic works. As Susanne Sklar argues so convincingly, there is in William Blake's work a vision of beauty so profound and so encompassing that it promises to elevate and enliven our very capacity for life. Attention to beauty, for Blake, is among the highest forms of moral and spiritual engagement. And practicing such attention can help us avoid succumbing to the debilitating and dispiriting power of Ulro—the place of death.

One senses something similar at work in Gregory of Nyssa's reflections on the Song of Songs. Here, as Martin Laird so sensitively argues, beauty emerges through eros and desire, which draw the bride and bridegroom toward one another and toward God. For Gregory, as for so much of the neo-Platonic tradition, eros is endless. The attractive power of the divine—the beauty of God—knows no bounds. So too is our longing for and enjoyment of God's beauty endless.

But where do we look for this beauty? And where do we find it? Two of the essays in this issue argue, albeit, in different ways, that it can be discovered in the world itself. Mary Evelyn Tucker's thoughtful reading of Teilhard de Chardin's work reminds us of the still-astonishing aesthetic-spiritual vision underlying so much of his thought. The great paleontologist-theologian, who had witnessed such destruction of life during World War I, became convinced that the beauty of God could be discerned in the unfolding life of the universe, in the evolutionary process itself. At a moment when we seem almost completely incapable of cherishing and caring for the living world in a way that will ensure its survival into the future, Teilhard's radically incarnational vision of Spirit—his ability to see the world's beauty and intricacy as a reflection of Spirit—stands as...