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The church fathers have said some wonderful things about divine beauty.
Excerpt from:
Purchase "Contemplating the Trinity" by Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM Cap. Translated by Marsha Daigle-Williamson, PhD
1. Trinitarian Beauty
Its loftiest celebration comes from Dionysius the Aeropagite when he speaks of the divine names:
God, who is beautiful beyond being, is said to be Beauty—for it gives Beauty from itself in a manner appropriate to each… . [He is] the productive cause which makes and conserves the whole by its love of the beauty which is proper for each being; the final cause—for all beings merge for the sake of the beautiful; the paradigmatic cause [for] all are determined according to it.[1]
This eulogy to beauty has a serious limitation, however. It deals with the beauty of God’s essence and not with God’s personal beauty. Dionysius says it explicitly: the attribute of beauty, like those of goodness and wisdom, expresses the relationship between God and the creation (with God as the cause and transcendent model of every kind of beauty). In the Platonic tradition it applies, therefore, to divinity in general, not to the individual Persons; it is divine beauty but not exactly trinitarian beauty.
Let us take a further step and speak of trinitarian beauty in the strict sense. If God is beautiful, he must be so for someone who is eternal just as he is. Just as there is no music where there is no ear to hear it, so too there is no beauty where there is no eye to admire it. But for whom would God be beautiful if there were no Trinity? For creatures? In that case he would be beautiful only from the time the world began to exist, not to mention the fact that no creature is capable of fully perceiving divine beauty that is infinite and transcendent.
Beauty is an attribute of a person, even more than it is of nature. The divine Persons are beautiful. The Father is beautiful to the Son, as the Son is beautiful to the Father, who finds in the Son “all his pleasure.” In God there is a fatherly beauty and a filial beauty. The same must be said of the Breath they share, who is the Spirit. The Son is presented to us in Scripture in eternal contemplation of the beauty (the “glory”) of the Father, and “He reflects the glory of God” (Hebrews 1:3).
In the Trinity God loves himself without any shadow of egotism and admires himself without any shadow of narcissism.
Trinitarian beauty is a wide area to explore. It is, like the Persons themselves, a beauty of relationship. It consists in beautiful relationships: it is the synthesis between unity and diversity. The least inadequate images of this beauty are from music and dance. In musical harmony every note derives its beauty from its relationship to the other notes. When a man and woman dance together, every movement derives its beauty through each partner’s coordination with the movement of the other. Beauty is the three divine Persons facing each other from the beginning with a joyful and silent gaze.
This is the beauty that Rublëv succeeded in portraying in his famous icon of the Trinity: a beauty that emanates from the very relationship of each Person to the other, from the meeting of their gazes and the recollection of their movements. It is a beauty of relationship that is not static but dynamic. One can reproduce each of the three figures of the icon separately (which is sometimes done), but that breaks the enchantment and loses the power of the whole.
Beauty has always been something that is impossible to define. One can say about beauty what Augustine said about time: “What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who asks me, I do not know.”[2] Perhaps we can understand something more about it if we begin with its original form in the Trinity as a beauty of relationship. Every Christian presentation about God should have a trinitarian character; in this regard there is still much to be done.
2. “Beauty is Vain”[3]
Only now can we begin to consider divine beauty in relationship to the world as Dionysius did in his text. He called the Trinity “Wise and Beautiful” because of whom all beings “are filled with every divine harmony and sacred good [beautiful] form.”[4]
To say that God is the author of beauty not only means that he created all the beautiful things in the world but that he also created the very sense of beauty, putting a love for it and a capacity to recognize it in the hearts of human beings, which we call the aesthetic sense. He wanted beauty (together with goodness) to be a ladder on which we ascend to him, the “one who attracts,” the magnet.
But if this is the case, how does beauty so often lead to destruction, and why do we read such things in Scripture as “beauty is vain” (Proverbs 31:30), “beauty has deceived you” (Daniel 13:5), and “your heart was proud because of your beauty” (Ezekiel 28:17)?
That is the issue I want to focus on in this meditation. I do not want to deal with the theme of beauty from the essential and metaphysical point of view—what beauty is in itself, what its relationship to truth and goodness is—but from an existential point of view. In other words, I would like to reflect on our experience of beauty. I would also like to highlight a very specific and limited aspect of that experience: not the beauty of seas and sunsets but of the human body, male and female. This is the beauty that generates eros, one of the great forces that moves the world—and perhaps the most powerful. The beauty of seas and sunsets is not erotic, but the beauty of the body is, with all that we know it entails. This is true whether in life or art. Even in response to art, people visiting the Uffizi Gallery in Florence react differently to a landscape or a still life than to Sandro Botticelli’s Venus.
To the extent in which advertising or entertainment reflect the spirit, the tastes, and the expectations of an age (and to a large extent they do), this type of beauty that I referred to as erotic seems to be the most sought-after value, the great “object of worship” in affluent societies. To prove that, we only need to think of fashion shows, calendars of nudes, and the role assigned to women in the world of entertainment and advertising. Modern man “doubts the truth, resists the good, but is fascinated by beauty.”[5]
This is a new challenge for believers. It is first of all a human problem, whose solution will determine the very future of culture and life.
For us at this time, however, it is above all a spiritual problem: how do we live the beatitude about purity of heart that the gospel presents to all believers in an environment so saturated with sensuality? External defenses used in the past no longer work: cloisters, religious habits, and rules… . Modern media have bypassed all these defenses and assault us outside and inside our homes. We need to strengthen our internal defenses, our strong personal convictions founded on God’s word and on right reason.
This is also a problem for proclamation. How do we evangelize by means of beauty a world that has such a debased idea of it?
3. The Ambiguity of Beauty
The words of the Idiot, one of Dostoevsky’s favorite characters, are well known and often repeated: “Beauty will save the world”; however, that affirmation is followed by a question: “What kind of beauty will save the world?”[6] It is clear—for him as well—that not every beautiful thing will save the world. There is a beauty that can save the world, and a beauty that can lead it to perdition.
“God,” writes Paul Evdokimov, “is not the only one who ‘clothes himself in beauty.’ Evil imitates him in this respect and thus makes beauty a profoundly ambiguous quality.”[7] There has been an evolution in this regard from the medieval to the modern era. In the Middle Ages, it was assumed that the good was beautiful and evil was ugly, but that is no longer the case. The devil, who was represented in figurative arts and poetry (Dante!) as grotesque and monstrous, began at a certain point to be represented as beautiful or at least as melancholic and poetic. Some painters (for example, Lorenzo Lotto in a painting in the Loreto Museum in central Italy) depict the devil as a very handsome youth, more like “Lucifer,” a luminous star, than as “an angel of darkness.” In poetry, as well, starting with John Milton, the devil takes on an aspect of fallen beauty. Beauty is no longer an exclusive attribute of the good.
One sign of the ambiguity about beauty is that we find in modern culture, along with its exaltation, an explicit refusal of beauty, a real “insult to beauty,” so much so that we can speak of the death of beauty as we did in the past about the death of God. Since those in the past who expressed themselves about beauty were almost exclusively men, the disdain for beauty was transferred to a disdain for woman. In the works of the fathers of modern so-called poetry we find such terrible verses as “O sweet merciful Woman—but a heap of entrails… .”[8]
In a painting an artist depicts monstrous birds rushing toward a female body as if it were a corpse. Someone has described some of the famous women of abstract art as “corpses of beauty.”[9]
It is beauty itself (and not just that of woman) that becomes “demystified” and violated in this way. The beginning of a collection of poems by Arthur Rimbaud is famous: “One night I settled Beauty on my knee and found her bitter.—And I insulted her.”[10] In art this attitude leads to the controversial depiction of anti-aesthetic objects like urinals and other similar things that have ended up in some museums.
What causes this ambiguity? The traditional answer is “sin.” But according to the biblical account, the ambiguity of beauty was not only the effect of sin but also its cause. Eve was seduced precisely by the beauty of the forbidden fruit, whatever the fruit may have signified. Eve saw that the fruit was “a delight to the eyes” (Genesis 3:6). It was aesthetically beautiful. People would not turn away from God if they were not attracted to created things. There are two elements present in every sin: a turning from God and a turning to creatures or created things (aversio a Deo et conversio ad creaturas), and the latter psychologically precedes the former.
Thus, there is an anterior cause to sin itself. The ambiguity of beauty finds its roots in the composite nature of human beings, who have both a material and an immaterial element, something that draws them to multiplicity and something that inclines them instead to unity. It is the same God who created both together in a profound “substantial” unity, because with the exercise of free will guided by the word of God, people choose the direction in which they will develop, i.e., whether “upward” toward that which is “above” them or “downward” toward that which is “below” them, toward unity or multiplicity.
The dignity of human beings and the privileged exercise of their freedom consist precisely in this capacity for self-determination. In creating a human being free, writes a Renaissance philosopher, it is as though God says,
I have placed thee at the center of the world, that from there thou mayest more conveniently look around and see whatsoever is in the world. Neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal have We made thee. Thou, like a judge appointed for being honorable, art the molder and maker of thyself; thou mayest sculpt thyself into whatever shape thou dost prefer. Thou canst grow downward into the lower nature which are brutes. Thou canst again grow upward from thy soul’s reason into the higher natures which are divine.[11]
This explains the struggle between flesh and the Spirit as well as the dramatic element that characterizes the existence of human beings in the world and their relationship to beauty.
In the 1977 earthquake in Assisi, a fresco by Giovanni Cimabue in the dome of the upper basilica was destroyed and shattered into thousands of miniscule colored fragments. There is a painstaking process underway now to reassemble those pieces to reconstruct the original fresco. This is a depiction of what happens when we shift from the uncreated Beauty of God to the multiplicity of beautiful things in the world. The beauty that we experience in the world is fragmented.
Sin begins, with respect to beauty, when one forgets the whole and becomes attached to the fragment. To return to the analogy, if someone finds a fragment and steals or destroys it instead of making it part of the reconstruction of the original fresco, that endangers the whole project. When people do not relate to created beauty as a springboard to lift themselves up to incorruptible Beauty with praise and desire but instead rush toward it, then they make the momentary pleasure an end in itself, “and upon the shapely things you have made I rushed headlong, I, misshapen, … [to] those things which would have no being were they not in you.”[12]
Created beauty becomes then the tomb instead of the occasion of exercising freedom, because, as we know, it enslaves people. To possess and enjoy that beauty, some people do exactly what others do in order to get drugs: steal, kill, or kill themselves. In crimes of passion we take into account the extenuating circumstances precisely because we realize that the person is operating with reduced freedom. Disordered love of beauty leads to “beastly conduct,” because it deprives people of the very things that make them “human”—reason and freedom.
Literature offers us famous symbols of these two kinds of feminine beauty—beauty that elevates and beauty that destroys—in Dante’s Beatrice and Homer’s Helen. The ambiguity of beauty also finds memorable expression in the Bible. On the one hand, there is the beauty in the Song of Songs of the two lovers trying to outdo each other in celebrating one another; on the other hand, there is the beauty of a woman that drew David into adultery and crime (see 2 Samuel 11:2). “Beauty has deceived you,” says Daniel to one of the two elders who wanted the chaste Susanna put to death (see Daniel 13:56).
Stopping at created beauty is seen by the Bible as the very essence of idolatry, insofar as it puts the creature in the place of the Creator:
For all men who were ignorant of God were foolish by nature;
and they were unable from the good things that are seen to know him who exists,
nor did they recognize the craftsman while paying heed to his works; …
If through delight in the beauty of these things men assumed them to be gods,
let them know how much better than these is their Lord,
for the author of beauty created them.
(Wisdom 13:1-3; see Romans 1:20-23)
The downward move from the level of spiritual beauty to purely material beauty also tends to be reflected within the creature, and in particular, the woman. The representation of female beauty does not usually focus on the face in which the feelings and thoughts—in a word, the soul—of the woman are so clearly manifested, but focuses instead on other parts of the body, always the same parts. There are no more “Mona Lisa’s” in art, and at this point it seems doubtful that there will be any in the future.
Feminine beauty is entirely reduced to a means of seduction (sex appeal), to the grave detriment of women themselves, who end up being seen only in relationship to men as objects and not as persons.
4. Christ Has Redeemed Beauty
St. Paul wrote, “the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; … the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8:20-21).
We could substitute the word “beauty” for “creation” in this text without changing the meaning of this affirmation in any way: “Beauty has been subjected to futility and waits to be set free.” To save the world, beauty itself first needs to be redeemed. The redemption of Christ does, in fact, extend to beauty. Let us see how that happened.
A contrast between two statements about Christ is quite striking. On the one hand, he is seen as “the fairest of the sons of men” (Psalm 45:2), and “he reflects the glory of God” (Hebrews 1:3). On the other hand, the words of the Fourth Servant Song are applied to him in his passion: “He had no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him… . [He was] as one from whom men hide their faces” (Isaiah 53:2-3).
The explanation of this contrast is simple: Jesus redeemed beauty by depriving himself of it out of love. “Because he took flesh, he took, as it were, your hideousness, that is, your mortality, that he might adapt himself to you and correspond to you and arouse you to loving the beauty within… . ‘He did not have attractiveness or comeliness’ [cf. Isaiah 53:2], in order that he might give you attractiveness and comeliness.”[13]
To understand this paradox we need to go back to the principle that Paul formulated at the beginning of 1 Corinthians: “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe” (1:21).
Applied to beauty, this means that since man is not capable of lifting himself up to the beauty of the Creator through the beauty of creatures, God changed his method, so to speak, and decided to reveal his beauty through the ignominy and the deformity of the cross and suffering, thus revealing his beauty through its opposite (sub contraria specie), as Luther might say. The attainment of beauty now comes about through the paschal mystery of death and resurrection.
The model and source of redeemed beauty is “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). Beauty is no longer the abstract “splendor of truth,”[14] as Plato defined it, but is, concretely, the splendor of Christ (even if the two coincide since he himself is the Truth). Even Beauty was incarnated!
What differentiates this redeemed beauty from every other type of beauty, including bodily beauty? It is that this beauty comes from within, that it has its expression—but not its origin—in the body. The human body becomes the “sacrament” of beauty, i.e., its sign, its manifestation, its transparent expression, but not its ultimate source. It is not an opaque screen on which the light shines, but a window that lets light through.
It sometimes happens that the faces of contemplative nuns bring this mystery closer to us. We see nothing except faces and eyes, often looking down, yet the exclamation most often heard from those who have had such an encounter for the first time is “What faces! What light! What beauty!” We can say of them what Paul Claudel said about a young girl in one of his plays: “Other people’s eyes absorb light; yours radiate it.”[15] It is above all in the faces of children (at least those who have been fortunate enough to grow up in a healthy environment) that we see this beauty that emanates from innocence and purity of heart.
5. Participating in the Redemption of Beauty
How can we actively participate in this redemption of beauty? Christ, as I said, has redeemed beauty in the paschal mystery through its opposite, allowing himself to be stripped of every beauty. He has proclaimed that there is something superior to the very love of beauty, and it is the beauty of love!
What does all this mean for us? Should we renounce seeking and enjoying created beauty in this world, and most of all the beauty of the human body, as we await the transfiguration of our bodies in the final resurrection? No, created beauty is meant to embellish this life and not the future life, which will have its own beauty. A text from Vatican II speaks of the need for all human acts and values to “be purified and perfected by the power of Christ’s cross,” and concludes,
For, redeemed by Christ and made a new creature in the Holy Spirit, man is able to love the things themselves created by God, and ought to do so. He can receive them from God, and respect and reverence them as flowing constantly from the hand of God. Grateful to his Benefactor for these creatures, using and enjoying them in detachment and liberty of spirit, man is led forward into a true possession of the world, as having nothing, yet possessing all things. [See 2 Corinthians 6:10][16]
Francis of Assisi is the most successful role model of this way of relating to creation. The saint of radical poverty is also the one who sang the beauty of creation in the most rapturous way. In his “Canticle,” Brother Sun is “beautiful”; the stars are “precious and beautiful”; Brother Fire is “beautiful.”[17] The most extraordinary thing is that Francis sang of the beauty of creatures when he could no longer see them, since by then he was almost blind, and the very light of the sun caused unspeakable pain to his eyes. Having renounced everything, he was able to rejoice in everything.
We can, then, enjoy created beauty if we also accept the cross that redeems it. And the cross of beauty does not entail some kind of strange suffering: it is love, and all that love requires is faithfulness, respect for others, submission to God, and the meaning of life, in other words, sacrifice and renunciation.
The redemption of beauty inevitably happens through a choice now. Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher, said that there are three orders or categories of greatness: the order of bodies and material things, the order of intelligence and genius, and the order of holiness. Strength, physical beauty, and material wealth belong to the first order; genius, science, and art belong to the second; goodness, holiness, and grace belong to the third. (An analogous distinction occurs with Kierkegaard’s three stages: aesthetic, philosophical, and religious.)
Between each of these three orders and the next one there is a qualitative difference that is almost infinite. The fact that a genius is rich or poor, beautiful or ugly, does not add or subtract anything because that person’s greatness is on a different and superior level. (The poetry of Giacomo Leopardi is very beautiful even if his appearance was pitiable.) In the same way, the fact that a saint is strong or weak, rich or poor, highly intelligent or illiterate, does not add or subtract anything because that person’s greatness is on a different and infinitely superior plane.[18]
Everything that Pascal says of greatness in general can also be said of beauty. There are three categories of beauty: physical or bodily beauty, intellectual and artistic beauty, and spiritual beauty. There is a large gap between each category. The beauty of the third category has a name that says it all: “grace.” This word, which is a synonym for beauty, appeal, fascination, is also the word that applies to the interior beauty of the soul. (The root for “grace,” charis, is the same one from which the Italian carme, the French charme, and English “charm” derive.)
“God’s better beauty, grace,” said one poet.[19] Nothing in the world—whether a spectacle of nature or a work of art—speaks to us so directly of divine beauty as grace does; it is not just a pale reflection of, but a direct “participation” in that beauty. St. Teresa of Avila once saw the splendor of a soul in grace and compares it to a diamond that reflects light in every direction,[20] and St. Catherine of Siena says, “If you could see the beauty of a rational soul … there is nothing in this world that can compare with such beauty.”[21]
The move from one category of beauty to the next-higher one—from external beauty to internal beauty and then to the transcendent beauty of grace—does not occur in a spontaneous and easy way. It requires an ascesis (“discipline”) and, with regard to beauty in particular, an asceticism of the eyes. Ludwig Feuerbach said that people are what they eat; in our current culture wholly dominated by images, perhaps we need to say that people are what they look at.
St. Augustine was not embarrassed to reveal the struggle he had with this issue, and it occurred not in his youth but when he was a bishop. He describes the innumerable lusts of the eyes that are multiplied through the things that people produce (clothes, items, pictures, sculptures) and adds, “I say all these things and recognize their truth, yet still I snag my steps on these beautiful objects… . I am miserably caught, but you mercifully extricate me, sometimes without my being aware of it, when I am only lightly entangled, but sometimes painfully because I am already stuck fast.”[22]
I do not know what Augustine would say if he were alive today after the invention of films, television, magazines, and the Internet! Jesus said, “If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away” (Matthew 5:29). And how can the eye sin except because of what it looks at?
More important, however, than closing one’s eyes to false beauty is opening them to true beauty: contemplating Christ crucified and risen. St. John Climacus writes, “A chaste man is someone who has driven out bodily love by means of divine love, who has used heavenly fire to quench the fires of the flesh,”[23] that is, the attraction to created things is driven out by attraction to Christ.
When we feel ourselves wounded by images of “carnal” beauty, let us do what the Israelites did in the desert. When they were bitten by poisonous snakes, if they quickly ran to look at the serpent lifted up by Moses they were healed (see Numbers 21:4-9). We too need to run, without losing time wanting to know why or how at our age … (which only gives time for the poison to spread); we need to run to a crucifix and look at it with faith (see John 3:14-15). The image of Christ and, even more so, the host that contains him in the sacrament also exercise their sanctifying power simply through sight, if our looking is accompanied by faith. Let the healing enter where the wound entered—through the eyes!
A different mode, but a very important one, of participating in the paschal mystery of the redemption of beauty is, lastly, to turn our attention to those who, like Christ in his passion, “have no form or comeliness that we should look at them”—the poor, the crucified, the rejected of our day. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, holding in her arms, with infinite tenderness, a sick child or a dying person who was abandoned, took part—despite all her wrinkles—in this redeemed beauty that also redeems. It will not be, I repeat, the love of beauty that will save the world but the beauty of love.
Our cities are full of ads for beauty treatments. I want to advertise one too. The prescription is not mine but comes from my friend Augustine: a person becomes beautiful by loving God. An ugly man does not become handsome because he loves a beautiful woman, but what is impossible on a physical level is possible on a spiritual level: “Our soul, my brothers, is hideous because of iniquity; by loving God it is made beautiful… . The more love increases in you, the more beauty increases.”[24] A person becomes what he or she loves!
6. Bearing Witness to Beauty
I said at the outset that the problem of beauty is important not only for our spiritual lives but also with regard to the proclamation of the gospel. How do we evangelize through beauty?
Since Paul’s time, two somewhat opposite methods have been laid out. The first, recasting what the apostle says about wisdom, could be formulated this way: “Today people seek beauty, but we preach Christ crucified who has neither splendor nor beauty” (see 1 Corinthians 1:22-23).
The second way, again paraphrasing the apostle, could be said this way: “Among the lovers of beauty, we too speak of beauty, although it is not a beauty of this world but a divine beauty, which has remained hidden and which God decreed before the ages for our glorification” (see 1 Corinthians 2:6-7).
In the history of the church we see this dialectic method (sic et non, “yes and no”) faithfully reproduced in relating to the worldly values of wisdom and beauty. Some, starting with Tertullian (“What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?”[25]), have chosen to bear witness to a radical detachment from worldly beauty corrupted by sin. They make no concession to the aesthetic sense but choose poverty and a radical divestment of everything, including the extreme cases of ascetics who persisted in destroying the signs of physical beauty in themselves so as to focus on interior beauty, and of people who live as “Fools for Christ” (radical Christians in the Russian tradition). Others, by contrast, have chosen to bear witness to divine beauty through its reflections in creation, which has resulted in all the great flowering of Christian art, the splendor of liturgies, of architecture, and of music.
It is important that both approaches are encouraged in the church, since each is the necessary corrective for the other. But if we had to choose one of the two approaches, I think that it would be important today to insist—as in every other area—on dialogue more than on the contrast, i.e., presenting the image of true beauty to the world more than denouncing false beauty.
The Trinity with whom we began our meditation offers us the richest indicator about how to bear witness to true beauty. Trinitarian beauty is the beauty of relationship. We should, therefore, strive to make our relationships beautiful: male-female relationships (inside and outside of marriage), relationships among friends, among clergy and lay people in the church, among members of a religious community, between superiors and those under them, between young and old. What makes a relationship beautiful—taught to us once again by the trinitarian model—is solely and only love.
Consecrated people have a special responsibility in this regard. They need to bear witness in today’s world that religious and spiritual life in general is not primarily a renunciation of, or even worse, a disdain for this world but a prophetic proclamation of the “new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13). And with righteousness, beauty!
1. See Psuedo-Dionysius Areopagite, The Divine Names, IV, 7, in The Divine Names and Mystical Theology, trans. and intro. by John D. Jones (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1980), pp. 139–40. He considers the word “beauty” (kalos) to be a derivation of “to call” (kaleo) insofar as it is something that beckons, that draws.
2. Augustine, Confessions, XI, 14, vol. 1, trans. by Maria Boulding, OSB, in The Works of St. Augustine, ed. John E. Rotelle, OSA (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997), p. 295.
3. I developed some of the reflections that follow in a book coauthored with Cardinal Carlo Martini, St. Francis and the Cross: Reflections on Suffering, Weakness and Joy ([Ann Arbor, MI: Servant, n.d.], pp. 23–47). I would like to share them here with a larger audience, since that other book was meant especially for priests.
4. Psuedo-Dionysius Aeropagite, Divine Names, I, 4, p. 111.
5. Cardinal Godfried Danneels, in his meditation to the extraordinary Consistory, May 2001.
6. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, III, 5, trans. by Henry and Olga Carlisle (New York: The New American Library, 199), p. 402.
7. Paul Evdokimov, The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty, trans. by Fr. Steven Bigham (Redondo Beach, CA: Oakwood Publications, 1990), p. 38.
8. Arthur Rimbaud, “Sisters of Charity” [“Soeurs de charité”], in Rimbaud Complete, trans. and intro. by Wyatt Mason (New York: Modern Library, 2002), p. 70; cf. also Charles Baudelaire, “The Vampire,” trans. by George Dillon, in The Flowers of Evil [Les fleurs du mal] (Franklin Center, PA: The Franklin Library, 1977), pp. 50–51.
9. Fr. Serge Bulgakov, qtd. in Evdokimov, p. 88.
10. “Un soir, j’ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux.—Et je l’ai trouvée amère.—Et je l’ai injuriée.” Arthur Rimbaud, “A Season in Hell” [“Une saison en enfer”], Arthur Rimbaud: Selected Poems and Letters, trans. by Jeremy Harding and John Sturrock (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 139.
11. Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, intro. by Paul J. W. Miller, trans. by Charles Glenn Wallis (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965), p. 5.
12. Augustine, Confessions, X, 27, p. 262.
13. St. Augustine, Tractates on the First Epistle of John, 9, 9, trans. by John W. Rettig, vol. 92 in The Fathers of the Church (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995), pp. 258–59.
14. Plato, The Republic, trans. by Richard W. Sterling and William C. Scott (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1966), p. 198.
15. Paul Claudel, The Humiliation of the Father [Le père humilié], Act I, scene 1, in Three Plays, trans. by John Heard (Boston: John W. Luce Co., 1945), p. 155.
16. Gaudium et spes [Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World], 37, in The Documents of Vatican II, gen. ed. Walter M. Abbott, SJ, intro. by Cardinal Lawrence Shehan, trans. by Joseph Gallagher (New York: Herder and Herder Association Press, 1966), p. 235.
17. Francis of Assisi, “The Canticle of Brother Sun,” in Frances and Clare: The Complete Works, pref. by John Vaughn, OFM, trans and intro. by Regis J. Armstrong, OFM CAP, and Ignatius C. Brady, OFM (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), pp. 38–39.
18. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 793, intro. by T. S. Eliot (Franklin, PA: The Franklin Library, 1979), pp. 237–38.
19. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “To What Serves Mortal Beauty?” in The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 4th ed., ed. by W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 98.
20. See Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life, 40, 5, in The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, vol. 1, trans. by Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD, and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD (Washington DC: ICS Publications, 1976), p. 278.
21. Raymond of Capua, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, trans. by George Lamb (New York: P. J. Kenedy, 1960), p. 138.
22. St. Augustine, Confessions, X, 34, p. 272.
23. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 15, trans. by Kallistos Ware, trans. by Colm Luibheid and Norman Russel (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), p. 171.
24. St. Augustine, Tractates on the First Epistle of John, 9, 9, pp. 257–58.
25. From Tertullian, De praescriptione haereticorum [The Prescription Against Heretics], VII, 9.