There are moments of sensitivity, in which the mind seems to achieve a stillness outside its regularly frantic twirl. Some flash of beauty stuns it, and for a brief moment we become aware of something shining forth from the otherwise drab moments of reality through which we move. The eye of the soul expands, and we listen to the subtler currents around us, to the stillness and the rustling. The gentle interplay of shadows and color becomes significant, immersive. These moments may make lasting impressions on us, softening us in subtle ways, or they may dissolve without a mark. These encounters with beauty tend to transcend the possibility of analysis. One is more often than not at a loss to identify what it is in particular in one’s experience that gives rise to such salience. The beauty seems to flow from above, through the parts of the whole but not precisely because of them, and one often simultaneously recognizes the ordinariness of what one is experiencing and the intensity of its beauty.
There are, of course, times when we encounter beautiful things, incredible objects of art or architecture, for example, that are of such aesthetic quality as to demand immediate recognition, that call attention to themselves and beckon one to contemplation. Yet when we encounter such objects, the experience of beauty, the deeper sense of openness and longing for something intangible is by no means guaranteed. One may even recognize something as beautiful despite failing to enter into it. There is a sensuality to the appreciation of beauty that can float along the surface, titillated but never challenged, never forced to allow the beauty into oneself as a current, a flow that may wash away the sediment of one’s habitual outlook and reveal the world, and oneself, anew. At the same time, this kind of encounter may occur with the apparently blandest of realities. A face that at other times appears plain becomes radiant; one is suddenly struck by the colors of a flowering bush one passes indifferently every day.
Chekhov describes this in his short story “The Beauties”:
That the girl was strikingly beautiful neither I nor the others gazing at her could doubt.
Were one to describe her appearance item by item, as is common practice, then the only truly lovely feature was her thick, fair, undulating hair—loose on her shoulders and held back on her head by a dark ribbon. All her other features were either irregular or very ordinary. Her eyes were screwed up, either as a flirtatious mannerism or through short-sightedness, her nose was faintly restroussé, her mouth was small, her profile was feeble and insipid, her shoulders were narrow for her age. And yet the girl produced the impression of true loveliness. . . . Indeed, had this young woman’s up-tilted nose been replaced by another. . . I fancy her face would have lost all its charm. (Translated by Ronald Hingley)
Plotinus tells us that the beauty of a thing is its form, the very fact of its being what it is. To the extent that something is at all and manifests its own particular self without distortion, it is beautiful. Ugliness, then, is not a positive quality at all, but rather the obfuscation of what is intrinsically beautiful; it is deformity, perversion, degradation. What one experiences in these moments is thus not the perfect harmonization of a thing’s elements, not a subjective overlay, nor even merely the result of a certain kind of relationship between the viewer and the viewed, but the very thing itself revealed in limpidity.
When we see a beautiful piece of art, we are encountering the pristine embodiment of an idea held by the mind of the artist, an idea that was itself full of the pristine fullness of reality manifested in its own particular essence. We see the form, the idea, revealed before us. So, too, when we see the beauty of a person, or a sound, or a constellation—we are seeing it for what it truly is, peering through the haze of obscurity that separates us from its inner being, its inner idea, in the common moments of wakeful consciousness. Indeed, we realize that we are, for the most part, asleep, and in this sleep we imagine that things are opaque. But they are not; each shines forth itself and, if we are sensitive to it, will unfold yet greater disclosures of its beauty. These disclosures are often hidden behind the accretions of deformity, of a failure of the form to come entirely to the fore without some hitch, some crack or twist keeping it limp. This is compounded by our own blindness, the deformity of our vision. With our dull eyes, we see only the grossest of surfaces, only the cracks and the rust, and we are indifferent to them. Only the truly exquisite can pique our interests, and even then often only momentarily, superficially. For the keen eye, however, that splendor is shining forth through all things.
As Chekhov describes, however, this encounter is not precisely one of pleasure. It can, in fact, be melancholic to a startling degree; beauty seems to cast a shadow upon the twisted things of the commonplace world and especially upon what is twisted in oneself:
A guard stood on the small open platform between our carriage and the next. Resting his elbows on the railing, he was gazing towards the girl, and his flabby, disagreeably beefy face, exhausted by sleepless nights and the train’s jostling, expressed ecstasy combined with the most profound sorrow, as if he could see his own youth, his own happiness, his sobriety, his purity, his wife, his children reflected in the girl. He seemed to be repenting his sins, and to be conscious with every fibre of his being that the girl was not his, and that for him—prematurely aged, clumsy, fat-visaged—the happiness of an ordinary human being and train passenger was as far away as heaven. (Translated by Ronald Hingley)
In such moments, beauty reveals to us the distance between itself and our own broken existence. For in each particular beautiful thing shines the beauty of Being, of the God who is the source of all Being, the fountainhead of beauty. Reflected in the beauty of the other, then, one sees the beauty that one could become if not for the weights of perversion that have prevented it. Indeed, one sees the very foundation of one’s own being and knows the measure of one’s lack. The tragedy of not being a saint, as Léon Bloy put it, is felt in all its density. This is, in fact, the judgment of God, for beauty is a revelation of God, a theophany, and in that revelation, that tearing of the veil, one is dispossessed of ignorance and recognizes every twist and shadow of oneself. This creates sadness; it births grief, but it should not breed despair. For though it reveals one’s coarseness, it may set the foundation of a new beginning. It is already in a sense a purification, for the eyes have been opened, and this is a step into the light that can only be achieved by the breaking down of some sickness that previously clouded the vision.
In such moments, we see with clarity that the abyss that appears to separate us from the things around us, making the world opaque and coarse, is as much our own blindness and coarseness as it is the fallenness of the world beyond us. We are encased within our own wretchedness, and so we see only the outward surfaces of things, just as a person looking through a dirtied window sees only obscurity. If we refine ourselves, if we sharpen our vision, casting the motes from our eyes, we will see behind the apparent lack of the encountered cosmos and know the fullness of being that shines forth from the depths; we will perceive the divine in all, Christ in the dirtiest beggar. One’s capacity to see the beautiful, to rightly judge the world as a theophany, is a direct measure of one’s own purity, the clarity with which the beauty that springs up at one’s deepest foundations is preserved. For whereof one judges, thereof shall he be judged.