The World will be Saved by Beauty

LONDON - Allah jamil ‘God is Beautiful’. A saying, itself very beautiful, of the Prophet Muhammad. Foreshadowed by a prayer of St. Augustine of Hippo: “Too late have I known you, O Beauty, so ancient and yet so new,” sighs the Saint, lamenting the lateness of his conversion. In similar vein, St. Anselm, philosopher and Archbishop of Canterbury, writes: “I yearn after thy Beauty, Lord Jesus Christ.”

In a world increasingly marred and scarred by ugliness – ugly deeds, ugly noises, ugly people – beauty feels almost like an imperative. An exalted moral value, along with goodness, truth, justice and peace. Surprising? Blame it all on the English language, folks! ‘A dumb blonde’, the phrase runs, suggesting a cleavage between a girl’s looks and brains. And ‘a handsome youth’ and ‘a wicked youth’ are not incompatible statements, when predicated of the same youngster. The Italian language, conversely, allows for an intrinsic nexus between beauty and goodness. Bello can mean both. ‘Una bella azione’, a fine deed. An action that is both good and beautiful.

What might be an example of una brutta azione, an ugly action, then? The indiscriminate slaughter of the innocent fits the bill. Take our London’s tragic 7/7. The body parts strewn across the road. Human flesh and bones littering the walls. People running with blood all over them. The awful screams of pain. The thick, black smoke of the explosion…some of which I glimpsed in person last Thursday, as I arrived on the scene shortly after. The palpable ugliness of the whole bloody deed hit me like another, invisible bomb. ‘Man is just another piece of meat’, I recalled painter Francis Bacon affirming. Poor Francis, what a cop-out! What a mega-category-mistake! At last, I understood why. Human beings are meat only for the perverted likes of Hannibal the Cannibal. It is when the human body – the temple of the Holy Spirit – is so horribly outraged that one might see them in that hideously reductive, ugly, slaughterhouse way.

Of course, innocent people have been mangled and massacred elsewhere. The people of Baghdad, Belgrade, Kabul, New York, Madrid et al. have suffered bigger carnages. Such violence ultimately must be seen as deeply anti-human. Tough-minded realpolitikers have scoffed at the pacifism of the Sermon on the Mount. ‘Turn the other cheek’ is sissy, they sneered. How obtuse. They have missed the point. Jesus’ beautiful teaching here is exquisitely eschatological. It embodies man’s highest aspirations, the final goal and realization of a transformed humanity. Jesus does not describe the way fallen human beings behave – he prescribes how they eventually must be. His exemplary ethics is one all rational beings should work towards, beginning here and now. Decent people everywhere, I submit, are revolted by the ugliness of violence. They instinctively realize it’s as much an offence to the Beauty and Goodness of God as African poverty or AIDS epidemics.

But how can God himself be beautiful? If He hasn’t got a physical body….

Here a woman comes to my rescue. (Toujours cherchez la femme.) A prophetess. A certain Diotima. One who once instructed Socrates, the wisest man of ancient Hellas. Read all about her in Plato’s Symposium. (Yeah. The priest confesses it. He is a closet, devout Platonist.) Eros or Love is being discussed. Eros – the yearning after the good and the beautiful – is the link between the sensible and the eternal world. Beauty of soul is higher than beauty of body. And Beauty in itself is something divine, unchangeable. “It neither comes into being nor passes away; neither waxes nor wanes,” says Diotima. The seeker after the Beautiful is like a person on a moving staircase: from the lower level of earthly drives and desires, he ascends to the upper regions where he “sees Beauty in its essence, pure and unalloyed…a Divine Beauty existing by itself and alone….”

The Beatific Vision is what the prophetess is hinting at. An unhindered, immediate, direct vision of God. Words fall short of conveying it, sure. But, if you are a mystic, your eyes will sparkle with insight. And even a psychologist like bad Dr. Freud had contended that the erotic impulse is capable of being sublimated and directed towards higher, ethical pursuits. In Holy Writ too we discover bridges between the two levels. Writers like St. Bernard of Clairvaux have interpreted the Song of Song, an erotic Hebrew love-song, as symbolical of Christ’s love for His Church. In the Old Testament Book of Hosea, God is a lover pursuing His beloved. Likewise, in The Interpreter of Desire, Ibn Arabi, a Sufi fountainhead, allegorizes his passionate love for a Byzantine princess. Celaluddin Rumi so sang his infatuation for Shams al-Tabrizi…and so on.

Some may wonder, though, about Osama Bin Laden. He has a soulful, handsome, spiritual face. “Looks like Christ”, an Ishmaili lady friend once observed. “But he isn’t,” responded I. Of course, in Christianity there is a tradition of the Devil himself being originally stunningly beautiful. The most handsome of all fallen angels. Lucifer, the Light-Bringer. Hence the need to distinguish between inner and outer beauty. And what’s most important, the actions. I recall the photo of one of the 9/11 hijackers, a young Saudi called Ahmed Al-Nami. Ravishingly good-looking lad. Yet, what an ugly deed did he and his accomplices perform! Nihilists and anarchists of all stripes have being dithyrambic about ‘the beauty of pan-destruction’ but it ill-behaves a putative follower of the Creator to follow suit. Besides, good looks are transient, whereas the beauty of a good deed lasts forever. As to Bin Laden, could he be a Socrates in reverse? Spiritual outside and unspiritual inside? Regardless, I would love to meet him. To assure him, before he shoots me, how mistaken he is about Christians hating Muslims. One day, perhaps, Insh’allah…meanwhile, like Dostoevsky, I believe in the end the world will be saved by beauty.

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