I've decided to set The Beauty of the Infinite aside for a while and pick up Blaise Pascal's Pensées.
It's not that I haven't been enjoying The Beauty of the Infinite - I think it may be the most important book I have read since undertaking Hans urs von Balthasar's The Glory of the Lord in graduate school. But ... here's an example of an relatively readable passage:
"If then a theology of beauty stands with the concrete and particular, in defiance of any species of thought that places its faith in abstraction or generalities, it militates of necessity against practices that simply sort narratives into discrete categories of story and metaphysics, myth and meaning, symbol and reality, and then rest content; the more difficult practice of approaching narratives already prepared to be defeated by the unique, uncategorizable, and irreducible in each, is also the more fruitful (and charitable). Beauty, when not made subject to a symbolic economy, calls attention to those details of surface, those nuances and recalcitrant peculiarities, that distinguish one story from another, one narrative moment from another, and so discourage idle chatter concerning the “nature” of religious language or religious truth. If indeed Christianity embraces “the aesthetic principle par excellence,” then abstraction is the thing most contrary and deadening to the truth it offers. This provides perhaps the best definition of metaphysics, in the opprobrious sense of the word: an inexorable volition toward the abstract. “Metaphysics,” so conceived, has no real name for beauty, and can account for it, if at all, only in terms of a formless ideality that is, aesthetically speaking, the only true deformity: the privation of form. God’s glory, though, is neither ethereal nor remote, but is beauty, quantity, abundance, kabod: it has weight, density, and presence. Moreover, it has been seen in the form of a slave, revealed in a particular shape whose place and time in space is determinative of every other truth, every other beauty. In the end, that within Christianity which draws persons to itself is a concrete and particular beauty, because concrete and particular beauty is its deepest truth."
This is extremely important. My entire life of the mind depends upon this paragraph.
Nonetheless, when that's a readable paragraph ... well ... Pascal's little notes on "the Machine" and faith are a lot easier to digest under a cottonwood tree by the stream.
I'll pick up The Beauty of the Infinite again this winter - when the landscape is burried in monochromatic death in life.
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7 comments:
Definitely a lovely quote! And a kindred spirit for me as well. Perhaps that is why I can never truly LOVE philosophy, but I do love history, and art, and literature. There is certainly some merit in discussing and "figuring out" beautiful things, but the real beauty comes in the appreciation of the thing AS ITSELF, not as we make it out to be. (Simliarly does a poet hate to have to explain "the meaning" of his poem. The poem IS the meaning! Perhaps also a similar idea to those interested in the appreciation of "story" as opposed to Plot, or Style, etc?) And, isn't that one glorious detail of the message of Christianity? God exists in all beauty, glory, and majesty, and SPECIFICITY as well. Christ, God, was not just THE MAN he was A MAN. A real, certain, individual man. Like Bob Smith. Or Harry Johnson. The fullness of all Beauty (and Truth and Goodness) in ONE person, both infinite and entirely individual. And just as we should love this real man named Jesus who holds for us all and everything, just so should we love others and even more breathtaking - just so does God love us. We are beauty IN OURSELVES, completely unique, notjust as "a human" (Did anyone ever find Marxism beautiful?). And so we can look at ("contemplate" is the really perfect word) and love the sunset, or the feeling of cool bedsheets, the taste of coffee, the walk to the post office, and all of it everyday, and even every minute anew. Once you have "figured out" the grander meaning of a thing, it is done for you. It is in the discovering, discovering, discovering that beauty is really found, isn't it? Hmmm..
Lovely! Thanks!
"Simliarly does a poet hate to have to explain "the meaning" of his poem."
So perhaps one of you "poets" could explain to us novices what the point of publishing poetry is if no one BESIDES THE POET HIMSELF is able to understand it. Shouldn't you just write it and keep it to yourself since you're the only one truly in on it's real meaning?
What can one say to anonymous? Alicia? Luke?
Perhaps there is nothing to say but stay in the stable with the rest of the dwarves :-)
I think Dostoyevsky put his finger on it when he had Alyosha affirm with Ivan that one must 'love life more than the meaning of it.'
This is the mystery of understanding poetry.
It is not that it can't be understood, but that, like life, to find the thesis is to kill it.
Besides, more than the poet understand it. Brother Damien knew that I would know of what he was speaking, and I did.
Poetry, like religion, is only for those willing to accept the humility of full communion.
If I need more explanation here it is, if not, please ignore....
I'm not a poet. (and publishing?... I don't know where that comes in at all) But I do like to read poetry and sometimes I even understand it! ;) poetry was just an example... If I were anything I would like to be a classicist, so here's a different example of what I meant about beauty: In reading Latin and translating you start off making word correspondences: 'amare' = to love, etc. At this stage you aren't reading Latin, you can't appreciate it as Latin. You are making English. Which is fine, and certainly a necessary step. However, it is only once you start to see 'amare' as the Latin word with all the connotations intact simultaneously that you really see the loveliness and real beauty of the words. It's not about excluding meanings or being obscure (and indeed, I think good poetry should NOT be obscure, but meaning should come as a whole- maybe an impression or a feeling or a picture, but not as a thesis statement...), but rather it is about being as clear as you can, which is usually alot more subtle than can be broken down into a tidy explanation. That's what I mean about poetry too - the reason many people write poetry is to communicate something that CAN NOT be said in prose. It's simply different. It is hard to describe the meaning because if the poet had meant "there was a boy who loved a girl and was sad because she didn't love him back" , he would have said that. Amare does not just mean to love; it may be close to "to love", but it isn't just that. Does that make more sense? Haha, probably not - I'm about the only person I know who thinks that translating Latin is beautiful, but perhaps this is why the original quote was so great. So, Anyway.
Cheers!
Don't translate. Love the Latin for the sake of the Latin itself. Keep that secret from those who don't bother to make the effort to appreciate it.
So let it be! So let it be!
All this grief, then pancakes!
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