Speak to Them of Beauty
Speak to your children, to the young, and even to the old of beauty and it will awaken their souls and open their eyes to the truth of things.
It is the blind, deadened soul that sees all things as subjective, relative, and interchangeable with each other. When beauty and ugliness, virtue and depravity, a truth and a lie are valued the same life has lost its meaning and brilliance behind a shadowy wall of cruel deception.
When goodness and light aren’t real, solid things but only perceptions found in the mind of the beholder, then all is trivial, then all is empty, then all is meaningless.
But speak to your children of beauty and they will begin to see the way of things. Speak to your children of beauty and you will ignite the light in their eyes. Speak to your children of beauty and you light a brightly burning signal fire in their hearts – a light that will send them running onwards and upwards to that great city on a hill.
“Sameness! Sameness!” Demands our modern world, “Everything must be sameness. Objective beauty, virtue, truth and goodness is hierarchy. Nothing could be more oppressive than hierarchy. Sameness is the only good.”
“All life is hierarchy and all life is aspirational” answers the ongoing song of all life from the primordial protozoa to the tallest tree shadowing the forest below. “We find sameness in death, but life is hierarchy, life is aspirational.”
Speak to your children of beauty and they’ll see the way of things.
We may have forgotten, but the ancients knew. The ancients knew.
“Can you be righteous” asks the poet Traherne,” unless you be just in rendering to things their due esteem? All things were made to be yours and you were made to prize them according to their value.”
Augustine in his “Order of Love” (ordo amoris) taught that to find meaning and peace in life we must love all things according to their worth, and God above all.
Plato in his Republic wrote that the child who has been raised well is one “who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in the ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears for her.”
Perhaps best and most ancient of all is the poetry of the Psalms (eg. 19, 119) that declare and celebrate the ascendant goodness and beauty of things that are good, right, and true.
We may have forgotten, but the ancients knew. Speak to your children, to your people, of beauty and they will come alive and find their way.
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