[Andrew Frisardi]

Yes, Michael F., but Yeats also wrote,

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing‐masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enameling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake,
Or set upon on a golden branch to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

And for those irritating briars that bind joys and desires mentioned by Ed, here are some hedge clippers:

Like compassion, love, and peace, beauty is seen as a Divine Quality in Islam, one of God’s Names being al-Jamil, the Beautiful. Furthermore, according to the hadith quoted at the beginning of this chapter, God loves beauty, meaning that the qualities of beauty and love are intertwined on the Divine plane. And this reality is reflected on the human plane as well by the fact that our soul loves what it perceives as beautiful and sees as beautiful what it loves. Beauty also has the power of radiation and emanation and shares therefore a basic characteristic with compassion and mercy. Furthermore, beauty brings about collectedness and helps the scattered elements of the soul gather together in a state of calm. Beauty is therefore also related to peace and has a remarkable pacifying power over the soul, a quality that is essential to Islamic spirituality, as reflected so clearly in Islamic art.

But what is beauty? In the Islamic universe, as in other traditional worlds, beauty is not simply a subjective state existing only "in the eye of the beholder," although each human being usually has the capacity to appreciate certain kinds of beauty and not others. Beauty is a dimension of reality itself, and throughout the ages Islamic philosophers and mystics have confirmed in their own terms the Platonic dictum "Beauty is the splendor of the truth." Now, the Arabic word haqiqah means both "truth" and "reality" and the Divine Name al-Haqq indicates the union of the two in God Who is both the Truth in its absolute sense, the Truth that makes us free, as Christ asserted, and absolute Reality.

Metaphysically speaking, since God is both Truth and Reality, He could not but be beautiful. As the Sufis would say, ultimately all beauty is the radiation on a particular level of reality of the Beauty of the Face of the Beloved.

--Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam

“I’m with Seyyed.”