[Andrew Frisardi]

Thanks for that great post, Bill (#224, above). Whatever it is in Kate’s voice, in an algebraic equation, or for that matter in the Kaaba or the ocean that moves people to the core—that’s beauty. I think that is the gist of what you say there at the end of the post. Everybody knows it when they’ve experienced it, and everybody wants that experience, however we define it or can’t define it, wherever we find it or don’t find it. It isn’t surprising that it is so hard to talk about or define—it would be surprising if it were otherwise, with anything that has such scope and power.

A brief disagreement with your characterization of Christian theories of beauty: Pseudo-Dionysius. I can’t do better than to say, as he does, that whatever beauty is, it transcends any particular manifestation of it—since it is experienced in so many ways and forms. Like being. The fact that I can say “I am,” and that it is true, doesn’t make it any less true when someone else says it. The “I” transcends the individual who says it. Megalomania (i.e., everyday delusion enjoyed by us all) is forgetting this. Beauty too is above and beyond its particular form. If this were not so, it is hard to see how it could be transformative in the way you describe. Beauty’s un-pin-down-able-ness, which you and Ed and Andrew M. refer to, comes from its not being a thing among other things. It can’t be possessed or googled, figured out or embalmed. The experience of it takes us out of the isolation of me-in-here subjectivity, into direct communion, to the I-am-no-longer-I, as Juan Ramón Jiménez puts it: Yo no soy yo. I am not I. Soy este / que va a mi lado sin yo verlo, / que, a veces, voy a ver, / y que, a veces olvido. “I am this one who goes along by my side without my seeing him, who at times I am on the verge of seeing, and who at times I forget.” The experience of beauty is the remembering, so whatever beauty is “in itself,” it has got to be something akin to that not-I or Other which is who we really are.

That’s what I understand by the curious phrase “Beauty is a transcendental.”

Someone, I think it was the sculptor Eric Gill, said that the last thing an artist should aim for is beauty. And he was a follower of Maritain. Gill’s point was, just do the work and do it well, and the beauty will come—or it won’t.