A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
January 16, 2005
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
Sometimes Nature can exhibit a shadow, can be violent and frightening — we have acknowledged that; I spoke last week of our need to forgive Nature and Life Itself and go on loving it.
Yet we live with Nature, as part of Nature, in a fundamental trust. Rather than look out at the sky or the sea or a mountain and regard it as a threat of an earthquake or a flood or or a volcano, we are more likely to anticipate beauty, exhilarating, beauty, serene beauty, and we behold in wonder.
There is more of beauty in Nature than of violence. Camus said, in the passage from The Plague we read last week, that there is more in people to admire than to despise. There is Beauty in us and in all Nature.
Even much of the violence of Nature is beauty. The birth of stars, the igniting of infant stars' hydrogen fuel into nuclear fusion, the titanic events that made life on Earth possible — there is astonishing beauty in this.
It is the beauty in us that cries its protest of cruelty, disease, the horror of thousands of drowning people, or human injustice.
We who care so much about social justice, about righting the wrongs of the world — may think of beauty as a luxury we cannot afford. But Beauty lies at the very heart and soul of spiritual life, and of prophetic vision, too.
You know the meaning of beauty: you have felt the shudder of awe, have been transported, have stared as all else has faded from sight.
To the Greeks, the Universe, the Kosmos — represented one whole, beings and things joined in a universal order, and that order is beautiful, is beauty itself. From the earliest philosophers through Plotinus there are hymns of rhapsody to the beauty of all nature. At the heart of things is order, symmetry, beauty.
Plato and Homer and Aquinas and Dante — they all felt beauty to be at the heart of being, something eternal. It's an attribute of the Kosmos, and a form of its speech.
Carlyle is writing about himself when he describes this experience of Seeing into the heart of Nature:
He gazed over those stupendous masses with wonder, almost with longing desire; never till this hour had he known Nature, that she was One, that she was his Mother and divine. And as the ruddy glow was fading into clearness in the sky, and the Sun had now departed, a murmur of Eternity and Immensity, of Death and of Life, stole through his soul; and he felt as if Death and Life were one, as if the Earth were not dead, as if the Spirit of the Earth had its throne in that splendour, and his own spirit were therewith holding communion.1
But sometimes we don't see it. Beauty will often surprise us. Sometimes it appears to us as an event, and you go back to where it happened, and you can't find it.
It can happen along a road. You drive along a country road, the wind is raising white crests on the waves, the light creating spectacles, you are overwhelmed by what you see. You stop, go back, get out of the car. You cannot find the beauty that just smote you. It was there in the passage down the road. It was an event, in a moment and yet everlasting.
"The eye," said Emerson, "is the best composer," and "light is the first of painters."
A piece of pottery catches your eye; you get close to it and examine it and you can't understand what you saw a moment ago.
But with beauty, we can feel ourselves in error the other way, too — gradually being overtaken by the almost hypnotic beauty of something or somebody who's been there all along, unnoticed, unappreciated.
The hunger for beauty isn't like the hunger for food: your desire for a good meal ends magically, as Ellen Scarry put it, just about the time the good meal ends. The desire for beauty outlasts its object; it's inexaustible.2
Beauty beckons to us first through the eye. Beauty beckons us beyond itself to its source. It incites the mind. It takes us from the surface of things to the worlds within them. The mind knows no constraints of the particular place and time, where beauty appeared to us.
First, we are momentarily stunned by beauty; it seizes our attention, and we aren't thinking. But after awhile, we discover that, far from suppressing thought, beauty incites the mind; it ignites the desire for truth — as Elaine Scarry puts it:
by giving us, with an electric brightness, the experience of conviction and the experience, as well, of error.3
It leaves us aspiring to truth, discontent until we find it, leaves us prepared to labor mightily to attain it.
We have been overcome with beauty and now we want to know; we must know: what is real and unreal, who and what we are. We reconsider our own judgments, whether they were false or true.
The experience of beauty first filled us with a sense of certainty — maybe for the first time we feel a certainty about something. But then beauty brings us into contact with our own capacity for error. We ask: why did I not see this beauty before? how could I have missed it? or, What did I see in him, in this? And now we must struggle and wrestle to find what is true. And beauty made us do it.
In that great Divinity School Address, Emerson invites his hearers to re-imagine the spectacular July day they have just shared. And then he allows the beauty of it to take them beneath the surface of what they have seen to the heart of things. Here is a little of what they heard that night in the little chapel in Cambridge:
A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to [someone] when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue. Then he is instructed in what is above him. He learns that his being is without bound . . . He ought. He knows the sense of that grand word, though his analysis fails entirely to render account of it.
The love of Beauty may lead us to truth and to good.
True prophets are acquainted with beauty and are driven by visions of beauty.
I was once told I was about to hear a prophet. He was very famous, controversial. He was speaking at one of our more important churches in a great city. He had consented to come and speak at an afternoon event. His bodyguards searched one as one entered.
He was full of hate. He knew by the injury of personal experience the wrongs of the present, the injustice of contemporary America. And he spoke only out of that, inspired by no vision of beauty, no dream of a glorious golden city governed by love and beauty and justice. He spewed venom and threat.
The enduring greatness of Dr. King is different. He, like Mandela, spoke and wrote and organized and protested and went to jail out of a vision of beauty, of a time when justice would roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream, when on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners would be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. He saw Mississippi transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. He had this dream: that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight. In his magnificent vision he could hew out of a mountain of despair a stone of hope; he could transform the jangling discord of the nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood and sisterhood.
It was a vision of Beauty that drove him, not mere rage.
Aristotle said that justice is a perfect cube. It is beautiful symmetry. It is equality in all directions.
We will not make a world of justice if we are not guided by visions of beauty, not acquainted with the beauty of the Kosmos.
Think of this three ways:
§ There is the beautiful object itself;
§ There's the act of beholding beauty; and
§ There's the creative act that beauty requires.
I
First, the beautiful object itself. There are splendors of many kinds; but the experience of any class of beauty heightens our sense of beauty, or heightens its lack, everywhere. If we feel deeply the beauty of a sunset, that very beauty has a way of requiring beauty elsewhere in our lives: in the relative equality of the laws that govern us, in the policies our nation pursues, in the quality of our dealings with others.
II
Second, the act of beholding. Carlyle wrote:
The [person] who cannot wonder, who does not habitually wonder (and worship), were he President of innumerable Royal Societies, and carried the whole . . . Hegel's Philosophy, and the epitome of all Laboratories and Observatories with their results, in his single head, — is but a Pair of Spectacles behind which there is no Eye.4
Emerson said "The eye is the best of artists." Outward beauty — in the flowers outside my door, in the music I hear — recalls me to an inner quality of beauty and demands it there, too. It is a state of consciousness.
The act of meditation, or contemplation, is a training of the inner eye to see beneath the surface of things. It enables us to see stark reality as it is; and it enables us to be ravished with the beauty of soul. It trains us to lay what we see outwardly against an inner vision of moral beauty, and with that vision, words like "success" and "failure" take on new meaning.
Evelyn Underhill, in her great 1910 work on Mysticism, said that most of us, in the course of our lives, have had those revelatory moments, splendor is poured through the world, "as light through a coloured window, grace through a sacrament, from that Perfect Beauty which `shines in company with the celestial forms' beyond the pale of appearance." In those moments, seh says, of heightened consciousness, "the seeing self is indeed an initiate thrust suddenly into the sanctuary of the mysteries."5
The crazy, brilliant Transcendentalist poet Very testified that he had gained a new capacity to see; and new beauty met his inner eye:
And still I gaze — but 'tis a holier thought
Than that in which my spirit lived before,
Each star a purer ray of love has caught,
Earth wears a lovelier robe than then it wore,
And every lamp that burns around thy shrine
Is fed with fire whose fountain is Divine.
The act of Seeing.
III
And third, the act of creation required by the experience of beauty. If you see, really See, this ravishing beauty — then there is something about it — it wants to be replicated, to be extended and distributed. It sets us to drawing, composing, planning, drafting laws, setting out on creative endeavours. And beauty brings us face to face with our own powers to create.
St. Teresa of Avila said the spiritual path is to "use the beauties of Earth as steps along which one mounts upward for the sake of that other Beauty." This congregation one hundred years ago next month dedicated this Great Hall and can create yet more beauty.
Our principal artwork is our lives themselves. But the vision of beauty at the heart of us is bigger than individual lives, bigger than great architecture: it looks beyond the ends of our noses, beyond the walls our forebears built, to this whole world of life, despoiled as it is by want of vision: the ugliness that paves over the good earth, poisons the air and water, and corrupts the political process; the tribalism that blinds us to the bitter realities of most of the world's people, billions of whom thirst simply for drinkable water, much less any degree of comfort, security, or promise; the cynicism that doesn't want to know because it lacks the imagination to do anything about it; the arrangements of power that ensure that nothing changes.
Simply to recognize that we're in big trouble — without a vision of beauty to drive creative and transformative work — is simply to become cynical. What we need now is a vision of the beauty at the heart of things, a vision of the Divine splendor of the Kosmos that only the eye of contemplation can see. Can we see the splendor no ugliness can negate? Let it overcome us with the deep conviction that it can yet transform the world.
"When it breathes through [our] intellect," said Emerson, "it is genius; when it breathes through [our] will, it is virtue; when it flows through [our] affection, it is love. . . . All reform aims, in some one particular, to let the soul have its way through us; in other words, to engage us to obey."
The Gospel of Unitarian Universalism is not a message of fear and wrath, but flows from an intuition of supreme beauty at the heart of things. And so toward the end of that great address Emerson asks,
In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God? Where now sounds the persuasion, that by its very melody imparadises my heart, and so affirms its own origin in heaven? Where shall I hear words such as in elder ages drew men to leave all and follow, — where shall I hear these august laws of moral being so pronounced, as to fill my ear, and I feel ennobled by the offer of my uttermost action and passion? The test of the true faith, certainly, should be its power to charm and command the soul, as the laws of nature control the activity of the hands, — so commanding that we find pleasure and honor in obeying. The faith should blend with the light of rising and of setting suns, with the flying cloud, the singing bird, and the breath of flowers.
Let it be. Let it be, here, with us.
Hail the glorious golden city, pictured by the seers of old: Hymn number one hundred forty.
Copyright © 2005 F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.
1 Sartor Resartus, Edited by Charles Frederick Harrold. New York: Odyssey Press, 1937, p. 151.
2 Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being
Just. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1999, p. 50.
3 Scarry, 52-53.
4 Thomas Carlyle. Sartor Resartus. Odyssey Edition, p. 85f.
5 Evelyn Underhill. Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual
Consciousness. Twelfth Edition. New York: Penguin/Plume, 1974; first published 1910. Pp. 21-22.
Martin Luther King
We must see that peace represents a sweeter music, a cosmic melody that is far superior to the discords of war. If we have the will and determination to mount such a peace offensive, we will unlock hitherto tightly sealed doors of hope and transform our imminent cosmic elegy into a psalm of creative fulfillment.
—MLK accepting the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Go in peace: the work of peace is in our hands.
In a time of great strife, when at too many times and in too many places the human face is distorted and its divine nature is not seen, when the air is filled with clashing discord:
We seek in the tumult and chaos a shaft of finer light and clearer color, a lucid harmony, a vision of Beauty; —
Let it enmesh us in a splendid chord like Bach.
And let the vision seen and the music discerned lift us, fill us, enchant us with its commanding splendors, makes us its own; let our words and our deeds reflect its harmonies; let the music in us move us with in paths of truth and justice with its agile rhythms.
Let our eyes be open to see what splendor would rise from the rubble; —
Let us imagine what minds have not conceived
Let us hear sounding from the heart of us an ardent calm,
Elaine Scarry
At the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo a radical decentering. Beauty, according to [Simone] Weil, requires us "to give up our imaginary position as the center... A transformation then takes place at the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate reception of sense impressions and psychological impressions." Weil speaks matter-of-factly, often without illustration, implicitly requiring readers to test the truth of her assertion against their own experience. Her account is always deeply somatic: what happens, happens to our bodies. When we come upon beautiful things . . . they act like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to some vaster space; or they form "ladders reaching toward the beauty of the world," or they lift us (as though by the air currents of someone else's sweeping), letting the ground rotate beneath us several inches, so that when we land, we find we are standing in a different relation to the world than we were a moment before. It is not that we cease to stand at the center of the world, for we never stood there. It is that we cease to stand even at the center of our own world. We willingly cede our ground to the thing that stands before us.
. . . This seems a gift in its own right, and a gift as a prelude to or precondition of enjoying fair relations with others. It is clear that an ethical fairness which requires "a symmetry of everyone's relation" will be greatly assisted by an esthetic fairness that creates in all participants a state of delight in their own lateralness.
Evelyn Underhill, 1910
"Beauty," said Hegel, who, though he was no mystic, had a touch of that mystical intuition which no philosopher can afford to be without, "is merely the Spiritual making itself known sensuously." . . . Récéjac only develops this idea when he says, "If the mind penetrates deeply into the facts of aesthetics, it will find more and more, that these facts are based upon an ideal identity between the mind itself and things. At a certain point the harmony becomes so complete, and the finality so close that it gives us actual emotion. The Beautiful then becomes the sublime; brief apparition, by which the soul is caught up into the true mystic state, and touches the Absolute. It is scarcely possible to persist in this aesthetic perception without feeling lifted up by it above things and above ourselves, in an ontological vision which closely resembles the Absolute of the Mystics." . . . "Of Beauty," says Plato in an immortal passage, "I repeat again that we saw her there shining in company with the celestial forms. . . . "
Most men in the course of their lives have known such Platonic hours of initiation, when the sense of beauty has risen from a pleasant feeling to a passion . . . In those hours the world has seemed charged with a new vitality; with a splendour which does not belong to it but is poured through it, as light through a coloured window, grace through a sacrament, from that Perfect Beauty which "shines in company with the celestial forms" beyond the pale of appearance. In such moods of heightened consciousness . . . the seeing self is indeed an initiate thrust suddenly into the sanctuary of the mysteries: and feels the "old awe and amazement" . . . In such experiences, a new factor of the eternal calculus appears to be thrust in on us, a factor which no honest seeker for truth can afford to neglect . . .
William Wordsworth
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye;
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration: —feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened: — that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on —
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul;
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
bdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
From POETICAL WORKS. WORDSWORTH. OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1981, P. 165.
Katherine