Beauty is Beyond

15 November 2022

Beauty Is Beyond from Return to the One, by Brian Hines

“After all this talk about the One being formless, limitless, and ineffable, the reader may be getting an impression that the One is some sort of amorphous blob of pure existence without any qualities: shapeless, featureless, colorless.  In a sense this is correct, since the highest encompasses all that is below and so is not any particular thing, but all things.  Yet Plotinus leaves no doubt that the One is the source of all beauty.

‘Therefore the productive power of all is the flower of beauty, a beauty which makes beauty.’ [Ennead VI-7-32]

“Thus the spiritual seeker desiring to return to the One needs only a simple direction.  Follow beauty . . .

“. . . Plotinus tells us that what we dimly recognize in every beautiful object is the beauty beyond.  We dart from one delight to another yet remain unsatisfied.  For we never are able to gaze upon pure spiritual Beauty, only its shadowy material reflection.

‘The lower . . . has a kind of memory of beauty.  But he cannot grasp it in its separateness, but he is overwhelmingly amazed and excited by visible beauties . . . Then all these beauties must be reduced to unity, and he must be shown their origin.’ [Ennead I-3-2]”

(Brian Hines, Return to the One: Plotinus’s Guide to God-Realization, Adrasteia Publishing, Salem, Oregon, 2004, page 65, ISBN: 9780977735211.  Note: Hines quotes from the translations of A. H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library.)

 

1. There is a wonderful balance in Platonism between its teaching of turning away from the world of the senses and the recognition that Platonism has of the beauty of that same world.  It may, at first, seem like a contradiction, but I don’t think it is.  Because for Platonism beauty is a sign of the transcendental in a material context.  From a Platonist perspective, beauty is the material cosmos reminding us of the source of beauty which is the same as The Good and The One.

2. I write poetry with a strong, though not exclusive, emphasis on Japanese forms.  These days I am primarily focused on English Language Haiku (ELH).  As I was studying the brief history, about 100 years, of English Language Haiku, I came across an article written in an early English Language Haiku Journal that explicitly rejected a Platonist view of beauty.  It seems that this idea had legs in the ELH community in the 70’s and 80’s; that beauty is something to be left behind in writing contemporary ELH.  This surprised me because it has no basis in Japanese poetic theory; it is strictly a feature of modernist theories of art.  It arises from thinking of beauty as nothing more than a culturally contingent preference; and it is often depicted as something less than that.  From this perspective, beauty is an arbitrary claim that has no real significance. 

3. I believe the Platonist view of beauty emerges from direct experience of higher hypostases, such as the forms, in Platonist contemplation.  By this I mean that when Plotinus writes about beauty it is on the basis of contemplative experience of Beauty as such, the source of all beauty that we observe in the material world. 

4. In Platonism the beauty of a poem, of a well-constructed house, of a stone found on a beach, of a melody, of a sunset, all have a common transcendental source.  It is possible to experience that source.  In this way beauty in the world is a gate that is at the same time a path, to The Good and The One.

5.  In Beauty It is Finished

On a sleepless night while the crickets sang

I took a road that went under the sea,

Following the sound of the bells that rang

At the gate that leads to eternity.

 

I wasn’t the only one on that road,

Numberless people were walking with me,

It was effortless, we carried no load,

We were unencumbered, totally free.

 

The waves of the sea, the sound of the bells,

Light in the distance that glows ceaselessly;

They are always speaking, they always tell

Of the way to end all hatred and greed.

 

Follow the beauty to its source, its start;

There’s the pure well of the infinite heart.

 

(Jim Wilson, A Night of Many Sonnets)