The Idea of Beauty

"Understood in its metaphysical sense, Beauty is one of the manifestations of the Absolute Being. Emanating from the harmonious rays of the Divine plan, it crosses the intellectual plane to shine once again across the natural plane, where it darkens into matter." —Jean Delville

So what could be considered as beautiful? An ‘Absolute Being’ as Delville sees it seems to suggest a kind of well integrated spiritual harmony within the observer but his view can’t apply to every individual. So if beauty to some people is not a form of spiritual awareness or even the opposite of the abject and degraded or even something dark and grotesque itself; who’s to say the statement should be true at all? If anything beauty could tap into an innate drive, to combat the complexities of our own repressed fears and give hope and pleasure, often when it seems there may be none.

How for instance must a Rose have evolved to be considered beautiful? More importantly how has the human mind evolved to consider such a thing beautiful in the first place? Perhaps it is out of mans reach, as nature is something so perfect and impossible to reconstruct and synthesise. If anything beauty may be an awareness of the present moment, an intoxication of the senses, something painfully sad yet uplifting, a romanticisation through exposure to societal fantasy and ultimately, indefinable. As Plato once said ‘if you know what beauty is, then it is as if you have met it face to face as a form.’

A somewhat whimsical passage lifted from an essay I'm currently writing on art related to the psychology of fear, madness, horror, beauty and the grotesque.