As it is not for those to speak of the graceful forms of the material world who have never seen them or known their grace — men bom blind, let us suppose— in the same way those must be silent upon the beauty of noble conduct and of learning and all that order who have never cared for such things, nor may those tell of the splendour of virtue who have never known the face of Justice and of Moral-Wisdom beautiful beyond the beauty of Evening and of Dawn.
Such vision is for those only who see with the Soul’s sight — and at the vision, they will rejoice, and awe will fall upon them and a trouble deeper than all the rest could ever stir, for now they are moving in the realm of Truth.
This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all dehght. For the unseen all this may be felt as for the seen ; and this the Souls feel for it, every soul in some degree, but those the more deeply that are the more truly apt to this higher love — just as all take delight in the beauty of the body but all are not stung as sharply, and those only that feel the keener wound are known as Lovers.
These Lovers, then, lovers of the beauty outside of sense, must be made to declare themselves.
Wdiat do you feel in presence of the grace you discern in actions.
in manners, in sound morality, in all the works and fruits of virtue, in the beauty of souls ? When you see that you yourselves are beautiful within, what do you feel ? What is this Dionysiac exultation that thrills through your being, this straining upwards of all your Soul, this longing to break away from the body and live sunken within the veritable self ?
These are no other than the emotions of Souls under the spell of
love.
But what is it that awakens all this passion ? No shape, no colour, no grandeur of mass : all is for a Soul, something whose beauty rests upon no colour, for the moral wisdom the Soul enshrines and all the other hueless splendour of the virtues. It is that you find in yourself, or admire in another, loftiness of spirit ; righteousness of life ; disciplined purity ; courage of the majestic face ; gravity ; modesty that goes fearless and tranquil and passionless ; and, shining down upon all, the light of god- like Intellection.
All these noble qualities are to be reverenced and loved, no doubt, but what entitles them to be called beautiful ?
They exist ; they manifest themselves to us : anyone that sees them must admit that they have reality of Being ; and is not Real- Being, really beautiful ?
But we have not yet shown by what property in them they have wrought the Soul to loveliness : what is this grace, this splendour as of Light, resting upon all the virtues ?
Let us take the contrary, the ughness of the Soul, and set that against its beauty : to understand, at once, what this ugliness is and how it comes to appear in the Soul will certainly open our way before us.
Let us then suppose an ugly Soul, dissolute, unrighteous : teeming with all the lusts ; torn by internal discord ; beset by the fears of its cowardice and the envies of its pettiness ; thinking, in the little thought it has, only of the perishable and the base ; perverse in all its impulses ; the friend of unclean pleasures ; living the life of abandonment to bodily sensation and delighting in its deformity.
WTiat must we think but that all this shame is something that has gathered about the Soul, some foreign bane outraging it, soiling it, so
that, encumbered with all manner of turpitude, it has no longer a clean activity or a clean sensation, but commands only a life smouldering dully under the crust of evil ; that, sunk in manifold death, it no longer sees what a Soul should see, may no longer rest in its own being, dragged ever as it is towards the outer, the lower, the dark ?
An unclean thing, I dare to say ; flickering hither and thither at the call of objects of sense, deeply infected with the taint of body, occupied always in Matter, and absorbing Matter into itself ; in its commerce with the Ignoble it has trafi&cked away for an ahen nature its own essential Idea.
If a man has been immersed in filth or daubed with mud his native comeliness disappears and all that is seen is the foul stuff besmearing him : his ugly condition is due to alien matter that has encrusted him, and if he is to win back his grace it must be his business to scour and purify himself and make himself what he was.
So, we may justly say, a Soul becomes ugly — by something foisted upon it, by sinking itself into the alien, by a fall, a descent into body, into Matter. The dishonour of the Soul is in its ceasing to be clean and apart. Gold is degraded when it is mixed with earthy particles ; if these be worked out, the gold is left and is beautiful, isolated from all that is foreign, gold with gold alone. And so the Soul ; let it be but cleared of the desires that come by its too intimate converse with the body, emanci- pated from all the passions, purged of all that embodiment has thrust upon it, withdrawn, a solitary, to itself again — in that moment the ugliness that came only from the alien is stripped away.
For, as the ancient teaching was, moral-discipline and courage and every virtue, not even excepting Wisdom itself, all is purification.
Hence the Mysteries with good reason adumbrate the immersion of the unpurified in filth, even in the Nether- World, since the unclean loves filth for its very filthiness, and swine foul of body find their joy in foulness.
What else is Sophrosyny, rightly so-called, but to take no part in the
pleasures of the body, to break away from them as unclean and unworthy of the clean ? So too, Courage is but being fearless of the death which is but the parting of the Soul from the body, an event which no one can dread whose dehght is to be his unmingled self. And Magnanimity is but disregard for the lure of things here. And Wisdom is but the Act of the Intellectual-Principle withdrawn from the lower places and leading the Soul to the Above.
The Soul thus cleansed is all Idea and Reason, wholly free of body, intellective, entirely of that divine order from which the wellspring of Beauty rises and aU the race of Beauty.
Hence the Soul heightened to the Intellectual-Principle is beautiful to all its power. For Intellection and all that proceeds from Intellection are the Soul’s beauty, a graciousness native to it and not foreign, for only with these is it truly Soul. And it is just to say that in the Soul’s becoming a good and beautiful thing is its becoming like to God, for from the Divine comes all the Beauty and all the Good in beings.
We may even say that Beauty is the Authentic-Existents and Ugliness is the Principle contrary to Existence : and the Ugly is also the primal evil ; therefore its contrary is at once good and beautiful, or is Good and Beauty : and hence the one method will discover to us the Beauty-Good and the Ugliness-Evil.
And Beauty, this Beauty which is also The Good, must be posed as The First : directly deriving from this First is the Intellectual- Principle which is pre-eminently the manifestation of Beauty ; through the Intellectual-Principle Soul is beautiful. The beauty in things of a lower order — actions and pursuits for instance — comes by operation of the shaping Soul which is also the author of the beauty found in the world of sense. For the Soul, a divine thing, a fragment as it were of the Prii^al Beauty, makes beautiful to the fulness of their capacity all things whatsoever that it grasps and moulds.
Therefore we must ascend again towards the Good, the desired of every Soul. Anyone that has seen This, knows what I intend when I say
that it is beautiful. Even the desire of it is to be desired as a Good. To attain it is for those that will take the upward path, who will set all their forces towards it, who will divest themselves of all that we have put on in our descent : — so, to those that approach the Holy Celebrations of the Mysteries, there are appointed purifications and the laying aside of the garments worn before, and the entry in nakedness — until, passing, on the upward way, all that is other than the God, each in the sohtude of himself shall behold that solitary-dwelling Existence, the Apart, the Unmingled, the Pure, that from Which all things depend, for Which all look and live and act and know, the Source of Life and of Intellection and of Being.
And one that shall know this vision — with what passion of love shall he not be seized, with what pang of desire, what longing to be molten into one with This, what wondering delight ! If he that has never seen this Being must hunger for It as for all his welfare, he that has known must love and reverence It as the very Beauty ; he will be flooded with awe and gladness, stricken by a salutary terror ; he loves with a veritable love, with sharp desire ; all other loves than this he must despise, and disdain all that once seemed fair.
This, indeed, is the mood even of those who, having witnessed the manifestation of Gods or Supernals, can never again feel the old dehght in the comehness of material forms ; what then are we to think of one that contemplates Absolute Beauty in Its essential integrity, no accumula- tion of flesh and matter, no dweller on earth or in the heavens — so perfect Its purity — far above all such things in that they are non-essential, composite, not primal but descending from This ?
Beholding this Being — the Choragos of all Existence, the Self- Intent that ever gives forth and never takes — resting, rapt, in the vision and possession of so lofty a loveliness, growing to Its hkeness, what Beauty can the soul yet lack ? For This, the Beauty supreme, the absolute, and the primal, fashions Its lovers to Beauty and makes them also worthy of love.
And for This, the sternest and the uttermost combat is set before the Souls ; all our labour is for This, lest we be left without part in this
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noblest vision, which to attain is to be blessed in the blissful sight, which to fail of is to fail utterly.
For not he that has failed of the joy that is in colour or in visible forms, not he that has failed of power or of honours or of kingdom has failed, but only he that has failed of only This, for WTiose winning he should renounce kingdoms and command over earth and ocean and sky, if only, -spuming the world of sense from beneath his feet, and straining to This, he may see.
But what must we do ? How lies the path ? How come to \ision of the inaccessible Beauty, dwelling as if in consecrated precincts, apart from the common w’ays where ah may see, even the profane ?
He that has the strength, let him arise and withdraw into himself, foregoing all that is known by the eyes, turning away for ever from the material beauty that once made his joy. When he perceives those shapes of grace that show in body, let him not pursue ; he must know them for copies, vestiges, shadows, and hasten away towards That they tell of. For if anyone follow what is like a beautiful shape playing over water — is there not a myth telling in symbol of such a dupe, how he sank into the depths of the current and was swept away to nothingness ? So too, one that is held by material beauty and will not break free shall be precipitated, not in body but in Soul, down to the dark depths loathed of the Intellective-Being, where, blind even in the Lower-W’orld, he shall have commerce only with shadow’s, there as here.