[This essay is as of yet unproofed, which will occur in the near future, but I thought that I should get it out there in case the afíb gets me tonight. Hmm!]
A very good friend, a lovely lady of long acquaintance, has suggested that I reveal more of my relationship with feminine beauty by bringing it even closer to home. In other words, I have a wife! How does that relationship fit in to the meaning of feminine beauty, as I understand it? Actually she has called me out on the one thing I avoided thinking about. Therefore, this essay is even more autobiographical than the last.
Nevertheless, in cleaning up my notes, I found this following entry from a year or so ago by Bishop Barron wherein he defines a pattern of behavior that fits my own behavior regarding feminine beauty. Thus I have included it first here. If you have seen the episode of The Chosen that dramatizes this encounter, you might remember the joy of the woman when she experiences what Jesus has to offer her. [I have no idea any more of either the season or the episode number.]
Then today (6/20/24) while reading Benedict XVI’s Church Fathers, in his third chapter on Saint Augustine I came across this well known and beautiful quote from the Confessions which I have for years delighted in as a commentary on my own life and experience. One of the delights of reading for knowledge as well as for pleasure is the delight in finding oneself reflected in the work of another. The two quotes from Augustine are not only expressive of my own experience and understanding, but I believe they are universal: our hearts are restless; not just mine, but that is our human universal, existential condition.
Since I have listed two sources for discussing my relationship with members of the opposite sex, I thought it prudent to list the third source, especially relevant. The third source [any bets?] is Dante. Dante is extremely important in providing a perspective on what I might call the “double billing.” In other words Dante is married to Gemma Donati and has four children with her before he is sent into exile from Florence, but his poetry throughout his life is about the meaning another woman, Beatrice Portinari, has in his life and in his understanding the meaning of his life. The meaning for Dante resides in understanding the meaning of the romantic love he experienced in the presence of Beatrice, which he documents or expresses in his La Vita Nuova and then even more profoundly in the Divine Comedy. While Dante’s relationship with Beatrice began at an early age, eight or nine, her early death at 21 became an important element in his thinking about her meaning and would not have interfered with his marriage to Gemma which no one seems to know much about.
At this point it appears to be necessary to point out the relevance of the passages cited below. First the restless heart: we appear to be made so that we have this desire; one can either believe it’s not true, or try to ignore it, or set about trying to fulfill it. Paul Tillich, if I remember correctly, calls this our ultimate concern. He too says in effect that every one has one, but that one needs to make certain that what he or she finds is truly absolute. [See his Dynamics of Faith: as Cicero did for Augustine, Tillich’s book did for me]. I suspect Augustine sought to find fulfillment in “love” relationships (relationships that were necessary to him but that didn’t work intellectually) and then in the real pursuit of truth that began with his reading of Cicero and reached its climax with his discovery of Plato and then Saint Paul.
Consider then what Augustine says in the tenth book: his pursuit is the pursuit of beauty in the external world. Surely that includes the presence of beauty in the beloved. In my case, I was always excessive like Shel Silverstein’s Hector the Collector. I found beauty everywhere: stones, rocks, gems; beer cans; comic books, to name just three. But my real interest was the pursuit of beauty in the “beloved,” which started at an early age (see “The Empty Schoolyard”). Feminine beauty is absolutely astonishing and, I think, comes closer to revealing the divine (as in Dante) for me rather than nature which also has that capacity or virtue (see Wordsworth’s Prelude). In the Middle Ages the “rules” of romantic love said that married love and romantic love must be separate: Gemma and Beatrice. However, the ideal of romantic love could, it seems, devolve simply into sexual enjoyment. And then all is lost. Consider Dante’s Paolo and Francesca and what they were reading and where it landed them. Consider Lancelot and Guinevere. They ended up in bed and eventually brought down Arthur’s Camelot. The reason married love doesn’t work finally is that the vision of the divine in the beloved comes up against her (or his) fallen nature in the day to day struggles of living a married life. Of course in the modern world dating itself will reveal the struggle first and marriage then should come with few surprises. Romantic love may well fade away in marriage only to let a real substantial love for the other take its place. At least that’s my experience.
Back to my sources then. The woman at the well has five husbands. What is she looking for in her relationships. Obviously she doesn’t find it in her husbands; only when she encounters Jesus the Lord does she discover the real absolute, the real divine, the love that passes all understanding. I intended to explore these matters after the quotes, but it seems to me I have said it here for the most part. Feminine beauty always attracts me; I can’t quit looking, but I also know now what it means. Feminine beauty is there to delight in but not to mistake that for sexual license or for concupiscence. When Augustine found the Lord in Saint Paul and within himself, he gave up the second mistress. Neither is this thou. All good things can reveal God for he made them, but none can take the place of God.
An interesting and final perspective on this is in Milton’s Paradise Lost which begins with our perspective focused on the prelapsarian Adam and Eve. We see them as God created them. The narrator makes it a point to image the relationship between the principles or virtues of Beauty and Wisdom in them. Adam was given the virtue of Wisdom; Adam knows and understands more than Eve. However, the Wisdom he has is for her; she inquires about creation; he explains. He is more knowledgeable than she is but not necessarily smarter, all things considered. Eve, on the other hand, is given the virtue of Beauty, and once again the Beauty is for the other, for Adam and is in a sense the image of his Wisdom. Together they are whole and complete as their lives are God-centered. When they become disobedient it is revealing to see the way in which our world emerges in them. (Read the poem. If you desire a commentary on this subject see my essay on Wisdom and Beauty in PL which I referenced in the preceding essay.)
_____________________________
Bishop Robert Barron
At high noon, on a very hot day, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman by Jacob’s well. To her enormous surprise, for Jews typically did not associate publicly with women or Samaritans, he asks her for a drink. When she balks, he calmly says, If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, “Give me a drink,” you would have asked him and he would have given you living water. The woman comes day after day to this well, draws the water, consumes it, and then becomes thirsty again, prompting her to return once more. Jesus is offering her not just a single refreshing drink but something that will satisfy her thirst forever: the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.
The obsessive and repeated journey to the well is a symbol of what the spiritual tradition calls “concupiscent desire,” which is to say the attempt to satisfy our longing for God through something less than God. When we seek to slake our infinite thirst for God with some worldly good—wealth, honor, pleasure, power—we are necessarily frustrated, and the pattern of our desire becomes addictive. Jesus offers the Samaritan woman grace, which is to say the divine life itself, and this will indeed become a spring bubbling up forever, for God’s life is inexhaustible.
This is why, at the end of the story, the woman puts down her bucket, the instrument by which she had drawn water for many years. She could abandon her errant, frustrating, hopeless pattern of desire, for she had found grace, the water gushing up to eternal life. That quote goes along with the idea Augustine expresses in the first chapter, also quoted below.
______________________________
Saint Augustine
Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried aloud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours. Confessions X
“You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (I, 1, 1).
_____________________________
I chose this image of the pianist Olga Scheps because it reveals various things about feminine beauty in our culture. I enjoy listening to Olga playing classical music and watching her as she plays. In a way you would be hard put to see the Olga pictured here as the same person playing Mozart or Chopin or Beethoven. When playing she gives us the gift of her talent and her hair is always up, and her look intense and determined. She is an artist at work. When she concludes the music, she stands, places her hand on her chest, smiles and bows. I find that Olga quite beautiful, quite fetching.
In the photo you find something, alas, quite different. The buyers and sellers have betrayed the pianist Olga—the piano is now in the background— the pose is supposedly relaxed and seductive with the slight come hither smile, not at all like the smile at the end of the concert. This Olga suggests concupiscente, pleasure indeed, but not now the pleasure of the music but only the pleasure of seductive beauty which you will certainly receive if you buy the album. Note how the music she plays is a reality and can reveal any number of goods while the album image is only an illusion to arouse desire.
