The Sense in Which Beauty Is Higher Than Goodness and Truth in Being With Them
Inspired by “The Net (74).” How there is hierarchy yet harmony.
“The Three Infinites” are classically beauty, truth, and goodness, and we ultimately require all three or else we end up in privation and perversion. In this, they are all in a sense equal, and yet there is another sense in which beauty is higher than goodness and truth. How so? Because it is in beauty that we can gain all three “with” one another (“beauty with goodness with truth”), which please note isn’t necessarily the same as saying “equal to” one another (“beauty equal to goodness equal to truth”). In goodness, we can gain “goodness with truth,” and in truth we can only have “truth with truth,” suggesting beauty is highest because of its capacity for “full with-ness” (and in that way we can say goodness “is” beauty as truth “is” beauty but only in beauty—the equality is contingent in that sense). Beauty is where the three infinities can be “in harmony,” and so there is a way in which beauty is the highest because it “dies to itself” in making space for the other. Beauty invites.
We as humans generally start learning (“climbing”) with facts, truths like “this is a pen.” We can then learn how it is good to use a pen, and once we learn how to write, we can learn to write beautifully. We likely cannot write beautifully with a pen (amid all the countless ways we could write) if we don’t know the good way to use it (amid all the countless possibilities), and we cannot know how to use a pen unless we know what it “is” (amid all the countless phenomena which make up reality). Thus “is-ness” (truth) can lead to “toward-ness” (goodness), which can lead to “art-fullness” (beauty), an order which ultimately requires metaphysics and phenomenology to determine, as discussed in A Philosophy of Glimpses. Please note that the order must be truth to goodness to beauty—we cannot start with beauty if we don’t know what a thing is or the right way to use it, as we cannot know the right way to use a thing we cannot identify. The “higher we climb” though, the more we garner the other infinites “in harmony” and so in a sense equally, and it is in that sense we can say the Three Infinities are “equal with one another” (in beauty). Technically, we might want to say “with” more than equal, but admittedly language is always tricky (I certainly don’t always maintain wording like I should).
Now, since truth can be with goodness in goodness (for example), it is there that goodness can be in conflict with goodness, and in beauty it is possible for goodness to be in conflict with goodness and truth. There must be “with-ness” for the possibility of conflict, and it is in beauty hence that the greatest evils seem possible. Those who have attuned their souls to be capable of experiencing beauty are very great souls that if they go astray, really go astray. To know beauty is to bear great responsibility. Fortunately, beauty draws us in, which suggests that moving away from it cannot happen on accident. If we “fall,” we choose to “fall,” knowing full well what we are doing, and yet for some reason believing we are doing what is best all the same.
If we are “toward” beauty, beauty will help us be “toward” it, but that means if we turn away we must have a strong will against it. And so we will instantly have a will that greatly favors us over the beautiful—which suggests why only the highest angel can become Lucifer, why only potential saints can become demons. Does this mean demons can become angels? Perhaps, but if angels turned away once, why would they turn back later? The act of turning away from beauty is the act of descending into hell, and so the flames of hell will not necessarily cause repentance if it didn’t during the descent. And so the will which turns away seems to stay away. Even if the door to hell is always unlocked, it might always remain closed.
The more we move from truth to goodness (with truth) to beauty (with goodness and truth), the more we gain virtue and become the kind of being which can experience beauty and be attuned to it, but thus all the more horrible it is if we turn away from beauty (as we gain capacity with beauty, so rise the stakes if we turn away). The more water a cup can hold, the more emptiness we will find in the cup if it is emptied out, and the more we “ascend toward beauty” the taller of a cup we become and the more filled with water we are (hence more “potential emptiness” also emerges in us). Might it be better than if we don’t try to “ascend toward beauty?” No, for it is good to ascend: to avoid the risk is vice, which suggests that virtue requires something like “reverential fear.”
As Thomas Jockin discusses, to the degree we “move toward beauty” might be tied to the degree we don’t “waste time” and choose to use our time in a way that better attunes our character to experience beauty, but with growing this also grows the capacity for greater evil (a risk “goodness” would compel us to take). Fortunately, there is grace in beauty in that the more we attune to it, the harder it is to turn away. And yet we can turn away. Why would we? A great question: it would seem likely because we have an idea of “what is true” or “what is good” that we are willing to put in conflict with beauty because we are so sure that it is right, “the true good,” or something similar. This basically seems like it must be what happens, for it would seem only goodness and truth have enough “power” to oppose beauty enough for someone to turn away (in fact, perhaps only goodness and truth together could muster that unalignment of the will). This in mind, there are narratives of Lucifer and Iblis in which his “idea of what is good for God” comes in conflict with “God’s Will,” hence how Lucifer and Iblis could fall before sin entered the world (an “idea of good” comes in conflict with “the true and beautiful good,” per se). So might go the worst terrors in history: “an idea” of the good of those capable of attuning themselves to beauty come in conflict with true and beautiful goodness.
Reality can be seen as the movement itself into the beautiful so that reality can know itself as beautiful. Reality is arguably the movement into the beautiful, the Dance of Dante (and for the Christian, perhaps we might think of a movement from “Christ into the Holy Spirit into the Father” as like the movement from “truth to goodness to beauty,” not only for individuals but for history as a whole?). As we gain truth, grace covers us for not yet garnering goodness and beauty, but once we gain goodness, then we are responsible for not falling back into “just truth” or for putting truth in conflict with goodness (for now goodness falls within the domain of our will). Likewise, before we reach beauty, we are not responsible for lacking it, and our soul has not “opened” to be capable of handling beauty, and so the consequences of us lacking it are not so great. But once we gain beauty, if we lose it, it must be a product of our will, and so the consequences are steep. As we climb, we cannot fall back without great consequence, but there is no need for the genuine in heart to fear. Beauty will hold us as we climb up and be-hold the dance.
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the lack of dialectic as we move to gather the dialectical elements, which is similar to the paint drying -- not necessarily fervently, however drying all the same -- this paint drying, this paint drying, represents and recapitulates the house in which it was built, in which it became paint, became paint as paint in paint -- not necessarily the chemicals, the elements, the proximal and for the most parts, parting ways to be in existence for the house that needs the paint, that is a better house for having paint, and the chemicals in the paint are better for having been given to the representation of the house in time and space.