At Catholic Culture, Dr. Jeff Mirus offers some helpful thoughts on beauty;
In contrast, any use of the artistic crafts which tends to turn the receiver in upon himself, closes him to the universal, concentrates his attention on apparently disjointed particulars, and tends to stimulate a sense of meaninglessness or despair is not an expression of beauty, no matter how pretty or how brilliantly executed it may be. Hence all materialisms and ideologies invariably subvert art."
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"Beauty, like being, has an infinite amplitude. But the work as such, realized in matter, exists in a certain genus, in aliquo genere. And it is impossible for a genus to exhaust a transcendental. Outside the artistic genre to which this work belongs, there is always an infinity of ways of being a beautiful work....
...No form of art, however perfect, can encompass beauty within its limits, as the Virgin contained her Creator. The artist is faced with an immense and lonely sea... and the mirror he holds up to it is no bigger than his own heart."
- Jacques Maritain
Good stuff.
Posted by: William Luse | September 05, 2009 at 03:07 AM
“Beauty is the battlefield where God and the devil war for the soul of man,” Dostoevsky had Mitya Karamazov declare, and the battle runs deep.
Posted by: e. | September 09, 2009 at 12:42 PM