09-18-2017, 10:57 AM
I loved her because she was beautiful. Then I woke up, and realized I had nothing but her beauty. At first I languished -- I suffered, having my love be so distant from me. But such suffering builds virtue, and I learned to love without relying on her beauty. Now I love her absolutely, unconditionally, even when all I have to know her by is her red hair, her green eyes, her special way with words -- her beauty.
Dante's poetry was rooted in Beatrice, but ultimately strove for God. He and his ilk believed, as Plato did, that beauty was a guide to love, and love a keeper of beauty. Forget definition: as love grows to reach its ideal state, so beauty becomes undefined, subsuming all good things in its wake. And what is love's ideal state, if not God?
Of course, I still suffer now, just as I still pray to God that she become real, or that I become ideal. Living in this world of forms, I cannot divorce my virtue from my desire, not completely. But if virtue is gained through prayer, and desire is made holy through prayer, then what have I through my suffering gained, but more love, more beauty, more virtue, more holiness? To answer the question, love in its imperfect state needs beauty, just as beauty in its dynamic state needs love -- but in their ideal states, Love needs not anything at all, while beauty, remaining a concept fundamentally tied to the created world, begins to need Love, albeit in a manner that surpasses the question. A manner, perhaps, that could only be expressed through another term: grace.
Dante's poetry was rooted in Beatrice, but ultimately strove for God. He and his ilk believed, as Plato did, that beauty was a guide to love, and love a keeper of beauty. Forget definition: as love grows to reach its ideal state, so beauty becomes undefined, subsuming all good things in its wake. And what is love's ideal state, if not God?
Of course, I still suffer now, just as I still pray to God that she become real, or that I become ideal. Living in this world of forms, I cannot divorce my virtue from my desire, not completely. But if virtue is gained through prayer, and desire is made holy through prayer, then what have I through my suffering gained, but more love, more beauty, more virtue, more holiness? To answer the question, love in its imperfect state needs beauty, just as beauty in its dynamic state needs love -- but in their ideal states, Love needs not anything at all, while beauty, remaining a concept fundamentally tied to the created world, begins to need Love, albeit in a manner that surpasses the question. A manner, perhaps, that could only be expressed through another term: grace.