Beauty, Suffering, and Mortality

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How about them who experience their daily being as burdensome and unbearable? Do they have their share in the beauty we are talking about? I claim that they do. To quote Marsilio Ficino, amor est desiderium pulchritudinis, love is the longing for beauty. Someone may have a life that seems devoid of both love and beauty, and I am afraid that there are plenty of such people. But life without longing, without hope or desire for something better, is unthinkable. Life that has no expectations, even if it were nothing more than getting drunk or waiting for the next meal, is inevitably going to its end. Hence beauty is present even in the struggle for survival, amidst hunger and violence.

One should not forget that many of the great masterworks of art are created at the time when famine and plague tortured mankind (e.g. the frescos of Michelangelo and the cantatas of Bach). This does not mean that outer hardships per se benefit artistic work, but that even the hardest times can not extinguish the human ability and urge to perceive and produce beauty. As a matter of fact, art is one of the most significant, creative and useful ways to cope with the darkest sides of human existence.

 To see the beauty of life does not mean that our life should have a happy ending. As far as we know, human life is always a tragedy. We all die in the end. Beauty is something that mortal beings are aware of. We may suppose or believe that there are immortal beings (God, angels) who can appreciate beauty, even better than we. However, our idea of beauty is not of a supernatural origin, even if we believe that God is the source of all beauty. We do not know how does an immortal or all-knowing Being apprehend beauty, but about how humans experience beauty we have ample evidence and personal knowledge. For us, there is no other beauty than the transient and mortal one. Faith means here the necessary perspective for us to see this.

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