I’ll take a dip into your beauty topic Rick!
If atheism (materialism) is defined as the maximation of ugliness, then I would say that the sliding scale of ugliness-beauty is a mental construct (that I just constructed!) where on one end God-does-not-exist, and at the other end exists God-in-his-glory. When I think of materialism, vanity comes to mind. I’m not suggesting vanity is to be abhorred. Not at all. After all my professional work is of a type of a very lucrative vanity industry. People, men and women, do care about how their hair looks and spend a lot of money getting it right. There is a place for vanity in our emotional life.
68:2:10 If
vanity be enlarged to cover pride, ambition, and honor, then we may discern not only how these propensities contribute to the formation of human associations, but how they also hold men together, since such emotions are futile without an audience to parade before. Soon
vanity associated with itself other emotions and impulses which required a social arena wherein they might exhibit and gratify themselves. This group of emotions gave origin to the early beginnings of all art, ceremonial, and all forms of sportive games and contests.
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Everyone wants to be beautiful, pretty, or handsome. (Well, maybe not everyone.) Everyone wants the prefect body, according to one’s internal standards of perfection, in conjunction with one’s social and cultural standards. But where do those internal perfection standards come from? Any human standard of perfection fails, in my opinion, if it does not put in first place the unutterable aspirations of the human soul to be perfect, even as our Father in heaven is perfect. The maximation of ugliness is atheism, because God is denied by the mind of the individual who thinks God does not exist and who professes atheism.
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A sliding scale of finite-cosmic beauty, might be expressed as: “Beauty, art, is largely a matter of the unification of contrasts. . . ” man finding God and God finding man, also known as the apex of cosmic art.
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56:10:3 Philosophy you somewhat grasp, and divinity you comprehend in worship, social service, and personal spiritual experience, but the pursuit of beauty–cosmology–you all too often limit to the study of man’s crude artistic endeavors. Beauty, art, is largely a matter of the unification of contrasts. Variety is essential to the concept of beauty. The supreme beauty, the height of finite art, is the drama of the unification of the vastness of the cosmic extremes of Creator and creature. Man finding God and God finding man–the creature becoming perfect as is the Creator–that is the supernal achievement of the supremely beautiful, the attainment of the apex of cosmic art.
Thanks much for chiming in Mara,
Good thoughts all.
Since human physical beauty is so fleeting, I more and more disregard it, looking instead to the inner light shining out of the eyes, mind and heart. But you make an excellent and germane point about the value and history of vanity.
In the human mind, the word beauty almost always evokes the human face. Especially the female face. For proof just google “beauty images”, you’ll see pages and pages of airbrushed female faces, virtually no male faces.
The words “beautiful images” when googled bring far different photos, diverse and natural mostly, seldom does a male or female face appear. That’s a good sign.
But, not until the Urantia Book do we find beauty permanently associated with the splendor of the cosmos. The stupendous living mechanism of the universe, integrated as it is on physical, intellectual and spiritual levels, is moving along to the rhythm and beat of The Creator. The magnificence of the Universe is ever changing, as The Great Orchestrator and Architect of the Cosmos rings out the harmonies of a compelling love that keeps the great family of Daughters and Sons busy building something else altogether Beautiful, the Supreme Being. How beautiful will the Supreme be, constructed of all the divine values that have been wrought and accumulated from time and space, lowly creatures’ values that continually drift into God’s project, our project, building an Experiential God whose substance is Truth, Beauty and Goodness, according to this:
…God the Supreme is truth, beauty, and goodness, for these concepts of divinity represent finite maximums of ideational experience. The eternal sources of these triune qualities of divinity are on superfinite levels, but a creature could only conceive of such sources as supertruth, superbeauty, and supergoodness…. (1279:5) 117:1.7
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Hmmm…Superbeauty!
