Exiled and Imperfect: Thoughts on Beauty

So I've been reading several books of late, among them: Jacques Maritain's essay Art and Scholasticism -- which you can read online here (the one benefit being the hyperlinked footnotes; and endlessly better than the large print book I mistakenly ordered and now possess). It's a rich and influential essay, empowering the likes of O'Connor, Percy and several more Catholic writers in the middle of last century. I recommend it with the caveat that it is not an easy read, not simple and thoroughly challenging.

One of the more salient discourses I came across is the the fifth chapter on Art and Beauty. Maritain has taken great pains to put into words the aesthetic and unquantifiable weight of Beauty -- what it is and what it represents, to the artist first, and to the perceiver of art. I was most struck by the notion that Baudelaire presents:

"it is this immortal instinct for the beautiful which makes us consider the earth and its various spectacles as a sketch of, as a correspondence with, Heaven."

I like this notion. That beauty, and what is beautiful, is a sort of window into Heaven. I remember a great speaker, Dennis Kinlaw, in chapel during college who talked about this idea. He said that if there were to be a Heaven, and all it's classical notions of being greater than this world, we should, at the very least, expect it to leak into this world. Expect to see evidences of it here and there and around us. Little windows into the great, wide expanse of a greatness we cannot very well handle in our present world (cf. Chesterton's take on the levity of angels).

But more than the windows we can look through it is our desire, the artists desire to search and seek and pine for these glimpses. Baudelaire goes on to say the following:

"We have still a thirst unquenchable. thirst belongs to the immortality of Man. It is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above.... And thus when by Poetry, or when by Music, the most entrancing of the poetic moods, we find ourselves melted into tears, we weep then, not... through excess of pleasure, but through a certain petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and forever, those divine and rapturous joys of which, through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses."

The moth for the star. Not just a flicker of a flame on a candle, a burning, roaring fire, a conflagration of a forest, a STAR. The moth for a burning, firing, flaming, bundle of gas and beauty and danger. The moth for a star. So may we seek after beauty in and around.