Salesian Literature

Chapter 1:  The beauty of human nature is due to the God-given influence of the will over all the powers of the soul

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Introduce unity into diversity, and you create order; order yields harmony, proportion; harmony, where you have perfect integrity, begets beauty.  There is beauty in music when voices, which are true, clear, distinct, blend to produce perfect consonance, perfect harmony.

 

Beauty is so called because knowledge of it pleases us.  This means that, in addition to unity and diversity, integrity, order and harmony, it should also have brilliance or clarity by which it can be known and seen.  To be beautiful, voices must be clear and true, speech intelligible, colours vivid and bright.

 

Most assuredly, Theotimus, beauty is rendered ineffective, unavailing – it is even utterly ruined – if clarity and brilliance fail to give it life; only when they have a lustrous splendour do we call colours vivid.

 

To be perfect in beauty, living things must also be graceful.  This joins to a harmonious perfection of parts the additional harmony of movement, in signs and actions, which is the soul of beauty – its vital spark – in all living things.  For this reason we meet with unity in the supreme beauty of God:  unity of essence in distinction of persons, bathed in infinite brilliance; added to this, an inexpressible harmony by which every perfection of action and movement is wonderfully included in (adapted to, you might say) the unique simple perfection of pure actuality; God, in other words, who is free from all potentiality and change … But I shall explain this further on[1].

 

God, then, bent on bestowing beauty on all things, transforms their multiplicity and diversity into perfect unity; arrays them – so to speak – under a monarchy, one thing dependent on another, all dependent on him as absolute monarch.  He makes many organs into one body, under one head; from several individual, he forms a family; from many families, a town; from many towns, a shire; from many shires, a kingdom – the whole kingdom subject to a single king.  In this way God enthrones the will over the multiplicity and variety of actions, impulses, feelings, inclinations, habits, passions, faculties and powers to be found in each man.

 

In this little world the will is monarch of all it surveys.  God says to the will, it would seem, what Pharaoh said to Joseph: Thou shalt have charge of my household and all my people shall obey thy word of command; no one shall be free to move hand or foot without thy permission (Gen. 41:40, 44).  In practice, however, the will’s power of control varies greatly.

 

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[1]  Book 2, Chapter 2.

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