Perfect Beauty

IV. The Desire for Perfect and Unconditional Beauty

One need not read the nineteenth century Romantic poets or listen to the great Romantic composers, or view the works of Romantic artists to see the human capacity to idolize beauty. One only need look at the examples of simple dissatisfaction with beauty in our everyday lives. We don’t look good enough and neither do other people. The house is not perfect enough, the painting can never achieve perfection, and the musical composition, though beautiful beyond belief, could always be better. Once in a great while, we think we have arrived at consummate beauty. This might occur while looking at a scene of natural beauty: a sunset over the water, majestic green and brown mountains against a horizon of blue sky; but even there, despite our desire to elevate it to the quasi-divine, we get bored and strive for a different or an even more perfect manifestation of natural beauty – a little better sunset, another vantage point of the Alps that’s a little more perfect.

As with the desire for the other three transcendentals (perfect truth, perfect love, and perfect goodness/justice), human beings seem to have an awareness of what is more beautiful. It incites them to the desire for this more perfect ideal. This desire has both a positive and a negative effect. The positive effect is that it incites the continuous human striving for artistic, musical, and literary perfection. We do not passively desire to create, we passionately desire to create, to express in ever more beautiful forms, the perfection of beauty that we seem to carry within our consciousness. We do not simply want to say an idea, we want to express it beautifully, indeed, more beautifully, indeed, perfectly beautifully. We do not simply want to express a mood in music, we want to express it perfectly beautifully. This striving has left a legacy of architecture and art, music and drama, and every form of high culture.

The negative effect is that we will always grow bored or frustrated with any imperfect manifestation of beauty. This causes us to try to make perfectly beautiful what is imperfect by nature. It is true that a garden can achieve a certain perfection of beauty, but our continuous desire to improve it can make us grow terribly dissatisfied when we cannot perfect it indefinitely.

This is evidenced quite strongly in the artistic community. When one reads the biographies of great artists, musicians, and poets, one senses the tragedy with which art is frequently imbued. What causes these extraordinarily gifted men and women to abuse themselves, to judge themselves so harshly, to so totally pour themselves into their art? Perhaps it’s when art becomes a “god,” when one tries to extract perfect and unconditional beauty from imperfect and conditioned minds and forms.

Where does this sense of perfect beauty come from? As with the other three yearnings for the ultimate, we are led to the beautiful itself, for dissatisfaction with even the most beautiful objects of our experience reveals our ability to indefinitely perceive the limits of worldly beauty, which, in turn, reveals our ability to be beyond those limits, which, in turn, reveals a notional awareness of what perfect beauty might be (a notional awareness of a beauty without imperfection or limit). Therefore it is not surprising to see the divine associated with perfect beauty, majesty, splendor, magnificence, grandeur, and glory.

This notional presence of perfect and unconditional beauty to human consciousness further reveals the transmaterial (spiritual), self-transcendent dimension of human beings.