Towards an Aesthetic Teleology:
Romantic Love, Imagination and the Beautiful
in the Thought of Simone Weil and Charles Williams
Laura A. Smit
A biology professor I once knew used to have the habit of standing up in the
interdisciplinary seminar we both attended and beginning his remarks by
saying, "In the 20th century, science has proven that…" Whatever followed was
almost inevitably something with which I disagreed. One of his favorite targets
was the idea that human life has a purpose or a point. "In the 20th century,
science has proven that there is no such thing as teleology." I remember him
saying this on more than one occasion.
I always found this professor's comments particularly jarring because they were
so radically at odds with the assumptions encountered in my own area of study:
medieval Christian philosophical theology. Christian thinkers in the middle
ages see teleology as a self-evident part of the world around us. I would like to
believe that they are right. I want to start with the assumption that life is meant
to be beautiful, not ugly; purposeful, not random. I enjoy medieval
philosophical theology because I find there a support for such assumptions, a
support that is often missing from contemporary philosophy and theology. My
work is motivated by a hope that there may be a way to recapture the ancient
and medieval vision of both Beauty and purpose in a way that is relevant to our
own century. I even dare to hope that the two ideas may be related, that Beauty
is actually part of the meaning and purpose of life.
In discussing the concept of progress, C. S. Lewis once observed:
We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place
where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go
forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road,
progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road;
and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive
man. We have all seen this when doing arithmetic. When I have started a
sum the wrong way, the sooner I admit this and go back and start over
again, the faster I shall get on. There is nothing progressive about being
pigheaded and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the
present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been
making some big mistakes. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so,
we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.
If we have, indeed, come to such a pass that the concepts of beauty and
purpose, goal and design are no longer seen as relevant, it is high time to go
back. In this paper, I hope to offer the beginnings of support for a teleology
based on aesthetics, specifically based on the idea that a goal - perhaps
even the goal - of human life is to apprehend and attain the Beautiful. I believe
that the philosophy of the past may be reappropriated and adapted by us to
defend such teleology. Two 20th-century authors who are models of such
reappropriation of past thinking are Simone Weil (1909-1943) and Charles
Williams (1886-1945). Weil is known primarily as a philosopher, working
under the influence of ancient philosophy, particularly Plato. Williams was a
novelist, poet and literary critic, who was most influenced by Dante and the
literature of the Renaissance. Both were thinkers shaped by a deep respect for
tradition and a profound religious faith. Both offer the possibility of a teleology
oriented toward Beauty - though with significant differences.
SIMONE WEIL AND THE VIA NEGATIVA
For Simone Weil, the first goal of human life is renunciation, especially the
renunciation of any illusory structures of meaning generated by the
imagination. Such renunciation is an assent to nothingness, and as such appears
to work against a purposive ordering of life and in favor of a nihilistic
understanding of the universe. Weil is interesting and useful precisely because
she begins with renunciation and moves toward purposive order.
Renunciation, according to Weil, must begin with my understanding of myself.
"I... am other than I imagine myself to be," writes Weil. Self-knowledge begins
with the letting go of the imaginary self, which we experience as self-denial or
abnegation.
I cannot conceive the necessity for God to love me, when I feel so
clearly that even with human beings affection for me can only be a
mistake. But I can easily imagine that he loves that perspective of
creation which can only be seen from the point where I am. But I act as a
screen. I must withdraw so that he may see it.
Weil's religious convictions thus do not lead her to a sense of self-worth, but
rather to a determination to withdraw or disappear.
Self-denial is a consistent theme in Weil's writing and was also a theme in her
life. She died young, partly as a result of a commitment to asceticism, which
undermined her health. Robert Coles cites a prayer Weil wrote near the end of
her life when she was living in New York. It illustrates the extremity of her
commitment to self-denial.
Father, in the name of Christ, grant me this in all reality.
May this body move or be still, with perfect suppleness or rigidity, in
continuous conformity to thy will. May our faculties of hearing, sight,
taste, smell and touch register the perfectly accurate impress of thy
creation. May this mind, in fullest lucidity, connect all ideas in perfect
conformity with thy truth. May this sensibility experience, in their
greatest possible intensity and in all their purity, all the nuances of grief
and joy. May this love be an absolutely devouring flame of love for God.
May all this be stripped away from me, devoured by God, transformed
into Christ's substance, and given for food to afflicted men whose body
and soul lack every kind of nourishment. And let me be a paralytic blind, deaf, witless and utterly decrepit....
Father, since thou art the Good, and I am mediocrity, rend this body and
soul away from me to make them do things for your use, and let nothing
remain of me, forever, except this rending itself, or else nothingness.
Although she was never left blind, deaf or witless, Weil did spend her life
looking for opportunities to sacrifice herself for others, often to the
exasperation of her family and friends. She sought out opportunities for hard
labor, working in factories and on farms, and attempted to live on as little food
as possible. While in an English hospital during World War II, she would
accept only as much food as she would have been rationed had she still been in
France. Self-renunciation was not just a theoretical commitment for Weil, but a
way of life.
But renunciation is not masochistic for Weil. It is a sign of love. She suggests
that in renouncing the imagined meanings and paradigms by which we try to
control the world we reflect God's renunciation of control in the act of creation,
thereby making space for our love of creation and other people.
God's creative love which maintains us in existence is not merely a
superabundance of generosity, it is also renunciation and sacrifice. Not
only the Passion but the Creation itself is a renunciation and sacrifice on
the part of God.... God already voids himself of his divinity by the
Creation. He takes the form of a slave, submits to necessity, abases
himself. His love maintains in existence, in a free and autonomous
existence, beings other than himself, beings other than the good,
mediocre beings. Through love, he abandons them to affliction and sin.
For if he did not abandon them they would not exist. His presence would
annul their existence as a flame kills a butterfly.
God's absence thus becomes a sign of his love, because it is only his
withdrawal that makes other life possible.
Since we are not God, we cannot practice renunciation by means of creation ex
nihilo. For us, renunciation consists of being willing to live under the necessity
of reality, which is fundamentally indifferent to us or at least to our
imaginations of ourselves. Renunciation consists of submission to the laws of
the natural world. One of the philosophers Weil found most intriguing was
Spinoza, and we can hear echoes of his determinism here. This is why Weil
does not ever seem to move from the renunciation of the imagined self to
acceptance or celebration of the real self. Self-assertion - even the assertion of
the true self as made and known by God - would be rebellion against necessity.
To know the self truly is to know that we are people living under authority
before which we should submit.
This submission to necessity requires that we renounce our imagination, not
only insofar as we imagine we know ourselves but also our imaginings about
the world and other people. Weil's suspicion of the imagination is one of the
most consistent features of her work. She presents imagination as the source of
illusion and deception, generating an alternative and unreal world in which we
often choose to live. Renouncing the power of the imagination is a prerequisite
for receiving revelation or knowledge of the real.
We live in a world of unreality and dreams. To give up our imaginary
position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the
imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and
eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence. A transformation
then takes place at the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate
reception of sense impressions and psychological impressions. It is a
transformation analogous to that which takes place in the dusk of
evening on a road, where we suddenly discern as a tree what we had at
first seen as a stooping man; or where we suddenly recognize as a
rustling of leaves what we thought at first was whispering voices. We
see the same colors; we hear the same sounds, but not in the same way.
In renouncing our imagination in this way, we imitate God's act of renunciation
when he willed the creation of the world - something outside himself - and
decided to allow freedom to his creatures. But it is also a different act, for we
are surrendering our desire to create a world and agreeing instead to live in the
one already created. This submission to necessity is what Weil understands by
love.
To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up
being the center of the world in imagination, to discern that all points in
the world are equally centers and that the true center is outside the world,
this is to consent to the rule of mechanical necessity in matter and of free
choice at the center of each soul. Such consent is love. The face of this
love, which is turned toward thinking persons, is the love of our
neighbor; the face turned toward matter is love of the order of the world,
or love of the beauty of the world which is the same thing.
Finally, after all this renunciation of self, submission to necessity and surrender
of imagination, we arrive - surprisingly - at beauty. Since beauty and order are
the same thing for Weil, beauty becomes a function of the world's necessity, for
which she uses the metaphor of gravity. The beautiful order of the world is an
irresistible force that we must obey, whether willingly or unwillingly.
Weil's emphasis on the renunciation of imagination and images marks her as a
follower of the via negativa, the pursuit of the ultimate by way of elimination.
"Not this, not this, not this" - that is the motto of this path. All imagined
realities must be exposed and rejected.
This act of suspending imagination is what Weil calls attention. It is essentially
a "shattering" of illusions. An inattentive person enjoys the illusion of control.
One who has begun to pay attention realizes not only that control is imaginary,
but also that the natural world will not fulfill the natural desires of human life.
Attention reveals the absence of the ultimate. Those who lack the courage to
pay attention and who live in an imaginary world of their own devising may
ignore this painful absence. Weil will not ignore it.
The process of paying attention begins with the intellectual life of study especially with math and science - because such study reveals our subservience
to necessity and our helplessness to control the events around us. Ann
Pirruccello explains the importance of study for Weil.
In applying oneself to intellectual exercises, one can come to an
appreciation of truth as something universal and necessary. Studies teach
us that a suspension of our selves - our own opinions and imagination is prerequisite to the apprehension of necessary and universal truths.
Mathematical studies are particularly helpful in this regard. The
intelligence is forced to recognize and manipulate necessary
relationships, which are resistant to imaginative attempts to invent truth.
Specific relationships must be obeyed, and rules must be rigorously
applied in order for such intellectual exercises to be successful.
Thus, although a philosopher, Weil is not opposed to science, but sees it as a
teacher in the development of the mature person.
When my attention moves beyond myself and my studies to other people, I
must again renounce the imagined apprehension of other people which would
allow me the illusion of being the Creator, designing and controlling the world
around me. Rather, I must be attentive to the other as purely real - as an
independent existence not oriented to me. Weil describes the common
experience of writing to a friend and anticipating his reply. "It is impossible
that he should not reply by saying what I have said to myself in his name."
Having scripted the response in advance and imagined a particular answer, it is
startling and disturbing to encounter the other's independence. "Men owe us
what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt." This
attention to the reality of the other is how I show love to my neighbor, just as
attention to the necessity of the world is how I love the beauty of the created
order.
Imagination is the reverse of love. Imagination is associated with possession,
love with distance. Imagination is associated with illusion, love with reality.
Love needs reality. What is more terrible than the discovery that through
a bodily appearance we have been loving an imaginary being. It is much
more terrible than death, for death does not prevent the beloved from
having lived.
That is the punishment for having fed love on imagination.
Most of us have probably had the experience of being disillusioned after an
infatuation, of realizing that the person with whom we thought we were in love
was merely the product of our own imagination and that the real person is a
disappointment. Most of us have probably not identified our fantasies in such
instances as criminal, but that is how Weil defines them. She claims that such
imaginings are an offense against reality, that they are poisonous for real love,
which she elsewhere defines as "belief in the existence of other human beings
as such."
Such love is the recognition of the other's beauty, since beauty is precisely that
which is distant and not possessable. "Everything obeys God, therefore
everything is perfect beauty." Beauty consists in being what one is designed to
be, i.e., of being in obedience to one's nature. To some extent, Weil thinks
obedience is not chosen, but inevitable, as a function of God's sovereignty. To
that extent, everything is beautiful. On the connection between beauty and
necessity, Weil observes:
In the beauty of the world harsh necessity becomes an object of love.
What is more beautiful than the effect of gravity on sea-waves as they
flow in ever-changing folds, or the almost eternal folds of the
mountains?
The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that ships are
sometimes wrecked. On the contrary this adds to its beauty. If it altered
the movement of its waves to spare a ship it would be a creature gifted
with discernment and choice, and not this fluid perfectly obedient to
every external pressure. It is this perfect obedience which makes the
sea's beauty.
For Weil, the Real is not immediately apparent and is only visible through
loving self-renunciation. We can see the influence of Plato in her insistence on
the contrast between reality and illusion. Weil envisions life as being a sort of
screen behind which can be glimpsed formal reality. Beauty exists behind the
screen, in the realm of the Real, and is appropriately apprehended and loved,
not pursued or possessed.
The beautiful is a carnal attraction which keeps us at a distance and
implies a renunciation. This includes the renunciation of that which is
most deep-seated, the imagination. We want to eat all the other objects
of desire. The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it.
We desire that it should be....
We have to remain quite still and unite ourselves with that which we
desire yet do not approach.
We unite ourselves to God in this way: we cannot approach him.
Distance is the soul of the beautiful.
The imagination has no role in this experience.
Beauty is the source of finality for Weil, but an ultimately unsatisfying source.
Beauty creates a desire which it can not itself meet and confronts us with God's
absence within the sensible world. Beauty makes us long for finality but offers
us nothing beyond its own existence, which may only be apprehended from
afar. Beauty alerts us to our own incompleteness.
Beauty is the supreme mystery of this world. It is a gleam which attracts
the attention and yet does nothing to sustain it. Beauty always promises,
but never gives anything; it stimulates hunger but has no nourishment for
the part of the soul which looks in this world for sustenance. It feeds
only the part of the soul that gazes. While exciting desire, it makes clear
that there is nothing in it to be desired. Because the one thing we want is
that it should not change. If one does not seek means to evade the
exquisite anguish it inflicts, then desire is gradually transformed into
love; and one begins to acquire the faculty of pure and disinterested
attention.
One can never find enough visible finality in the world to prove that it is
analogous to an object made with a view to a certain end. It is even
manifest that this is not the case. Yet the analogy between the world and
a work of art has its experimental verification in the very feeling itself of
the beauty of the world, for the beautiful is the only source of the sense
of beauty. This verification is valid only for those who have experienced
that feeling, but those who have never felt it, and who are doubtless very
rare, cannot perhaps be brought to God by any path. In comparing the
world to a work of art, it is not only the act of creation but Providence
itself which is found to be assimilated in the artistic inspiration. That is
to say that in the world, as in the work of art, there is completion without
any imaginable end.... In a sense the end is nothing but the very
arrangement, the assembling itself of the means employed; in another
sense the end is completely transcendent.
Weil connects Beauty and Purpose in this analogy between the world and a
work of art. But she also leaves them disconnected, suggesting that ultimately
Beauty serves to show us what our purpose is not, more than what our purpose
is. Beauty reveals the limitations of our experience and illustrates our need for
some reality to transcend that experience and make it meaningful.
George Herbert - an author who exercised a strong influence on Weil expresses this idea in his poem "The Pulley." Herbert explains that when God
created people, he poured all possible blessings on them: beauty, wisdom,
honor, pleasure. The only blessing which he withheld was the blessing of rest.
For if I should (said he)
Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:
So both should losers be.
Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness:
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast.
Clearly, Herbert is inspired here by Augustine's idea of the restless heart. Like
Herbert, Weil suggests that it is part of the design of creation that people should
not be able to rest in Nature. So, although Beauty has a finality about it, it is not
the final finality. Weil leaves us with the classic outcome of the via negativa being driven outside and beyond experience to find the transcendent and
wholly other God.
There are some elements of immanentism in Weil, but they are consistently
overshadowed by her insistence on transcendence. She affirms that the
beautiful is "the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible." She
further says that all beauty reflects God. But even in its reflection of God, the
Beautiful suggests negation and distance, a distance which can not be crossed
or bridged, at least not within our experience. "To love purely is to consent to
distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love."
Beauty functions teleologically for Weil in that it is the only thing we can
experience which is not a means, but purely an end. However, our experience
of Beauty, even under the power of love, remains frustrating and unsatisfying.
CHARLES WILLIAMS AND THE VIA AFFIRMATIVA
In contrast to Weil, Charles Williams consistently presents both God and the
Beautiful as immanent. He explicitly ties this to the Incarnation, and affirms
that he is presenting the via affirmativa. Williams does write about suffering
and renunciation, so there is a negative way present in his writing, but his
emphasis is very deliberately on the affirmative. In The Figure of Beatrice as
well as elsewhere, Williams lays out the features of these two paths, which he
calls "the Way of Affirmation" and "the Way of Rejection." He posits that the
Way of Rejection has been more commonly followed in the history of Christian
doctrine, perhaps because it is logically prior to the Way of Affirmation. "It
was necessary first to establish the awful difference between God and the world
before we could be permitted to see the awful likeness." He admits that a
balanced life requires that the "tangle of affirmation and rejection which is in
each of us... be drawn into some kind of pattern," although he himself is drawn
more clearly to the Way of Affirmation - which he also calls "the Way of
Images," and "the Dantean Way," since he identifies Dante as its greatest
exemplar.
In the literature of Europe the greatest record of the Way of Affirmation
of Images is contained in the work of Dante Alighieri.... he had the
genius to imagine the Way of Affirmation wholly - after a particular
manner indeed, but then that is the nature of the way of the Images. If a
man is called to imagine certain images, he must work in them and not in
others. The record of the Dantean Way begins with three things - an
experience, the environment of that experience, and the means of
understanding and expressing that experience; say - a woman, a city, and
intellect or poetry; say again - Beatrice, Florence, and Virgil. These
images are never quite separated, even in the beginning; towards the end
they mingle and become a great complex image. They end with the
inGodding of man.
Alice Hadfield, Williams' chief biographer, says that in The Figure of Beatrice,
"the title [uses] a formal meaning of the word 'figure' - a mixing of idea and
shape - as a blending of imagination and fact." Clearly, for Williams the
imagination is a good thing, a tool to be used in apprehending God.
Even when he is calling for self-renunciation, Williams gives this call a
positive spin which is unlike that of Simone Weil.
The denial of the self has come, as is natural, to mean in general the
making of the self thoroughly uncomfortable. That (though it may be all
that is possible) leaves the self still strongly existing. But the phrase is
more intellectual than moral, or rather it is only moral because it is
intellectual; it is a denial of the consciousness of the existence of the self
at all. What had been the self is to become a single individual, neither
less nor more than others; as it were, one of the living creatures that run
about and compose the web of the glory.
Being part of the "web of the glory," though a metaphor for self-denial, still
seems to be a more attractive, affirmative image than the complete
disappearance of self under the weight of necessity which Weil envisions when
she speaks of renunciation.
For Williams, the Beautiful is most clearly and naturally apprehended in the
experience of love - and not just love in general but specifically the experience
of romantic love. Over and over in his works, Williams returns to the idea of
"romantic theology," that is, a theological exploration of the phenomenon of
romantic love. He began exploring these themes in his first book of poetry, a
cycle of eighty-four sonnets written for his wife as part of their courtship.
I love her. O! what other word could keep
In many tongues one clear immutable sound,
Having so many meanings? It is bound,
First, to religion, signifying: "The steep
Whence I see God," translated into sleep
It is: "Glad waking," into thought: "Fixed ground;
A measuring rod," and for the body: "Found."
These know I, with one more, which is: "To weep."
For Williams, falling in love was a source of knowledge and revelation. His
love helps him to know God and to find stability, purpose and self-knowledge.
Later in life, Williams became acquainted with the poetry of Dante and found
there the full articulation of that romantic theology for which he had been
seeking. Like Dante, Williams presents romantic love as an experience by
which we have a vision of the beauty of God. This vision is mediated to us
through imagination, which is a tool for love to see the hidden glory of the
beloved, a glory which is really the presence of God. So romantic love, assisted
by imagination, experiences revelation and has a direct apprehension of the
Beautiful.
Williams suggests that everyone could potentially show us this vision of God.
But it is a divine mercy that they don't. So much glory would crush us.
.... perfection is the arch-natural state of human beings as such.... It is
everyone's or it is no-one's; on that there can be no compromise.
But then why do we not see it always, everywhere, and in all? Because
the Divine Mercy intervenes. Mercy? Mercy assuredly. 'We cannot',
wrote Dante in the third Tractate of the Convivio, 'look fixedly upon her
aspect because the soul is so intoxicated by it that after gazing it at once
goes astray in all its operations.' The first manner in which it goes astray
is in a tendency always to extort from the glory its own satisfaction with
the glory. The alternative to being with Love at the centre of the circle is
to disorder the circumference for our own purposes. This - the perversion
of the image - is in fact the sole subject of theInferno, although Beatrice
herself is hardly mentioned there. If such a perversion follows so easily
on a single seeing, would it be less likely to follow on a multitudinous?
If the gazing fixedly on one divine aspect is apt to intoxicate the soul and
send it reelingly astray, what chaos would follow if all men and women
were so beheld, what sin, what despair!... While we are what we are, the
Divine Mercy clouds its creation.
Love empowers the imagination to see a beauty that is not visible without the
presence of love. That beauty is divine, in so far as it reflects and obeys God. It
is formal, in that it reflects the essential nature or form of the person we love. It
is potential, in that it is not yet fully actualized but is in the process of
becoming.
Beauty thus functions in a revelatory way when mediated by love. This insight
lies behind the vast tradition of calling on the beloved to serve as a Muse. A
Muse is one who makes knowledge of transcendent reality possible, who
reveals glory, though in a passive way - simply by existing and by being loved.
[Beatrice] is, in a sense, his [Dante's] very act of knowing. It is in this
sense that the Paradiso is an image of the whole act of knowing which is
the great Romantic way, the Way of the Affirmation of Images, ending
in the balanced whole. Indeed the entire work of Dante... is a description
of the great act of knowledge, in which Dante himself is the Knower,
and God is the Known, and Beatrice is the Knowing.
The Muse does not vigorously proclaim the truth but is perceived with a clarity
and glory that is not normally part of our perception of other people, and
through this inspired vision an epiphany occurs. So an artist may take as a
Muse a loved person who does not return that artist's love. Mutuality is not a
requirement of the Muse tradition. In fact, it is not the norm. Poet Robert
Graves describes the experience:
A Muse-poet falls in love, absolutely, and his true love is for him the
embodiment of the Muse. As a rule, the power of absolutely falling in
love soon vanishes; and, as a rule, because the woman feels embarrassed
by the spell she exercises over her poet-lover and repudiates it.... But the
real, perpetually obsessed Muse-poet distinguishes between the Goddess
as manifest in the supreme power, glory, wisdom and love of woman,
and the individual woman whom the Goddess may make her instrument
for a month, a year, seven years, or even more. The Goddess abides; and
perhaps he will again have knowledge of her through his experience of
another woman.
Williams would not refer to Beatrice as the Goddess, but he is daring in the
titles out of Christian tradition which he considers to be appropriate for the
beloved.
... in this state of love he [the lover] sees and contemplates the beloved
as the perfection of living things: love is bestowed by her smile; she is its
source and its mother. She appears to him, as it were, archetypal, the
alpha and omega of creation; without father or mother, without human
ties of any sort, for she is before humanity, the first-created of God....
She is the Mother of Love, purissima, inviolata, admirabilis .... she is the
mirror of all mystical titles - speculum iustitiae, sedes sapientiae, causa
nostrae laetitiae, domus aurea, stella matutina, salus infir-morum .... any
lover to whom the application of the titles we have quoted seems natural
and right may believe from that in the Godhead of Incarnate Love, and
may so dare to apply in a very real sense the titles which remain - Mater
divinae gratiae, Mater Salvatoris, Rosa mystica, Refugium peccatorum,
Regina Prophetarum. Not certainly of herself is she anything but as
being glorious in the delight taken in her by the Divine Presence that
accompanies her, and yet is born of her; which created her and is
helpless as a child in her power. However in all other ways she may be
full of error or deliberate evil, in the eyes of the lover, were it but for a
moment, she recovers her glory, which is the glory that Love had with
the Father before the world was. Immaculate she appears, Theotokos, the
Mother of God.
In his discussions of Dante, Williams calls Beatrice the "Mother of Love."
Traditionally, only poets and artists experience the revelatory power of a Muse,
and only men - since the Muse always seems to be female. The Muse "does not
choose but is chosen: la demoiselle élue. But if the man is religious,... he will
believe that the woman was chosen by God; he will even resist making a choice
until the inevitable is forced upon him." Williams departs from this tradition in
that he believes all Christian marriage - not just the love affairs of artists should be marked by revelatory romantic love, so that every Christian husband
should be able to assign all the titles mentioned above to his wife. Williams
also never suggests that the experience of encountering God through romantic
love is gender-specific. Though he writes out of his own experience as a
married man, he clearly expects Christian women to have the same epiphanous
experiences through their love for their husbands.
In Williams' understanding, Beauty functions teleologically as final cause, in
that it draws us to itself. The apprehension of Beauty is an end or a goal for us.
He would agree with Weil in understanding Beauty as that which we wish to
see without consuming, the one thing which we can see as an end in itself, not
as a means to a further end. But whereas Weil sees Beauty stirring up our desire
for a rest which is not available to us, Williams envisions rest as part of a
knowable future reality. We can rest in Beauty, rather than striving to use it for
some further end. The traditional Christian idea of the Beatific Vision as the
ultimate telos is predicated on the assumption that God is the Beautiful, and
that to look on God is the one thing which we will find we are content to do
always.
Beauty further functions teleologically for Williams in that it is formal cause.
Each being moves toward its own beauty by moving toward the actualization of
its own essence. As Williams read Dante's Vita Nuova, Beatrice becomes more
herself because of Dante's love for her.
The deepening beauty of Beatrice is a part of the poem; that is, it is (in
the poem) known to us because Dante knew it. Her beauty is her own,
but its publication is his; more - it is in his sight of it and worship of it
that it grows deeper - so that all the infinite gratitude is not to be only on
his side. In the exchange of their celestial love, she becomes more
Beatrician by the measure of the Dantean knowledge.
Beatrice in turn mediates God's presence and even salvation itself to Dante
because of Dante's love for her. It is not that Beatrice is unique among women,
but that Dante has been granted a vision of her in glory. Here Williams and
Weil are very close. Dante is seeing Beatrice's formal reality. His view of her is
more real than the view he has of other people. Williams wrote to a woman
whom he loved about having the experience of seeing her reality: "Quite
clearly, quite certainly, you are all that I ever said. I always saw you." And to
another friend he wrote, "do not underrate yourself... you were meant to
be Margaret after all, to be Margaret and no other; there is no other in all the
masses of creation, who can be that." Yet Williams differs from Weil in that he
believes this vision is mediated by imagination - of which Weil is so distrustful.
Williams posits a double vision of the beloved. He suggests that Dante was
quite capable of seeing Beatrice both as a normal girl like any other, flawed and
complex and resistant to the workings of his imagination. But Dante
simultaneously enjoys another vision of Beatrice glorified.
Beatrice was, in her degree, an image of nobility, of virtue, of the
Redeemed Life, and in some sense of Almighty God himself. But she
also remained Beatrice right to the end; her derivation was not to obscure
her identity any more than her identity should hide her derivation. Just as
there is no point in Dante's thought at which the image of Beatrice in his
mind was supposed to exclude the actual objective Beatrice, so there is
no point at which the objective Beatrice is to exclude the Power which is
expressed through her.
And again:
The girl seems to him something like perfection - though, of course, he
knows quite well that she is not, and may even . . . experience quite
sharply that she is not. The vision of perfection does not at all exclude
the sight of imperfection; the two can exist together; they can even, in a
sense, co-inhere.
In He Came Down from Heaven, Williams often discusses the dynamic of
simultaneous inclusivity and exclusivity. This is a vision of both actuality and
potentiality simultaneously. What is actual may be apprehended by paying
attention, to use Weil's expression, but what is potential may only be seen
through the work of loving imagination.
In traditional Christian philosophy, God is understood as pure actuality.
Therefore, God is the Beautiful, just as God is Being. Imagination should not
be necessary when perceiving God. In fact, imagination gets in the way of an
accurate vision of God by distorting our perception. People, however, are a
mixture of actuality and potentiality, being and becoming. Our essential nature
is not fully actualized; therefore, our beauty has not fully come into its own. To
see another person's full beauty requires seeing not only what is actual, but also
seeing what is potential - what that person may become. Seeing such potential
reality does require imagination, since it cannot be directly experienced as
acutal or real.
An example of such vision is the way parents look at their children. A parent
will say: My child is special, gifted, brilliant; my child is going to be a great
artist, an athlete, a scholar. The parent is not simply fantasizing. Rather, he or
she has the ability to see beyond what is to what may be, the ability to
recognize potential attributes in the child as well as actualized attributes.
Clearly there is the danger that we will imagine something illusory, rather than
potential reality. Think, for instance, of parents who imagine their own
frustrated aspirations fulfilled in their children. Such children may wish their
parents had less imagination. The key seems to be the combination of
imagination with love. Williams would agree with Weil in saying that love
celebrates the other's independence from myself. Therefore, loving imagination
never seeks to use the other as an extension of myself but rather sees the
potential of the other's essence realized.
This ability to imagine the beauty which is coming as well as the beauty which
is present is activated by love and made possible by imagination. It is love
which lets us see each other as we may someday be. It is love which gives us
insight into the divine spark in the other. The loving vision sees potentiality
fully actualized. This is the Beautiful. "Beauty," says Aquinas, "properly
belongs to the nature of a formal cause." In other words, a thing has beauty in
so far as it actualizes its essential nature, and that form or nature is its proper
beauty. So the Beautiful exercises causal influence by leading and pulling,
rather than by pushing and propelling. The Beautiful is that which is being
actualized when a being becomes what it is meant to be by virtue of its own
essential nature.
Beatrice becomes Dante's guide to heaven, for "the beloved is the first
preparatory form of heaven and earth." The perfected form, the image of which
may be apprehended by love, contains the goal toward which each individual
and the very cosmos move. We are meant to progress toward Beauty. Toward
the end of his life, Williams wrote to a friend:
...many things I have lost, and many thrown away, and many were
forbidden. But almost everywhere a something has - I hardly dare even
say lasted, but been. There has been everywhere a point of good; it is
astonishing and in a way terrifying - that lucid, often vanishing, often
repudiated, point of - beauty? say, of fact. I should like to believe I shall
never emotionally deny it again.
Beauty and fact are two words for this same "point of good" that grounds our
existence.
TOWARDS AN AESTHETIC TELEOLOGY
So what can be retained from these two thinkers' efforts to go back into history
and find a meaningful understanding of Beauty? Is it possible to draw their two
approaches into "some sort of pattern," as Williams would say, or are they too
different? I am committed to the project of drawing the best from both because
whichever of these two authors I am reading at the moment always sounds
completely convincing to me. Still there are such substantial differences - and
even contradictions - between them that I fail to see how they can both be
completely right.
First, they clearly differ in their understanding of the role the imagination
should play in apprehending the Beautiful. While Williams sees imagination as
a means by which we reach heaven, Weil observes: "We must prefer real hell to
an imaginary paradise." Martin Andic argues that Weil does allow for a
positive understanding of imagination, but that when she's speaking in positive
terms she uses the word "genius." So she makes space for the value of
imagination in the work of an artist, or even the work of a scientist. But her
fundamental view of imagination is still that it is a source of unreality, whereas
the real is apprehended only by love. Even in speaking of artists, she observes,
"The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real."
I find this dismissal of imagination disturbing. Imagination seems to be the
only way to apprehend potential reality, and I fear that Weil's dismissal of
imagination is in part the result of an understanding of reality which is too
static. At the same time, I appreciate her hard-nosed insistence on facing reality
and her suspicion of self-serving delusions which the imagination easily
creates. From Weil we need to take the idea that a true encounter with reality,
and therefore with Beauty, may have a shattering effect on our illusions. C. S.
Lewis discusses this same "shattering" phenomenon when he talks of the
"iconoclastic" nature of the real.
Images, I must suppose, have their use or they would not have been so
popular. (It makes little difference whether they are pictures and statues
outside the mind or imaginative constructions within it.) To me,
however, their danger is more obvious. Images of the Holy easily
become holy images - sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It
has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great
iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the
marks of His presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it
leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins....
All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life,
incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to;
you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her
unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality.
Here Lewis unites Williams' insights from romantic love with Weil's insistence
on resisting imagination. The shattering of images and ideas is one of the marks
of God's presence. Since Reality and Beauty are synonymous for Weil, it is the
Beautiful which is so iconoclastic. Contact with the Beautiful shatters our
illusions about the nature of reality.
A second difference between Williams and Weil concerns the role of romantic
love in apprehending the Beautiful. Williams understands romantic love as the
most direct way to achieve a vision of Beauty and to know God. Again, Weil is
more suspicious, though she does affirm that love may serve this function.
The longing to love the beauty of the world in a human being is
essentially the longing for the Incarnation. It is mistaken if it thinks it is
anything else. The Incarnation alone can satisfy it. It is therefore wrong
to reproach the mystics, as has been done sometimes, because they use
love's language. It is theirs by right. Others only borrow it.
But such love is still based on illusion for Weil, not on reality, and so its
function as a source of revelation is limited. Weil is uncomfortable with the
idea of loving any one person more than another. She assumes that she is
obligated to love everyone equally.
I think I must love wrongly: otherwise things would not seem like this to
me. My love would not be attached to a few beings. It would be
extended to everything which is worthy of love.
Even friendship is somewhat suspect for her, since she sees it as a concession
to her own self-centered nature. The particularity of Dante's experience of
Beatrice would trouble Weil. Weil observes approvingly that "Plato thinks that
carnal desire is a corruption, a degradation, of love of God." This is quite
different from Williams assertion that romantic love is a first step toward the
love of God.
The model of the Incarnation tells us that revelation must always be particular
in order to be understood. In the Hebrew Bible, we read the story of the
creation of human beings. First God creates Adam, the sinless man who has
God's own spirit breathed into him and who walks in the garden of Eden with
God as a friend walks with his friend. And yet Adam is described as lonely or
alone. Perfect and sinless communion with God is not enough for him. "There
was not found a helper to be his partner," says the book of Genesis. The word
"helper" is generally a divine word in Genesis. Adam does have a helper in
God, who made him and continues to nurture and care for him. But God is not
Adam's partner. He needs that divine helping presence in his own form in order
for it to be comprehensible. When God creates Eve and presents her to Adam,
he greets her with this song: "Here at last is flesh of my flesh, bone of my
bone." Here is the helper who is also a partner - divine help and presence in a
"meet" form, a form designed for Adam, to correspond to him.
Within Christian tradition, this is the first sign that the Incarnation is necessary.
Divine essence requires comprehensible form in order to be understood. This
happens through other people, who carry the image of God - participate in the
divine nature; share the divine spark - all in human form. Human form is
necessarily particular and individuated. This is the insight offered by Charles
Williams' romantic theology: part of our human design includes the ability to
glimpse ultimate Reality and Beauty in the particular form of those we most
love.
So both Weil and Williams offer us legitimate ways in which contact with the
Beautiful may help us to know the nature of reality. For Simone Weil, the
Beautiful shows us what reality is not, shattering those ideas which are simply
products of our imagination. For Charles Williams, the Beautiful as it is
glimpsed in a loved person gives us a positive vision of the nature of reality.
For Weil as well as for Williams, therefore, Beauty may function as a formal
cause. A formal cause is "that attribute by virtue of which any thing is what it
is." In agreeing that Beauty shows the nature of reality, both Weil and Williams
allow Beauty to reveal something of the essential nature of individual beings
and of the world. In agreeing to identify Beauty with formal reality, they
suggest that the Beautiful is the essential nature of reality. A being's design and
purpose are contained in its essential nature. If the essential nature of reality is
Beauty, then the actualization of Beauty is where reality is headed.
There is still disagreement between Weil and Williams on what it means to
identify Beauty with reality. For Weil, this is a relatively static concept, leading
to her insistence on submission and obedience before the necessity of the world
and our own essential nature. For Williams, the formal dimension of Beauty
includes a potential aspect. There is a sense in which Beauty is that which we
are meant to become. For Weil, Beauty reveals that humanity's purpose is to
unflinchingly accept the shattering of our imaginary realities, to renounce all
pretense to control or power, and to bow in obedience before the necessity of
the world. For Williams, our destiny is to grow into the beautiful beings we
have been designed to become.
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Scripture citations are from the New Revised Standard Version.