201. Beauty, lust, and contemplation
201. BEAUTY, LUST, AND CONTEMPLATION
Does this principle (the last paragraph of the preceding page) mean that there is a strong and necessary connection between chastity (sexual virtue) and contemplation, and between lust and ignorance? And if so, does this connection work both ways causally? Does chastity foster contemplation and contemplation foster chastity, just as lust fosters ignorance and ignorance of contemplation fosters lust?
Beauty . . . consists in a certain clarity and due proportion. Now each of these is found . . . in the reason, because both the light that makes beauty seen and the establishing of due proportion among things belonging to reason. Hence since the contemplative life consists in an act of the reason, there is beauty in it by its very nature and essence; wherefore it is written (Wis 8:2) of the contemplation of wisdom: I became a lover of her beauty.
On the other hand, beauty is in the moral virtues by participation, in so far as they participate in the order of reason; and especially is it in temperance, which restrains the concupiscences which especially darken the light of reason. Hence it is that the virtue of chastity most of all makes man apt for contemplation, since venereal pleasures most of all weigh the mind down to sensible objects (II-II,180,2).
The answer to all of the questions above is yes.
It was Plato who first made the point, in The Republic, which all contemplatives after him have corroborated from their own experience, that spiritual beauties and joys are greater than merely physical ones. To argue that the opposite is true does not prove it is; it proves that the arguer has never experienced the higher beauties and joys, that he has not been scientific and gathered all his data.
St. Thomas’ focus on “clarity and due proportion” is only a partial and incomplete definition of beauty. But it is a minimum, at least; a necessary, even if not sufficient, cause. And these features of beauty are found more clearly and strongly in “things belonging to reason” (in St. Thomas’ ancient, broad meaning of “reason”) than in subrational things. From these two premises it necessarily follows that there is more beauty, and thus more joy, in contemplation than in anything less rational. However beautiful the contemplation of a sunset may be, it can’t hold a candle to the contemplation of God.
Between the beauty of God and the beauty of physical things lies the beauty of moral virtues, which are rational “by participation” even though not acts of reason directly. A saint is more beautiful than a beauty queen.
Among the moral virtues the one that most clearly possesses and produces the two attributes of beauty that St. Thomas mentions, “clarity and due proportion (order)”, is temperance. Correlatively, disordered desires cause not the most joy but the least. The denial of this truth is one of the Devil’s most effective lies and one of our most inexcusable stupidities, for it is refuted time after time. Ask any addict.
St. Thomas himself was given a supernatural grace of chastity on the occasion of his total refusal to be tempted by the prostitute inserted into his prison cell by his brothers to deter him from becoming a Dominican monk; and this is surely part of the secret of his incomparably luminous and clear-sighted rationality in every word he ever wrote. Reason and love are friends but reason and lust are enemies.
It should not be necessary to mention this, but please notice that when St. Thomas says that venereal pleasures “weigh the mind down to sensible objects” he is not denying the beauty or power or even the ontological goodness of physical objects or of the pleasure they naturally cause, but merely reminding us of the obvious and embarrassing fact that it is significantly more difficult to think clearly in the bed than in the pew.