Beauty. Creativity. Renewal.
These are not mere words. They are life-giving ideals. They help calibrate a moral compass. They bring light into the darkness.
They are the beating heart of Refracted Light Fiber Arts.
And it’s time I shared more about them and why these are the ties that bind me.
Beauty is perhaps the most difficult of the three to write about. For one thing, competing definitions of the word abound, so simply defining the term can feel impossible. For another, it is perhaps easier to say what beauty is not than what it is.
Beauty is not some ephemeral standard that shifts with each new trend.
Beauty is not just about looks.
Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder.
So what is it?
Beauty is one of the transcendentals (the other two being Truth and Goodness).
While there are many ways of thinking about the transcendentals, they are aspects of God’s being that permeate his created world. Sometimes I think of them as emanations of the Divine Being.
Every time we encounter something that is True, Good, or Beautiful, we are encountering the Divine, whether we recognize it or not.
My own thinking on Beauty has been shaped by many sources, but I would like to share two that continually stand out above the rest.
The first is the Catholic bishop and cardinal Jean Daniélou. In his work Prayer: The Mission of the Church, he opens his first chapter with these words:
“God is the supreme reality; he is what is most important because he is what is most real.”1
Now, this quotation may at first seem like it has nothing to do with Beauty. But if God is what is most real—more real than the chair I’m sitting in to write this or the food I ate for dinner—then everything else that is real gets its real-ness from him. Furthermore, anything that is truly beautiful is only so because it participates in the Beauty of God.
So the things in this world that are beautiful—and they are far more abundant than any of us can fathom—are beautiful not simply because they appeal to my own or anyone else’s fancy. No, they are beautiful for the far more enduring reason that God bestows his Beauty upon them.
The second source is Plato. In the Symposium, Socrates relates a tale he heard from the wise woman, Diotima. It is a long tale and worth the reading, but the culmination of it is a discussion of how to arrive at the “notion of absolute beauty.”
This is a Beauty which
“if you once beheld, you would see not to be after the measure of gold, and garments, and fair boys and youths…. But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty—the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the…vanities of human life…? Do you not see that in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities; for he has hold not of an image but of a reality….”2
I certainly don’t understand all of this fully myself, but when I read this discussion of Beauty, a few ideas stand out. First, Beauty is more than something that shows up just here or there in certain people or scenes or objects. Second, the source of Beauty is the divine. In fact, this text can be read to mean that Beauty is the divine. In this way, Plato’s discussion of beauty bears some similarity to Daniélou’s.
Once again, Beauty is portrayed as something that exists in the world because of the divine. Beauty is transcendent and everlasting because God is transcendent and everlasting, and all Beauty flows from him.
Now, perhaps you’re saying to yourself, “This is all very high and lofty, but what does it have to do with dyeing yarn and knitting things?”
There is certainly more than one way to think about this, but for me, this means that creating beautiful things using yarn and natural dyes is a worthwhile endeavor and not just some frivolous hobby.
Worthwhile because Beauty is a window to the Divine—an encounter with the God who loves us.
It takes practice to learn how to see and look through these windows, but what better way to practice than making beautiful things with our own hands.
And even though we may not feel it in the moment, these encounters with Beauty have the power to renew our souls.
Footnotes:
1. Prayer: The Mission of the Church. Jean Daniélou. Trans. by David Louis Schindler, Jr. 1996, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Grand Rapids, MI.
2. Lysis, Phaedrus, and Symposium: Plato on Homosexuality. Trans. by Benjamin Jewett. 1991, Prometheus Books. Amherst, NY.
