beauty(1/3)
Do not mix truth and beauty
We humans are tempted to equate beauty with truth. If something is beautiful, we reason, then it’s more than likely true, right? Wrong. Dr. Sollereder makes a solid argument that beauty is not a reliable indicator for truth. She writes, 💬 Historically, many beautiful, simple, and elegant ideas in science were wrong. Johannes Kepler thought the orbital distance of the six (known) planets were related to the Platonic solids. It is a lovely, attractive idea, but wrong.…
The monastery is a school in which we learn from God how to be happy
The monastery is a school—a school in which we learn from God how to be happy. Our happiness consists in sharing the happiness of God, the perfection of His unlimited freedom, the perfection of His love. What has to be healed in us is our true nature, made in the likeness of God. What we have to learn is love. The healing and the learning are the same thing, for at the very core of our essence we are constituted in God’s likeness by our freedom, and the exercise of that freedom is nothing else but the exercise of disinterested love—the love of God for His own sake, because He is God.…
God makes the works of his wisdom more beautiful through contrast
if Adam had never fallen, the whole human race would have been a series of magnificently different and splendid images of God, each one of all the millions of men showing forth His glories and perfections in an astonishing new way, and each one shining with his own particular sanctity, a sanctity destined for him from all eternity as the most complete and unimaginable supernatural perfection of his human personality. If, since the fall, this plan will never be realized in millions of souls, and millions will frustrate that glorious destiny of theirs, and hide their personality in an eternal corruption of disfigurement, nevertheless, in re-forming His image in souls distorted and half destroyed by evil and disorder, God makes the works of His wisdom and love all the more strikingly beautiful by reason of the contrast with the surroundings in which He does not disdain to operate.…
How happy I was to know the word
Every time I rounded a corner, I’d encounter a sublime new gorge or escarpment. In the haze, the horizons of distant peaks braided together. The nature writer Robert MacFarlane observes, in his book “Landmarks,” that a Scottish painter once described this phenomenon to him as landskein. “Skein” can mean either a coil of yarn or a flock of birds in a V formation. Landskein, a neologism, uses both ,knitting the V’s of mountaintops together.…