Spiritual Quality: John O’Donohue on Beauty

[Explor­ing Life] The sub­tleties of suf­fer­ing and loss that now seem per­va­sive in mod­ern life is inti­mately con­nected with a loss of beauty. While the world remains rich in beauty, it is our abil­ity to sense and appre­ci­ate it has fallen vic­tim to the vagaries of cul­ture and progress. There is no vibrant cul­ture in the absence of beauty; nor is there any real progress in the absence of beauty.

The Poet­ics of Beauty

Mod­ern soci­ety tends to com­mer­cial­ize the idea of beauty into ideal forms and con­fuses it with fash­ion and glamor. All too often, beauty is assumed to be some­thing visual. How­ever, beauty can­not be con­fined by tra­di­tion or cul­tural influ­ence, even though we may lose our sense of its pres­ence around us. In Beauty: The Invis­i­ble Embrace, John O’Donohue offers sen­si­tive insight into an eter­nal qual­ity that lies at the very root of expe­ri­ence. He explores the Beau­ti­ful as an inde­pen­dent autonomous phe­nom­e­non that orig­i­nates in nature and exists as eter­nal energy. In this sense, beauty is an life force and a “pro­found illu­mi­na­tion of pres­ence” that uni­fies the real and the ideal.

The human soul is hun­gry for beauty… As Fred­er­ick Turner puts it, “Beauty is the high­est inte­gra­tive level of under­stand­ing and the most com­pre­hen­sive capac­ity for effec­tive action.” …the Beau­ti­ful is the true priest­ess of indi­vid­u­a­tion… Our deep­est self-knowledge unfolds as we are embraced by Beauty… Beauty does not linger, it only vis­its… beauty invests the aura of a per­son or infuses a land­scape with an unex­pected inti­macy that sat­is­fies our long­ing… ulti­mately beauty is a pro­found illu­mi­na­tion of pres­ence… When Beauty touches our lives, the moment becomes lumi­nous. (O’Donohue 2004)

Beauty as a spir­i­tual essence that ener­gizes the body, clar­i­fies the mind, calms the spirit, inti­mately con­nects us to the nat­ural world, and pro­vides direc­tion for expe­ri­ence. In this sense, beauty is an inte­gral idea that invokes a higher level of con­scious­ness and rep­re­sents a higher level of devel­op­ment in human evo­lu­tion. In O’Donohue’s view, to per­ceive the Beau­ti­ful is to be in com­mu­nion with the pres­ence of Life itself.

To behold beauty dig­ni­fies your life; it heals you and calls you out beyond the small­ness of your own self-limitation to expe­ri­ence new hori­zons. To expe­ri­ence beauty is to have your life enlarged.(O’Donohue 2004)

Beauty is a form of com­mu­nion and fel­low­ship with life. The word com­mu­nion is derived from Latin com­mu­nio mean­ing shar­ing in com­mon. The cor­re­spond­ing term in Greek is often trans­lated as fel­low­ship. Both com­mu­nion and fel­low­ship are terms that fre­quent reli­gious beliefs and often point toward defined pat­terns of prac­tice asso­ci­ated. How­ever, in a spir­i­tual sense, com­mu­nion and fel­low­ship are a uniquely per­sonal sense of felt-meaning that orig­i­nate within an indi­vid­ual. Com­mu­nion and fel­low­ship with the Beau­ti­ful are open rela­tion­ships that do not impose a spe­cific reli­gious per­spec­tive or practice.

Beauty and Mod­ern Civilization

The back­ground to O’Donohue’s fan­ta­sia on the theme of beauty is the assump­tion of a mod­ern soci­ety that has gone hor­ri­bly wrong. He views the trap­pings of civ­i­liza­tion as a test of “strug­gle and endurance” that per­me­ates our exis­tence with anx­i­ety and uncertainty.

Pol­i­tics, reli­gion and eco­nom­ics and the insti­tu­tions of fam­ily and com­mu­nity, all have become abruptly unsure… it is because we have so dis­as­trously neglected the Beau­ti­ful that we now find our­selves in such a ter­ri­ble cri­sis… Though we have become more help­less and hope­less, we have grown keenly aware of the need for pos­i­tive change. We grow increas­ingly deaf to the worn plat­i­tudes of staid author­ity. Their forced, didac­tic tones no longer reach our need. Now we want the expe­ri­ence itself, not the analy­sis or the mem­ber­ship card to some new syn­drome. Notions of self-improvement have become banal and weari­some. (O’Donohue 2004)

Beauty pro­motes self-awareness and heal­ing, and allows us a space to recon­sider the facade of mate­r­ial progress and con­sump­tion that degen­er­ate our sen­si­bil­i­ties and degrade the Earth. O’Donohue is par­tic­u­larly harsh on media that serve to “gen­er­ate relent­less images of medi­oc­rity and ugli­ness in talk shows, tapes­tries of smoth­ered lan­guage and fre­netic grat­i­fi­ca­tion.” Though his state­ments on mod­ern civ­i­liza­tion are con­demn­ing it is extremely dif­fi­cult to find fault with his crit­i­cisms, and it is not too harsh to char­ac­ter­ize the media sphere as a medium for the mass dis­sem­i­na­tion of ugli­ness, super­fi­cial­ity, and degradation.

O’Donohue presents beauty as a means to ele­vate soci­ety from the “ines­timable ener­gies of the mechan­i­cal mind.” (O’Donohue 2004) My inter­pre­ta­tion of the mechan­i­cal mind is one that fol­lows the sta­tus quo with­out know­ing it is doing so. This means that a mechan­i­cal mind is lack­ing in self-awareness and the influ­ences that con­fine that aware­ness, and there­fore lack­ing in aware­ness of the deeper innate expe­ri­ences in life. Beauty, in this sense, is a source of con­tem­pla­tion and action.

A Rev­er­ence of Approach

The word rev­er­ence refers to the intu­itive per­cep­tion of being in com­mu­nion with a pro­found pres­ence. Rather than being a form of thought, rev­er­ence is a deep sense of aware­ness in which we are fully present and undisturbed.

Yet what you encounter, rec­og­nize or dis­cover depends to a large degree on the qual­ity of your approach… we have lost rev­er­ence of approach… We become more inter­ested in “con­nec­tion” rather than com­mu­nion… A rev­er­ence of approach awak­ens depth and enables us to be truly present where we are. When we approach with rev­er­ence great things decide to approach us. (O’Donohue 2004)

The idea of calm­ing the mind through the devel­op­ment of aware­ness, mind­ful­ness, or med­i­ta­tion is a uni­ver­sal ele­ment of spir­i­tual prac­tice. The Bud­dhists refer to an agi­tated mind as being a “mon­key mind” char­ac­ter­iz­ing thoughts as behav­ing like mon­keys swing­ing hap­haz­ardly from tree to tree. An agi­tated or mon­key mind engaged com­pul­sive thought blocks the pos­si­bil­ity of rev­er­ence or com­mu­nion. Through­out Beauty, O’Donohue makes reg­u­lar ref­er­ence to the essen­tial impor­tance of calm­ing the mind and reduc­ing habit­ual thought pat­terns that only offer distraction.

Beauty in Life

The cen­tral pre­sup­po­si­tion of O’Donohue’s ideas is that beauty has an autonomous exis­tence that is sep­a­rate and dis­tinct from our own, yet desires com­mu­nion with us.

This book pre­sumes the exis­tence and the auton­omy of the Beau­ti­ful as a thresh­old which holds the real and the ideal in con­nec­tion and con­ver­sa­tion with each other… The Beau­ti­ful uni­fies feel­ing, thought and dream… Beauty is an end­less and illu­sive theme. (O’Donohue 2004)

Whether we believe this to be true or not, it is unlikely that any­one has not had an intu­itive sense of beauty at times in their life when they were pre­sented with a dis­tinct sense of felt-meaning that seemed to appear from beyond.[2] While the power of human thought is sig­nif­i­cant, it is not the only way we expe­ri­ence the world. There are times in our lives when we are intu­itively grasped by a sense of pres­ence that seems to orig­i­nate in the shad­ows of mys­tery, from a place that is not within ourselves.

Foot­notes

1. John O’Donohue’s web­site con­tains a vari­ety of inter­est­ing mate­r­ial. I find myself quot­ing an author far more than usual. I am allow­ing myself this indul­gence as I find his ideas and expres­sion both evoca­tive and compelling.

2. His­tor­i­cal overview: The­o­ries of Beauty to the Mid-Nineteenth Cen­tury.