Feature
About Face
On Beauty & the Personal Being of God & Man
by Anthony Esolen
I shall retire unto the cave of my self, the self that is old as a cave.
Man once dwelt in caves, to keep warm in the winter and to be safe from wild beasts prowling the night. But as it was man who dwelt there, and not a beast, he liked to surround himself with beauty. “The prehistoric period,” says Chesterton in The Everlasting Man, “need not mean the primitive period, in the sense of the barbaric or bestial period.” Whatever we may guess about the cave dwellers, including whether they wore clothes, “we do know that they did have pictures; and the pictures have remained,” playful and serious, the animals seeming to move with the shapely ripples in the rock. Could we have looked into the eyes of that early man of art, quietly gazing upon his walls by firelight, filled with the goodness of deer and bison and the life of the hunt, we might now drop our own eyes for shame.
He did so much with so little.
If the fire was for warmth, it was also for light, and you see by the fire, through all the seasons, the faces of your kindred, familiar and mysterious. That, too, was to be surrounded by beauty—even to be pressed by it.
No Mere Object
When the poet Milton, bravely addressing his blindness, meditates upon the beautiful things he can no longer see, he builds to the climax, to the most glorious object in all of physical creation:
Thus with the year
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer’s rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine.
The beauty of the human face is not reducible to color and form. Consider the old grandfather painted by Ghirlandaio, in An Old Man and His Grandson, gazing lovingly into the eyes of the fresh-faced little boy. The old man’s nose is overgrown and ugly, but his eyes, full of gentleness and wisdom, speak to the boy, and say, “How good it is that you exist!” We too, looking upon the grandfather, seeing his love, and feeling in imagination the weight of his many years, will say in reply, “Yes, and it is good also that you exist.”
To look into the human face at rest, or in thought, or caught unawares in a moment of joy or sorrow, is to stand on the brink of creation, when the spirit of God was brooding over the deep. It is to behold no mere object, but a subject, a likeness of God, whose eyes can behold and contemplate all the things that come before him; a subject that can give a tongue and an ear to the deaf and dumb creatures of the world, and say what God said when he made the light, and saw that it was good. The face of an infant asleep speaks more eloquently than all the statesmen and wise men of the world, when they rely upon their private stock of intelligence and our common stock of words. Mother and father know it, and look upon the face of that child as a mystery, revealing itself day by day, with ever more and more to reveal.
Meant for Relationship
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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