Tuesday, February 22, 2011

'The sleeper's visions are as turbulent as his day.'

[I]t was a very frequent theme of moralists that virtue is marked by the disappearance of dreams that translate the appetites and involuntary movements of the mind and body. "The sleeper's visions," said Seneca, "are as turbulent as his day." Plutarch cited Zeno in affirming that it is a sign of progress when a person no longer dreams that he derives pleasure from indecent actions. And he alluded to those individuals who have enough strength in their waking hours to combat and resist their passions, but who at night, "throwing off opinions and laws," cease to feel any shame: then there awakens what is immoral and licentious within them.
Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self (The History of Sexuality, Volume 3) (1984) (trans. R.H. 1986)

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

They Suffer Because of Their Love

Both the person who is transported by natural beauty and the one snatched up by the beauty of Christ must appear to the world to be fools, and the world will attempt to explain their state in terms of psychological or even physiological laws (Acts 2:13). But they know what they have seen, and they care not one farthing what people may say. They suffer because of their love, and it is only the fact that they have been inflamed by the most sublime of beauties—a beauty crowned with thorns and crucified—that justifies their sharing in that suffering.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form (1967)

Monday, February 14, 2011

Go down, beauteous Sun

Works of art can die as a result of being looked at by too many dull eyes, and even the radiance of holiness can, in a way, become blunted when it encounters nothing but hollow indifference. But this remains but an external offense to beauty which may be rectified by purifying the heart and by exhuming what has been buried under the ruins. Hölderlin exclaimed in this vein: "Go down, beauteous Sun. They paid but little heed to thee; they knew thee not, thou holy one... for me thou graciously go'st down and up, O Light! And my eyes surely recognize thee, Splendour!" And even if works of art should die, even if the 'holy Sun' itself should die, how could the highest beauty die if it were true that its form had attained a living immortality?
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form, (1967)