Hmmm...

I was just reading some threads and came across this exchange:

Where's your proof that god exists?

The reply from someone:






Perhaps I should state that another way:

We have noted that the beautiful is first of all a form, and thus “the light does not fall on this form from above and from outside, rather it breaks forth from the form’s interior.” The outer appearance of this invisible unfathomable mystery “reveals it while, naturally, at the same time protecting and veiling it”. In the beautiful there are both hiddenness and manifestation: the hiddenness of the inner organizing agent, the inner form energy, and the outward appearance stemming from it. This it is that “lends the phenomenon of the beautiful its enrapturing and overwhelming character”. The mere animal hears the Mozart concerto and sees the daffodil, but it is neither enraptured nor overwhelmed. It has no intellect to perceive the inner depth, the form.
In both the forms of nature and those of art the external manifestation and the inner depths are not separable. Rather, “we ‘behold’ the form; but, if we really behold it, it is not as a detached form, rather in its unity with the depths that make their appearance in it. We see form as the splendour, as the glory of Being. We are ‘enraptured’ by our contemplation of these depths and are ‘transported’ to them.” Form is therefore indissoluble. It cannot be cut and studied in pieces.

(The Evidential Power of Beauty: Science and Theology Meet
by Thomas Dubay :51)

If a marriage of form and being is made in heaven maybe that's why it doesn't last here on earth.

A few meanderings, the ascetic Platonist or the model for the fashions of the time will come to consider the form to be purer than its manifestation, so they waste away into pure nothingness through their incessant purging. Their attempted purging and purifying seems rather gross, are they so pure?

If "In the beautiful there are both hiddenness and manifestation..." then on the other hand the hedonist Epicurean comes to feel that nothing can be hidden, so they wallow about in forms of their own brutal honesty and visceral reactions. Yet are they so honest? The different patterns of ascetics and hedonists when it comes to matter seem to matter little indeed, as both come to the same end through perversion.