Towards an Aesthetic Teleology: Romantic Love, Imagination and the Beautiful in Simone Weil and Charles Williams

7/21/2019 Towards an Aesthetic Teleology: Romantic Love, Imagination and the Beautiful in Simone Weil and Charles Williams

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Towards an Aesthetic Teleology:

Romantic Love, Imagination and the Beautiful

in the Thought of Simone Weil and Charles Williams

Laura A. Smit

A biology professor I once knew used to have the habit of standing up in the

interdisciplinary seminar we both attended and beginning his remarks by

saying, "In the 20thcentury, science has proven that" Whatever followed was

almost inevitably something with which I disagreed. One of his favorite targets

was the idea that human life has a purpose or a point. "In the 20thcentury,

science has proven that there is no such thing as teleology." I remember him

saying this on more than one occasion.

I always found this professor's comments particularly jarring because they were

so radically at odds with the assumptions encountered in my own area of study:medieval Christian philosophical theology. Christian thinkers in the middle

ages see teleology as a self-evident part of the world around us. I would like to

believe that they are right. I want to start with the assumption that life is meant

to be beautiful, not ugly; purposeful, not random. I enjoy medieval

philosophical theology because I find there a support for such assumptions, a

support that is often missing from contemporary philosophy and theology. My

work is motivated by a hope that there may be a way to recapture the ancient

and medieval vision of both Beauty and purpose in a way that is relevant to our

own century. I even dare to hope that the two ideas may be related, that Beauty

is actually part of the meaning and purpose of life.

In discussing the concept of progress, C. S. Lewis once observed:

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place

where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go

forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road,

progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road;

and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive

man. We have all seen this when doing arithmetic. When I have started a

sum the wrong way, the sooner I admit this and go back and start overagain, the faster I shall get on. There is nothing progressive about being

pigheaded and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the

present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been

making some big mistakes. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so,

we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.


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If we have, indeed, come to such a pass that the concepts of beauty and

purpose, goal and design are no longer seen as relevant, it is high time to go

back. In this paper, I hope to offer the beginnings of support for a teleology

based on aesthetics, specifically based on the idea that a goal - perhaps

even thegoal - of human life is to apprehend and attain the Beautiful. I believe

that the philosophy of the past may be reappropriated and adapted by us todefend such teleology. Two 20th-century authors who are models of such

reappropriation of past thinking are Simone Weil (1909-1943) and Charles

Williams (1886-1945). Weil is known primarily as a philosopher, working

under the influence of ancient philosophy, particularly Plato. Williams was a

novelist, poet and literary critic, who was most influenced by Dante and the

literature of the Renaissance. Both were thinkers shaped by a deep respect for

tradition and a profound religious faith. Both offer the possibility of a teleology

oriented toward Beauty - though with significant differences.

SIMONE WEIL AND THE VIA NEGATIVA

For Simone Weil, the first goal of human life is renunciation, especially the

renunciation of any illusory structures of meaning generated by the

imagination. Such renunciation is an assent to nothingness, and as such appears

to work against a purposive ordering of life and in favor of a nihilistic

understanding of the universe. Weil is interesting and useful precisely because

she begins with renunciation and moves toward purposive order.

Renunciation, according to Weil, must begin with my understanding of myself.

"I... am other than I imagine myself to be," writes Weil. Self-knowledge begins

with the letting go of the imaginary self, which we experience as self-denial or

abnegation.

I cannot conceive the necessity for God to love me, when I feel so

clearly that even with human beings affection for me can only be a

mistake. But I can easily imagine that he loves that perspective of

creation which can only be seen from the point where I am. But I act as a

screen. I must withdraw so that he may see it.

Weil's religious convictions thus do not lead her to a sense of self-worth, butrather to a determination to withdraw or disappear.

Self-denial is a consistent theme in Weil's writing and was also a theme in her

life. She died young, partly as a result of a commitment to asceticism, which

undermined her health. Robert Coles cites a prayer Weil wrote near the end of


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her life when she was living in New York. It illustrates the extremity of her

commitment to self-denial.

Father, in the name of Christ, grant me this in all reality.

May this body move or be still, with perfect suppleness or rigidity, incontinuous conformity to thy will. May our faculties of hearing, sight,

taste, smell and touch register the perfectly accurate impress of thy

creation. May this mind, in fullest lucidity, connect all ideas in perfect

conformity with thy truth. May this sensibility experience, in their

greatest possible intensity and in all their purity, all the nuances of grief

and joy. May this love be an absolutely devouring flame of love for God.

May all this be stripped away from me, devoured by God, transformed

into Christ's substance, and given for food to afflicted men whose body

and soul lack every kind of nourishment. And let me be a paralytic -

blind, deaf, witless and utterly decrepit....

Father, since thou art the Good, and I am mediocrity, rend this body and

soul away from me to make them do things for your use, and let nothing

remain of me, forever, except this rending itself, or else nothingness.

Although she was never left blind, deaf or witless, Weil did spend her life

looking for opportunities to sacrifice herself for others, often to the

exasperation of her family and friends. She sought out opportunities for hard

labor, working in factories and on farms, and attempted to live on as little food

as possible. While in an English hospital during World War II, she wouldaccept only as much food as she would have been rationed had she still been in

France. Self-renunciation was not just a theoretical commitment for Weil, but a

way of life.

But renunciation is not masochistic for Weil. It is a sign of love. She suggests

that in renouncing the imagined meanings and paradigms by which we try to

control the world we reflect God's renunciation of control in the act of creation,

thereby making space for our love of creation and other people.

God's creative love which maintains us in existence is not merely asuperabundance of generosity, it is also renunciation and sacrifice. Not

only the Passion but the Creation itself is a renunciation and sacrifice on

the part of God.... God already voids himself of his divinity by the

Creation. He takes the form of a slave, submits to necessity, abases

himself. His love maintains in existence, in a free and autonomous

existence, beings other than himself, beings other than the good,


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mediocre beings. Through love, he abandons them to affliction and sin.

For if he did not abandon them they would not exist. His presence would

annul their existence as a flame kills a butterfly.

God's absence thus becomes a sign of his love, because it is only his

withdrawal that makes other life possible.

Since we are not God, we cannot practice renunciation by means of creation ex

nihilo. For us, renunciation consists of being willing to live under the necessity

of reality, which is fundamentally indifferent to us or at least to our

imaginations of ourselves. Renunciation consists of submission to the laws of

the natural world. One of the philosophers Weil found most intriguing was

Spinoza, and we can hear echoes of his determinism here. This is why Weil

does not ever seem to move from the renunciation of the imagined self to

acceptance or celebration of the real self. Self-assertion - even the assertion of

the true self as made and known by God - would be rebellion against necessity.To know the self truly is to know that we are people living under authority

before which we should submit.

This submission to necessity requires that we renounce our imagination, not

only insofar as we imagine we know ourselves but also our imaginings about

the world and other people. Weil's suspicion of the imagination is one of the

most consistent features of her work. She presents imagination as the source of

illusion and deception, generating an alternative and unreal world in which we

often choose to live. Renouncing the power of the imagination is a prerequisite

for receiving revelation or knowledge of the real.

We live in a world of unreality and dreams. To give up our imaginary

position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the

imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and

eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence. A transformation

then takes place at the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate

reception of sense impressions and psychological impressions. It is a

transformation analogous to that which takes place in the dusk of

evening on a road, where we suddenly discern as a tree what we had at

first seen as a stooping man; or where we suddenly recognize as a

rustling of leaves what we thought at first was whispering voices. We

see the same colors; we hear the same sounds, but not in the same way.

In renouncing our imagination in this way, we imitate God's act of renunciation

when he willed the creation of the world - something outside himself - and

decided to allow freedom to his creatures. But it is also a different act, for we


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are surrendering our desire to create a world and agreeing instead to live in the

one already created. This submission to necessity is what Weil understands by

love.

To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up

being the center of the world in imagination, to discern that all points inthe world are equally centers and that the true center is outside the world,

this is to consent to the rule of mechanical necessity in matter and of free

choice at the center of each soul. Such consent is love. The face of this

love, which is turned toward thinking persons, is the love of our

neighbor; the face turned toward matter is love of the order of the world,

or love of the beauty of the world which is the same thing.

Finally, after all this renunciation of self, submission to necessity and surrender

of imagination, we arrive - surprisingly - at beauty. Since beauty and order are

the same thing for Weil, beauty becomes a function of the world's necessity, forwhich she uses the metaphor of gravity. The beautiful order of the world is an

irresistible force that we must obey, whether willingly or unwillingly.

Weil's emphasis on the renunciation of imagination and images marks her as a

follower of the via negativa, the pursuit of the ultimate by way of elimination.

"Not this, not this, not this" - that is the motto of this path. All imagined

realities must be exposed and rejected.

This act of suspending imagination is what Weil calls attention. It is essentially

a "shattering" of illusions. An inattentive person enjoys the illusion of control.One who has begun to pay attention realizes not only that control is imaginary,

but also that the natural world will not fulfill the natural desires of human life.

Attention reveals the absenceof the ultimate. Those who lack the courage to

pay attention and who live in an imaginary world of their own devising may

ignore this painful absence. Weil will not ignore it.

The process of paying attention begins with the intellectual life of study -

especially with math and science - because such study reveals our subservience

to necessity and our helplessness to control the events around us. Ann

Pirruccello explains the importance of study for Weil.

In applying oneself to intellectual exercises, one can come to an

appreciation of truth as something universal and necessary. Studies teach

us that a suspension of our selves - our own opinions and imagination -

is prerequisite to the apprehension of necessary and universal truths.

Mathematical studies are particularly helpful in this regard. The


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intelligence is forced to recognize and manipulate necessary

relationships, which are resistant to imaginative attempts to invent truth.

Specific relationships must be obeyed, and rules must be rigorously

applied in order for such intellectual exercises to be successful.

Thus, although a philosopher, Weil is not opposed to science, but sees it as ateacher in the development of the mature person.

When my attention moves beyond myself and my studies to other people, I

must again renounce the imagined apprehension of other people which would

allow me the illusion of being the Creator, designing and controlling the world

around me. Rather, I must be attentive to the other as purely real- as an

independent existence not oriented to me. Weil describes the common

experience of writing to a friend and anticipating his reply. "It is impossible

that he should not reply by saying what I have said to myself in his name."

Having scripted the response in advance and imagined a particular answer, it isstartling and disturbing to encounter the other's independence. "Men owe us

what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt." This

attention to the reality of the other is how I show love to my neighbor, just as

attention to the necessity of the world is how I love the beauty of the created

order.

Imagination is the reverse of love. Imagination is associated with possession,

love with distance. Imagination is associated with illusion, love with reality.

Love needs reality. What is more terrible than the discovery that througha bodily appearance we have been loving an imaginary being. It is much

more terrible than death, for death does not prevent the beloved from

having lived.

That is the punishment for having fed love on imagination.

Most of us have probably had the experience of being disillusioned after an

infatuation, of realizing that the person with whom we thought we were in love

was merely the product of our own imagination and that the real person is a

disappointment. Most of us have probably not identified our fantasies in suchinstances as criminal, but that is how Weil defines them. She claims that such

imaginings are an offense against reality, that they are poisonous for real love,

which she elsewhere defines as "belief in the existence of other human beings

as such."


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Such love is the recognition of the other's beauty, since beauty is precisely that

which is distant and not possessable. "Everything obeys God, therefore

everything is perfect beauty." Beauty consists in being what one is designed to

be, i.e., of being in obedience to one's nature. To some extent, Weil thinks

obedience is not chosen, but inevitable, as a function of God's sovereignty. To

that extent, everything is beautiful. On the connection between beauty andnecessity, Weil observes:

In the beauty of the world harsh necessity becomes an object of love.

What is more beautiful than the effect of gravity on sea-waves as they

flow in ever-changing folds, or the almost eternal folds of the

mountains?

The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that ships are

sometimes wrecked. On the contrary this adds to its beauty. If it altered

the movement of its waves to spare a ship it would be a creature giftedwith discernment and choice, and not this fluid perfectly obedient to

every external pressure. It is this perfect obedience which makes the

sea's beauty.

For Weil, the Real is not immediately apparent and is only visible through

loving self-renunciation. We can see the influence of Plato in her insistence on

the contrast between reality and illusion. Weil envisions life as being a sort of

screen behind which can be glimpsed formal reality. Beauty exists behind the

screen, in the realm of the Real, and is appropriately apprehended and loved,

not pursued or possessed.

The beautiful is a carnal attraction which keeps us at a distance and

implies a renunciation. This includes the renunciation of that which is

most deep-seated, the imagination. We want to eat all the other objects

of desire. The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it.

We desire that it should be....

We have to remain quite still and unite ourselves with that which we

desire yet do not approach.

We unite ourselves to God in this way: we cannot approach him.

Distance is the soul of the beautiful.

The imagination has no role in this experience.


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Beauty is the source of finality for Weil, but an ultimately unsatisfying source.

Beauty creates a desire which it can not itself meet and confronts us with God's

absence within the sensible world. Beauty makes us long for finality but offers

us nothing beyond its own existence, which may only be apprehended from

afar. Beauty alerts us to our own incompleteness.

Beauty is the supreme mystery of this world. It is a gleam which attracts

the attention and yet does nothing to sustain it. Beauty always promises,

but never gives anything; it stimulates hunger but has no nourishment for

the part of the soul which looks in this world for sustenance. It feeds

only the part of the soul that gazes. While exciting desire, it makes clear

that there is nothing in it to be desired. Because the one thing we want is

that it should not change. If one does not seek means to evade the

exquisite anguish it inflicts, then desire is gradually transformed into

love; and one begins to acquire the faculty of pure and disinterested

attention.

One can never find enough visible finality in the world to prove that it is

analogous to an object made with a view to a certain end. It is even

manifest that this is not the case. Yet the analogy between the world and

a work of art has its experimental verification in the very feeling itself of

the beauty of the world, for the beautiful is the only source of the sense

of beauty. This verification is valid only for those who have experienced

that feeling, but those who have never felt it, and who are doubtless very

rare, cannot perhaps be brought to God by any path. In comparing the

world to a work of art, it is not only the act of creation but Providence

itself which is found to be assimilated in the artistic inspiration. That is

to say that in the world, as in the work of art, there is completion without

any imaginable end.... In a sense the end is nothing but the very

arrangement, the assembling itself of the means employed; in another

sense the end is completely transcendent.

Weil connects Beauty and Purpose in this analogy between the world and a

work of art. But she also leaves them disconnected, suggesting that ultimately

Beauty serves to show us what our purpose is not, more than what our purpose

is. Beauty reveals the limitations of our experience and illustrates our need for

some reality to transcend that experience and make it meaningful.

George Herbert - an author who exercised a strong influence on Weil -

expresses this idea in his poem "The Pulley." Herbert explains that when God

created people, he poured all possible blessings on them: beauty, wisdom,

honor, pleasure. The only blessing which he withheld was the blessing of rest.


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For if I should (said he)

Bestow this jewel also on my creature,

He would adore my gifts instead of me,

And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:

So both should losers be.

Yet let him keep the rest,

But keep them with repining restlessness:

Let him be rich and weary, that at least,

If goodness lead him not, yet weariness

May toss him to my breast.

Clearly, Herbert is inspired here by Augustine's idea of the restless heart. Like

Herbert, Weil suggests that it is part of the design of creation that people should

not be able to rest in Nature. So, although Beauty has a finality about it, it is not

the final finality. Weil leaves us with the classic outcome of the via negativa-

being driven outside and beyond experience to find the transcendent and

wholly other God.

There are some elements of immanentism in Weil, but they are consistently

overshadowed by her insistence on transcendence. She affirms that the

beautiful is "the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible." She

further says that all beauty reflects God. But even in its reflection of God, the

Beautiful suggests negation and distance, a distance which can not be crossed

or bridged, at least not within our experience. "To love purely is to consent to

distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love."

Beauty functions teleologically for Weil in that it is the only thing we can

experience which is not a means, but purely an end. However, our experience

of Beauty, even under the power of love, remains frustrating and unsatisfying.

CHARLES WILLIAMS AND THE VIA AFFIRMATIVA

In contrast to Weil, Charles Williams consistently presents both God and the

Beautiful as immanent. He explicitly ties this to the Incarnation, and affirms

that he is presenting the via affirmativa. Williams does write about suffering

and renunciation, so there is a negative way present in his writing, but his

emphasis is very deliberately on the affirmative. In The Figure of Beatrice as

well as elsewhere, Williams lays out the features of these two paths, which he

calls "the Way of Affirmation" and "the Way of Rejection." He posits that the

Way of Rejection has been more commonly followed in the history of Christian

doctrine, perhaps because it is logically prior to the Way of Affirmation. "It

was necessary first to establish the awful difference between God and the world


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before we could be permitted to see the awful likeness." He admits that a

balanced life requires that the "tangle of affirmation and rejection which is in

each of us... be drawn into some kind of pattern," although he himself is drawn

more clearly to the Way of Affirmation - which he also calls "the Way of

Images," and "the Dantean Way," since he identifies Dante as its greatest

exemplar.

In the literature of Europe the greatest record of the Way of Affirmation

of Images is contained in the work of Dante Alighieri.... he had the

genius to imagine the Way of Affirmation wholly - after a particular

manner indeed, but then that is the nature of the way of the Images. If a

man is called to imagine certain images, he must work in them and not in

others. The record of the Dantean Way begins with three things - an

experience, the environment of that experience, and the means of

understanding and expressing that experience; say - a woman, a city, and

intellect or poetry; say again - Beatrice, Florence, and Virgil. These

images are never quite separated, even in the beginning; towards the end

they mingle and become a great complex image. They end with the

inGodding of man.

Alice Hadfield, Williams' chief biographer, says that in The Figure of Beatrice,

"the title [uses] a formal meaning of the word 'figure' - a mixing of idea and

shape - as a blending of imagination and fact." Clearly, for Williams the

imagination is a good thing, a tool to be used in apprehending God.

Even when he is calling for self-renunciation, Williams gives this call a

positive spin which is unlike that of Simone Weil.

The denial of the self has come, as is natural, to mean in general the

making of the self thoroughly uncomfortable. That (though it may be all

that is possible) leaves the self still strongly existing. But the phrase is

more intellectual than moral, or rather it is only moral because it is

intellectual; it is a denial of the consciousness of the existence of the self

at all. What had been the self is to become a single individual, neither

less nor more than others; as it were, one of the living creatures that run

about and compose the web of the glory.

Being part of the "web of the glory," though a metaphor for self-denial, still

seems to be a more attractive, affirmative image than the complete

disappearance of self under the weight of necessity which Weil envisions when

she speaks of renunciation.


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For Williams, the Beautiful is most clearly and naturally apprehended in the

experience of love - and not just love in general but specifically the experience

of romantic love. Over and over in his works, Williams returns to the idea of

"romantic theology," that is, a theological exploration of the phenomenon of

romantic love. He began exploring these themes in his first book of poetry, a

cycle of eighty-four sonnets written for his wife as part of their courtship.

I love her. O! what other word could keep

In many tongues one clear immutable sound,

Having so many meanings? It is bound,

First, to religion, signifying: "The steep

Whence I see God," translated into sleep

It is: "Glad waking," into thought: "Fixed ground;

A measuring rod," and for the body: "Found."

These know I, with one more, which is: "To weep."

For Williams, falling in love was a source of knowledge and revelation. His

love helps him to know God and to find stability, purpose and self-knowledge.

Later in life, Williams became acquainted with the poetry of Dante and found

there the full articulation of that romantic theology for which he had been

seeking. Like Dante, Williams presents romantic love as an experience by

which we have a vision of the beauty of God. This vision is mediated to us

through imagination, which is a tool for love to see the hidden glory of the

beloved, a glory which is really the presence of God. So romantic love, assisted

by imagination, experiences revelation and has a direct apprehension of the

Beautiful.

Williams suggests that everyone could potentially show us this vision of God.

But it is a divine mercy that they don't. So much glory would crush us.

.... perfection is the arch-natural state of human beings as such.... It is

everyone's or it is no-one's; on that there can be no compromise.

But then why do we not see it always, everywhere, and in all? Because

the Divine Mercy intervenes. Mercy? Mercy assuredly. 'We cannot',wrote Dante in the third Tractate of the Convivio, 'look fixedly upon her

aspect because the soul is so intoxicated by it that after gazing it at once

goes astray in all its operations.' The first manner in which it goes astray

is in a tendency always to extort from the glory its own satisfaction with

the glory. The alternative to being with Love at the centre of the circle is

to disorder the circumference for our own purposes. This - the perversion


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of the image - is in fact the sole subject of theInferno, although Beatrice

herself is hardly mentioned there. If such a perversion follows so easily

on a single seeing, would it be less likely to follow on a multitudinous?

If the gazing fixedly on one divine aspect is apt to intoxicate the soul and

send it reelingly astray, what chaos would follow if all men and women

were so beheld, what sin, what despair!... While we are what we are, theDivine Mercy clouds its creation.

Love empowers the imagination to see a beauty that is not visible without the

presence of love. That beauty is divine, in so far as it reflects and obeys God. It

is formal, in that it reflects the essential nature or form of the person we love. It

is potential, in that it is not yet fully actualized but is in the process of

becoming.

Beauty thus functions in a revelatory way when mediated by love. This insight

lies behind the vast tradition of calling on the beloved to serve as a Muse. AMuse is one who makes knowledge of transcendent reality possible, who

reveals glory, though in a passive way - simply by existing and by being loved.

[Beatrice] is, in a sense, his [Dante's] very act of knowing. It is in this

sense that theParadisois an image of the whole act of knowing which is

the great Romantic way, the Way of the Affirmation of Images, ending

in the balanced whole. Indeed the entire work of Dante... is a description

of the great act of knowledge, in which Dante himself is the Knower,

and God is the Known, and Beatrice is the Knowing.

The Muse does not vigorously proclaim the truth but is perceived with a clarity

and glory that is not normally part of our perception of other people, and

through this inspired vision an epiphany occurs. So an artist may take as a

Muse a loved person who does not return that artist's love. Mutuality is not a

requirement of the Muse tradition. In fact, it is not the norm. Poet Robert

Graves describes the experience:

A Muse-poet falls in love, absolutely, and his true love is for him the

embodiment of the Muse. As a rule, the power of absolutely falling in

love soon vanishes; and, as a rule, because the woman feels embarrassedby the spell she exercises over her poet-lover and repudiates it.... But the

real, perpetually obsessed Muse-poet distinguishes between the Goddess

as manifest in the supreme power, glory, wisdom and love of woman,

and the individual woman whom the Goddess may make her instrument

for a month, a year, seven years, or even more. The Goddess abides; and


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perhaps he will again have knowledge of her through his experience of

another woman.

Williams would not refer to Beatrice as the Goddess, but he is daring in the

titles out of Christian tradition which he considers to be appropriate for the

beloved.

... in this state of love he [the lover] sees and contemplates the beloved

as the perfection of living things: love is bestowed by her smile; she is its

source and its mother. She appears to him, as it were, archetypal, the

alpha and omega of creation; without father or mother, without human

ties of any sort, for she is before humanity, the first-created of God....

She is the Mother of Love, purissima, inviolata, admirabilis .... she is the

mirror of all mystical titles - speculum iustitiae, sedes sapientiae, causa

nostrae laetitiae, domus aurea, stella matutina, salus infir-morum .... any

lover to whom the application of the titles we have quoted seems naturaland right may believe from that in the Godhead of Incarnate Love, and

may so dare to apply in a very real sense the titles which remain - Mater

divinae gratiae, Mater Salvatoris, Rosa mystica, Refugium peccatorum,

Regina Prophetarum. Not certainly of herself is she anything but as

being glorious in the delight taken in her by the Divine Presence that

accompanies her, and yet is born of her; which created her and is

helpless as a child in her power. However in all other ways she may be

full of error or deliberate evil, in the eyes of the lover, were it but for a

moment, she recovers her glory, which is the glory that Love had with

the Father before the world was. Immaculate she appears, Theotokos, the

Mother of God.

In his discussions of Dante, Williams calls Beatrice the "Mother of Love."

Traditionally, only poets and artists experience the revelatory power of a Muse,

and only men - since the Muse always seems to be female. The Muse "does not

choose but is chosen: la demoiselle lue. But if the man is religious,... he will

believe that the woman was chosen by God; he will even resist making a choice

until the inevitable is forced upon him." Williams departs from this tradition in

that he believes all Christian marriage - not just the love affairs of artists -

should be marked by revelatory romantic love, so that every Christian husband

should be able to assign all the titles mentioned above to his wife. Williams

also never suggests that the experience of encountering God through romantic

love is gender-specific. Though he writes out of his own experience as a

married man, he clearly expects Christian women to have the same epiphanous

experiences through their love for their husbands.


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In Williams' understanding, Beauty functions teleologically asfinalcause, in

that it draws us to itself. The apprehension of Beauty is an end or a goal for us.

He would agree with Weil in understanding Beauty as that which we wish to

see without consuming, the one thing which we can see as an end in itself, not

as a means to a further end. But whereas Weil sees Beauty stirring up our desire

for a rest which is not available to us, Williams envisions rest as part of aknowable future reality. We can rest in Beauty, rather than striving to use it for

some further end. The traditional Christian idea of the Beatific Vision as the

ultimate telosis predicated on the assumption that God is the Beautiful, and

that to look on God is the one thing which we will find we are content to do

always.

Beauty further functions teleologically for Williams in that it isformalcause.

Each being moves toward its own beauty by moving toward the actualization of

its own essence. As Williams read Dante's Vita Nuova, Beatrice becomes more

herself because of Dante's love for her.

The deepening beauty of Beatrice is a part of the poem; that is, it is (in

the poem) known to us because Dante knew it. Her beauty is her own,

but its publication is his; more - it is in his sight of it and worship of it

that it grows deeper - so that all the infinite gratitude is not to be only on

his side. In the exchange of their celestial love, she becomes more

Beatrician by the measure of the Dantean knowledge.

Beatrice in turn mediates God's presence and even salvation itself to Dante

because of Dante's love for her. It is not that Beatrice is unique among women,

but that Dante has been granted a vision of her in glory. Here Williams and

Weil are very close. Dante is seeing Beatrice's formal reality. His view of her is

more real than the view he has of other people. Williams wrote to a woman

whom he loved about having the experience of seeing her reality: "Quite

clearly, quite certainly, you are all that I ever said. I always sawyou." And to

another friend he wrote, "do not underrate yourself... you were meant to

beMargaretafter all, to be Margaret and no other; there is no other in all the

masses of creation, who can be that." Yet Williams differs from Weil in that he

believes this vision is mediated by imagination - of which Weil is so distrustful.

Williams posits a double vision of the beloved. He suggests that Dante was

quite capable of seeing Beatrice both as a normal girl like any other, flawed and

complex and resistant to the workings of his imagination. But Dante

simultaneously enjoys another vision of Beatrice glorified.


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Beatrice was, in her degree, an image of nobility, of virtue, of the

Redeemed Life, and in some sense of Almighty God himself. But she

also remained Beatrice right to the end; her derivation was not to obscure

her identity any more than her identity should hide her derivation. Just as

there is no point in Dante's thought at which the image of Beatrice in his

mind was supposed to exclude the actual objective Beatrice, so there isno point at which the objective Beatrice is to exclude the Power which is

expressed through her.

And again:

The girl seems to him something like perfection - though, of course, he

knows quite well that she is not, and may even . . . experience quite

sharply that she is not. The vision of perfection does not at all exclude

the sight of imperfection; the two can exist together; they can even, in a

sense, co-inhere.

InHe Came Down from Heaven, Williams often discusses the dynamic of

simultaneous inclusivity and exclusivity. This is a vision of both actuality and

potentiality simultaneously. What is actual may be apprehended by paying

attention, to use Weil's expression, but what is potential may only be seen

through the work of loving imagination.

In traditional Christian philosophy, God is understood as pure actuality.

Therefore, God isthe Beautiful, just as God isBeing. Imagination should not

be necessary when perceiving God. In fact, imagination gets in the way of anaccurate vision of God by distorting our perception. People, however, are a

mixture of actuality and potentiality, being and becoming. Our essential nature

is not fully actualized; therefore, our beauty has not fully come into its own. To

see another person's full beauty requires seeing not only what is actual, but also

seeing what is potential - what that person may become. Seeing such potential

reality doesrequire imagination, since it cannot be directly experienced as

acutal or real.

An example of such vision is the way parents look at their children. A parent

will say: My child is special, gifted, brilliant; my child is going to be a greatartist, an athlete, a scholar. The parent is not simply fantasizing. Rather, he or

she has the ability to see beyond what is to what may be, the ability to

recognize potential attributes in the child as well as actualized attributes.

Clearly there is the danger that we will imagine something illusory, rather than

potential reality. Think, for instance, of parents who imagine their own


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frustrated aspirations fulfilled in their children. Such children may wish their

parents had less imagination. The key seems to be the combination of

imagination with love. Williams would agree with Weil in saying that love

celebrates the other's independence from myself. Therefore, loving imagination

never seeks to use the other as an extension of myself but rather sees the

potential of the other's essence realized.

This ability to imagine the beauty which is coming as well as the beauty which

is present is activated by love and made possible by imagination. It is love

which lets us see each other as we may someday be. It is love which gives us

insight into the divine spark in the other. The loving vision sees potentiality

fully actualized. This is the Beautiful. "Beauty," says Aquinas, "properly

belongs to the nature of a formal cause." In other words, a thing has beauty in

so far as it actualizes its essential nature, and that form or nature is its proper

beauty. So the Beautiful exercises causal influence by leading and pulling,

rather than by pushing and propelling. The Beautiful is that which is being

actualized when a being becomes what it is meant to be by virtue of its own

essential nature.

Beatrice becomes Dante's guide to heaven, for "the beloved is the first

preparatory form of heaven and earth." The perfected form, the image of which

may be apprehended by love, contains the goal toward which each individual

and the very cosmos move. We are meant to progress toward Beauty. Toward

the end of his life, Williams wrote to a friend:

...many things I have lost, and many thrown away, and many were

forbidden. But almost everywhere asomethinghas - I hardly dare even

say lasted, but been. There has been everywhere a point of good; it is

astonishing and in a way terrifying - that lucid, often vanishing, often

repudiated, point of - beauty? say, of fact. I should like to believe I shall

never emotionally deny it again.

Beauty and fact are two words for this same "point of good" that grounds our

existence.

TOWARDS AN AESTHETIC TELEOLOGY

So what can be retained from these two thinkers' efforts to go back into history

and find a meaningful understanding of Beauty? Is it possible to draw their two

approaches into "some sort of pattern," as Williams would say, or are they too

different? I am committed to the project of drawing the best from both because

whichever of these two authors I am reading at the moment always sounds


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completely convincing to me. Still there are such substantial differences - and

even contradictions - between them that I fail to see how they can both be

completely right.

First, they clearly differ in their understanding of the role the imagination

should play in apprehending the Beautiful. While Williams sees imagination asa means by which we reach heaven, Weil observes: "We must prefer real hell to

an imaginary paradise." Martin Andic argues that Weil does allow for a

positive understanding of imagination, but that when she's speaking in positive

terms she uses the word "genius." So she makes space for the value of

imagination in the work of an artist, or even the work of a scientist. But her

fundamental view of imagination is still that it is a source of unreality, whereas

the real is apprehended only by love. Even in speaking of artists, she observes,

"The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real."

I find this dismissal of imagination disturbing. Imagination seems to be theonly way to apprehend potential reality, and I fear that Weil's dismissal of

imagination is in part the result of an understanding of reality which is too

static. At the same time, I appreciate her hard-nosed insistence on facing reality

and her suspicion of self-serving delusions which the imagination easily

creates. From Weil we need to take the idea that a true encounter with reality,

and therefore with Beauty, may have a shattering effect on our illusions. C. S.

Lewis discusses this same "shattering" phenomenon when he talks of the

"iconoclastic" nature of the real.

Images, I must suppose, have their use or they would not have been so

popular. (It makes little difference whether they are pictures and statues

outside the mind or imaginative constructions within it.) To me,

however, their danger is more obvious. Images of the Holy easily

become holy images - sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It

has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great

iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the

marks of His presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it

leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins....

All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life,

incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to;

you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her

unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality.

Here Lewis unites Williams' insights from romantic love with Weil's insistence

on resisting imagination. The shattering of images and ideas is one of the marks


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of God's presence. Since Reality and Beauty are synonymous for Weil, it is the

Beautiful which is so iconoclastic. Contact with the Beautiful shatters our

illusions about the nature of reality.

A second difference between Williams and Weil concerns the role of romantic

love in apprehending the Beautiful. Williams understands romantic love as themost direct way to achieve a vision of Beauty and to know God. Again, Weil is

more suspicious, though she does affirm that love may serve this function.

The longing to love the beauty of the world in a human being is

essentially the longing for the Incarnation. It is mistaken if it thinks it is

anything else. The Incarnation alone can satisfy it. It is therefore wrong

to reproach the mystics, as has been done sometimes, because they use

love's language. It is theirs by right. Others only borrow it.

But such love is still based on illusion for Weil, not on reality, and so itsfunction as a source of revelation is limited. Weil is uncomfortable with the

idea of loving any one person more than another. She assumes that she is

obligated to love everyone equally.

I think I must love wrongly: otherwise things would not seem like this to

me. My love would not be attached to a few beings. It would be

extended to everything which is worthy of love.

Even friendship is somewhat suspect for her, since she sees it as a concession

to her own self-centered nature. The particularity of Dante's experience ofBeatrice would trouble Weil. Weil observes approvingly that "Plato thinks that

carnal desire is a corruption, a degradation, of love of God." This is quite

different from Williams assertion that romantic love is a first step toward the

love of God.

The model of the Incarnation tells us that revelation must always be particular

in order to be understood. In the Hebrew Bible, we read the story of the

creation of human beings. First God creates Adam, the sinless man who has

God's own spirit breathed into him and who walks in the garden of Eden with

God as a friend walks with his friend. And yet Adam is described as lonely oralone. Perfect and sinless communion with God is not enough for him. "There

was not found a helper to be his partner," says the book of Genesis. The word

"helper" is generally a divine word in Genesis. Adam does have a helper in

God, who made him and continues to nurture and care for him. But God is not

Adam's partner. He needs that divine helping presence in his own form in order

for it to be comprehensible. When God creates Eve and presents her to Adam,


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he greets her with this song: "Here at last is flesh of my flesh, bone of my

bone." Here is the helper who is also a partner - divine help and presence in a

"meet" form, a form designed for Adam, to correspond to him.

Within Christian tradition, this is the first sign that the Incarnation is necessary.

Divine essence requires comprehensible form in order to be understood. Thishappens through other people, who carry the image of God - participate in the

divine nature; share the divine spark - all in human form. Human form is

necessarily particular and individuated. This is the insight offered by Charles

Williams' romantic theology: part of our human design includes the ability to

glimpse ultimate Reality and Beauty in the particular form of those we most

love.

So both Weil and Williams offer us legitimate ways in which contact with the

Beautiful may help us to know the nature of reality. For Simone Weil, the

Beautiful shows us what reality is not,shattering those ideas which are simplyproducts of our imagination. For Charles Williams, the Beautiful as it is

glimpsed in a loved person gives us a positive vision of the nature of reality.

For Weil as well as for Williams, therefore, Beauty may function as a formal

cause. A formal cause is "that attribute by virtue of which any thing is what it

is." In agreeing that Beauty shows the nature of reality, both Weil and Williams

allow Beauty to reveal something of the essential nature of individual beings

and of the world. In agreeing to identify Beauty with formal reality, they

suggest that the Beautiful isthe essential nature of reality. A being's design and

purpose are contained in its essential nature. If the essential nature of reality is

Beauty, then the actualization of Beauty is where reality is headed.

There is still disagreement between Weil and Williams on what it means to

identify Beauty with reality. For Weil, this is a relatively static concept, leading

to her insistence on submission and obedience before the necessity of the world

and our own essential nature. For Williams, the formal dimension of Beauty

includes a potential aspect. There is a sense in which Beauty is that which we

are meant to become. For Weil, Beauty reveals that humanity's purpose is to

unflinchingly accept the shattering of our imaginary realities, to renounce all

pretense to control or power, and to bow in obedience before the necessity of

the world. For Williams, our destiny is to grow into the beautiful beings we

have been designed to become.


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Scripture citations are from the New Revised Standard Version.

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Towards an Aesthetic Teleology: Romantic Love, Imagination and the Beautiful in Simone Weil and Charles Williams