It is love that reveals to us the
eternal in us and in our neighbours.
Is it the beautiful, the eternal, in things, that awakens and kindles
our love for them, or is it our love for things that reveals to us the
beautiful, the eternal, in them? Is not beauty perhaps a creation of
love, in the same way and in the same sense that the sensible world is a
creation of the instinct of preservation and the supersensible world of
that of perpetuation? Is not beauty, and together with beauty eternity,
a creation of love? "Though our outward man perish," says the Apostle,
"yet the inward man is renewed day by day" (2 Cor. iv. 16). The man of
passing appearances perishes and passes away with them; the man of
reality remains and grows. "For our light affliction, which is but for a
moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory"
(ver. 17). Our suffering causes us anguish, and this anguish, bursting
because of its own fullness, seems to us consolation. "While we look not
at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for
the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not
seen are eternal" (ver. 18).
This suffering gives hope, which is the beautiful in life, the supreme
beauty, or the supreme consolation. And since love is full of suffering,
since love is compassion and pity, beauty springs from compassion and is
simply the temporal consolation that compassion seeks.
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