the Christian ideal.[1] Says Clement of Alexandria: He who in chaste love ((
Greek characters)) looks on beauty, thinks not that the flesh is beautiful, but the spirit, admiring the body as a statue ((Greek characters)) through whose beauty he transports himself to the artist and the true beauty.[2]
Augustine's early manhood is known to all. Too passionately had he loved the beauty of the flesh; yet it was beauty that he loved, and would be often saying to his friends, "Num amamus aliquid nisi pulchrum?"[3] "But I saw not yet the essential matter in thy art, Almighty One, who alone makest marvellous things; and my soul was travelling through corporeal forms; and I was defining and distinguishing what was beautiful in itself, what was fit, and what should be adapted to something; and I was finding corporeal illustrations. Also I turned to the nature of the soul; and the false view I held of things spiritual did not permit me to perceive the truth."[4] But as Augustine found his way more surely to Christianity, these thoughts changed with him, till he knew that outward
- ↑ Clement praises a spiritual beauty, rather than any beauty of an embellished body. The true beauty is of that man with whom dwells the Word; for he then has the form of the Word, and is made like God ; and another beauty of men is love. Love vaunteth not itself, seeketh not what is not its own and God's, so does not behave itself unseemly ; all of which would be opposed to the true spiritual beauty, as of Christ, who had neither form nor comeliness.—Paedagogus, III, 1. Ambrose says, speaking of the Virgin: "ut ipsa corporis species simulacrum fuerit mentis, figura probitatis," De Virginibus, II, 2; Migne, Patr. Lat., 16, col. 209.
- ↑ Strom., IV, 18.
- ↑ Confessions, IV, 20. At the age of twenty-seven he wrote the De Pulchro et Apto.
- ↑ Confessions, IV, Sec. 24. The Latin is somewhat obscure.
