Let loving the beautiful be your morality

                                                

Without the power of desire there is no longing, and so no love, which is the issue of longing; for the property of desire is to love something. And without the incensive power, intensifying the desire for union with what is loved, there can be no peace.

—St. Maximus the Confessor, The Philokalia

Orthodox Christian theologian Timothy Patitsas has written a beautiful book,The Ethics of Beauty. In the West, he says the intellectual sins like pride were taken as primary, while in the East, the sensual sins were taken as primary. 

In Orthodoxy, first the passions must be cleansed, then we can perceive and fall in love with true Beauty.

Moved by Beauty the will now desires to embrace Goodness.

Lastly, we are ready to bow down to Truth.

The modern world operates in the opposite way, stop being ignorant and just do the right thing.

It’s not about moral reform, to will yourself to do good. You’ll naturally wish to do good when you perceive it to be desirable. What causes you to desire something ? When you see it as beautiful . For that, you first need to cleanse the nous to perceive what’s truly beautiful and fall in love with it, thereby embracing the Good you now see as Beautiful.

The following are excerpts from an interview he did HERE :

“….in Orthodoxy first comes the battle with concupiscent passions, which we win by fasting—in other words, by falling in love with Beauty itself, and not with false beauty. But what is this real Beauty, but Christ himself in a moment of self-emptying love? And so through Beauty we learn the Goodness of the Cross—that is to say, Ethics—and we ourselves long to pour out our life for our brothers, sisters, enemies, and all of creation. To contemplate this good-ness, to be illumined, we must give alms. We are then illumined in both senses—we contemplate correctly, and our light “shines before men.”

The healing of the soul begins with noticing God’s many theophanies, and with falling in love with them. In other words, it begins with Beauty.

After this we can discuss Goodness. By embracing what we ind within authentic Beauty—the crucified Savior and the Cross—we attain Goodness and become good, and ind our communion to others restored.

Finally, through these two steps we are brought to the gates of Truth, by a purified feeling. I mean a theological sensing, the innate ability we have to recognize theophany even in its hidden manifestations. In relying on that intuition, or in recognizing that within the Beautiful story of Christ is goodness, and therefore almost certainly truth—we fall in love with beauty and step out in faith toward it.

Is faith any different than eros? Abraham stepped out of his land and onto  a journey of exile not because he worked it out intellectually, but because he had received a theophany! Perhaps faith is just the memory of theophany, the continuing to launch out towards that divine supernova when it seems to have gone dark?

And when we ind within Beauty the miracle of empathy, and contemplate this Goodness by imitating it, we see that the irst feeling is not left behind. Rather, it is amplified and becomes contemplation, a feeling that includes discursive thought—a faith that is expressed as reason. 

And Finally our sense of truth is but an amplification of our sense of Beauty and our sense of Goodness or morality. The three are just one clear channel, one pure stream—from feeling to contemplation to knowing Truth directly. 

This is why Orthodox theology looks the way it does, so pure and free, so elegant and aesthetically satisfying—rather than cold, logical, and hard.

Your sense of the beautiful is already an intellectual power, and your initial  knowing of truth will still be a falling in love with the beautiful through feeling. 

                                                       

This is why Orthodox ascetic struggle, and Orthodox theology and ethics, do not begin with intellect and truth, nor with the intellect investigating goodness. Or, they may temporarily begin there if challenged to do so, but they will always return to their real beginning, which is Beauty, followed by Goodness, then the appropriation of the self-revelation of God. We begin with theophany, then add correct praxis, and inally we investigate dogma.

Imagine an ethics that was nothing more than Truth investigating Goodness, with no thought for Beauty? Who would even care about what it discovered? But isn’t this exactly how we deine Ethics today?

Or, imagine a psychotherapy in which Truth investigates Truth, asking only whether what we feel is true, always seeming to denigrate concern for Beauty and Empathy in the form of its very practice? Can there even be a Truth without Goodness and Beauty? Well, this is just what we call “objectivity,” and it is just a kind of hell.

We begin with theophany, then add correct praxis, and finally we investigate dogma.

Purification, illumination, deification .

Deification comes not from moral struggle, but from ascetic struggle—the attempt to fall in love with Christ and him alone, to be chaste, to energize our eros. And Illumination is a contemplation not yet of theological truths, but of goodness, of the empathy and compassion at the heart of beauty. 

Thus to purify our reasoning, we emphasize not logic, but the giving of alms; only this will clarify our judgment about goodness and render us Illumined.

 Deification is not separate from the others. To attain Eros (Beauty; the first commandment of Christ's two greatest commandments) and Agape (Goodness; the second of these two commandments) is already to be Deified.

 Or, we must see that even the first rays of Beauty in our lives, represent the onset, incipient but real, of our deification. We know the theologian to be deified because when he speaks, it is God speaking with him, with one voice human and divine. He is theologos be-cause he has found his own logos in the Logos who is Theos. This could be anyone."