every angel is terrible...

“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.” Rainer Maria Rilke, First Duino Elegy

Editor’s note: "Duino" is the name of a castle in Italy where Rilke, after hearing a voice as he walked near the Adriatic cliffs, began writing his Elegies. The whispering voice, whose testimony would become the first line of the lamenting poems, proclaimed, "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies of angels?" Severe depression would interrupt his writing, to be completed rather quickly some years later in a "boundless storm, a hurricane of the spirit."

Rilke, in the Elegies, it seems to me, endeavored to communicate a personal vision of love as ultimate reality. "Angels," for him, represented a transcendental expression of beauty, a higher reality, unattainable to man while on the Earth-plane. Occasionally, we might catch a glimpse, but even a fleeting insight terrifies us. Man's encounter, indeed, a confrontation, with existential Beauty underlies our loneliness and separateness, our striving toward, our inability to substantially access, the divine, while in this world. Rilke perceived a unity among life, love, and death, in that, true lovers will not be able to touch ultimate love while hampered by mortality: "the nature of every ultimate love ... is only able to reach the loved one in the infinite."

Editor's note: "Every angel is terrible [and] the beginning of terror." Not without reason men truly in love cannot sometimes breathe or speak in the presence of a Beloved as she symbolizes Beauty Personified. Her "made in the image" status, as we've discussed, conveys to him a nearness to God that shall not be superseded in this life or, likely, the next. This "terrible" ensign of God's perfect essence becomes all the divinity he is able to bear; yes, "Every angel is terrible," as she "serenely disdains to destroy" him, both with presence and absence. There is reason why a man truly in love finds himself compelled to "worship and adore" his Beloved.

Marc Chagall, Lovers with Half Moon, 1926

Ernest Becker, The Denial Of Death: “… the fear of the reality of the intense focalization of natural wonder and power; the fear of being overwhelmed by the truth of the universe as it exists, as that truth is focused in one human face.”

Editor's note: Ernest Becker's words brilliantly capture the sense of "every angel is terrible" as the Sacred Beloved, one's personal "beatific vision," reveals the face of God to her lover.

Eckhart Tolle, Even The Sun Will Die

beauty as portal to ultimate reality and truth

"[The mind might stop] when overwhelmed by tremendous beauty and, for a moment, there’s an opening; and whenever you respond to the beauty in nature, or the beauty of another human being, there’s a moment for the recognition of beauty to be possible, in that, there’s always a moment of thoughtless awareness, and that’s when you truly perceive…"

In The Wedding Song we find authentic lovers engaged in consciousness-enhancing activity: drawing life and giving it back again. Not all of this interaction is pleasant and will sometimes fall under the heading of “sacred combat.” However, a major avenue of access, a portal into greater maturity and awareness, is effected by the concept of beauty.

We learned from Andrew Jackson Davis that true lovers will see each other as ideals and ultimates in every aspect. But this is not the unrealistic, infatuation-driven assessment of John and Mary. True lovers are not blinded to what may be remaining faults and imperfections of the beloved. “Spots and wrinkles” are seen to be what they truly are – heralds of strength and virtue to come.

The true lover sees through present imperfection, all the way to the beauty of the beloved’s hidden nature, all that he or she will yet become in a flowering of human potential; and this existential “beatific vision” of future and ultimate loveliness holds the viewing lover in thrall concerning the majesty and splendor of that which the sacred beloved will one day manifest: “I believe in you, I know who you are.”

the translucence of the eternal splendor of the One and of the Truth

In 1970 Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg delivered an address entitled, “The Meaning of Beauty in the Exact Sciences.”

He drew distinction between two definitions of beauty put forth in history:

(1) the concept of beauty as harmonious relational symmetry, a pleasing unity of externals (see the previous essay); but also, from Plotinus,

(2) “Beauty is the translucence, through material phenomena, of the eternal splendor of the One”; further, Heisenberg referenced two Latin mottos, “The simple is the seal of the true,” and “Beauty is the splendor of truth.”

In the essay “What We Stay Alive For,” I suggest that the true mate will see in his beloved this “translucence” revealing the “eternal splendor” and the “hidden face of God.” Only he will see these marvels as she becomes, for him, spiritual pedagogue of divine mystery.

the sacred meaning of art

Above, I quoted Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg: “Beauty is the translucence, through material phenomena, of the eternal splendor of the One.”

On the strength of this, along with my own meditations, in the “What We Stay Alive For” writing, I offered that one’s eternal mate, “in the beauty of her countenance, reveals, as no other pedagogue, the hidden face of God… only for him, her beauty becomes a sacred portal to an inner knowing.”

However, beauty as expressed in the fine arts might also become pathway to mystical depths. I would call this “sacred art,” in that it issues as product of the artist’s accessing Universal Consciousness. We discussed this in the “Higher Creativity” article.

Most art today is not worthy of the term and does not reflect higher levels of awareness; instead, most art seems to reach for the sensational, the gaudy, the carnival, the meretricious. When we view it, there is no calling forth of hallowed wonderment from the depths of being. Most art seems to reach for the sensational, the gaudy, the meretricious.

From “The Seven Purposes,” channeled comment from the other side: “Art, when it is a real interpretation of life, is a high and noble thing, but the art that is merely self-expression [representing the dysfunctional ego] is a disintegrating force. Too much of it is that now."

Instead, we sense that the artist connived, “ok, let’s see if we can turn heads and raise eyebrows by being outrageous, let’s offend proprietous sensibility, and then they’ll think we’re clever and say we’re ‘creative’.”

We often see this same dynamic in the typical published work. The writer seems to believe that good writing is the arresting of attention by way of the scandalous and the coarse, with little regard to the most important part of writing – having something worthwhile to say.

In these works of art there is nothing that leads us to higher ground or deeper perceptions, nothing that points us to the inner knowing, there is no “translucence,” no shining through, “of the eternal splendor of the One.” It’s a purely man-made work devoid of co-creatorship with the divine.

From a grander perspective, however, it’s not just painting and writing, or music and sculpture, that becomes plastic material for the muse – one’s entire life, if properly lived, should reflect a cooperation with the transcendental; one’s very life should become a masterpiece of Universal Consciousness’s expression.

I like quoting Dr. Ernest Becker on this vital point, and have done so on the homepage, but allow me to reference his words again:

Victory "over human limitation is not something that can be programmed by science … It comes from the vital energies of masses of men sweating within the nightmare of creation … The most that anyone can do is to fashion something - an object or ourselves - and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the Life Force.”

beauty and the inner cosmos

In one of his lectures, Eckhart makes an important point about the night sky. As we peer into the midnight dark-blue, we perceive both objects and an immensity of space around them. But, he says, how can this be? “Space” is not a thing, as such, and so why should we be aware of it? Even to give it a name, “space,” adds to the confusion because, with a name, we reify it, make it a “thing,” turn it into a kind of object.

Space is a “no-thing.” The fact that we perceive it at all -- given that there is so much we do not perceive, especially, the gargantuan immensity of the cosmic “space” -- indicates or suggests a hidden proclivity, in that, a deeper part of ourselves, the “inner cosmos,” the “inner space,” resonates with, is drawn to, this external version.

When I heard Eckhart explain this, I said, yes, of course, and this is very closely related to the meaning of beauty. Just as our sense of awe in observing “outer space” is generated not by the space itself but by an affinity with the "space," the "stillness," of our own “inner cosmos,” so, too, the sense of awe, the majesty of the beauty, which a lover perceives in his beloved, is not, strictly speaking, emanating from the beloved, per se, but from (1) the soul-depths of the loving observer and (2) a perception of the new glorious "One Person" relationship which their love has created (see "The Wedding Song" regarding this latter phenomenon).

Vincent van Gogh:
“When facing a flat landscape,
I see nothing but eternity.
Am I the only one to see it?”

Editor’s note: Originally, I’d made reference to Van Gogh’s ecstasy in a chapter of the book, “How To Sit Quietly In A Room Alone.” See it here.

However, it occurs to me that Van Gogh’s vision of eternity, as a result of communing with the glories of nature, accesses the same spirit of which I speak in this “Meaning Of Beauty” article.

There is something about Beauty that opens a door to the mystical, to the transcendent God, to the infinite, to the inexpressible; opens the heart and soul, and evolves these, as nothing else. I submit to you, here, and in the above discussion, that the opening of this door – this existential vision of unbounded “eternity,” as Van Gogh would have it -- is facilitated by one’s Sacred Beloved, one’s Twin Soul, the unknowable God's "made in the image" agent, more than any other purveyor of the splendid and sublime.

Editor's last word:

Many love songs, referencing the loss of a beloved, speak to a hopelessness, a future’s bleak landscape; even more, with authentic relationship, the very soul itself, the inner person, so it feels, languishes, is hollowed, in utter purposelessness.

darkness where my soul has been

One such song comes to mind, by Elvis, entitled, “When I’m Over You.” The sorrowful aftermath of losing one’s love, he says, is more than simple tragedy: “There’ll be darkness where my soul has been, and no light will ever shine again…”

What is the nature of this extreme grief and misery? It’s as if one’s very sense of personhood has been eviscerated and emptied. One’s beloved is a source of beauty, to be sure, but why should the loss of this beauty in one’s life become so utterly devastating? Why does it feel like “there’ll be darkness where my soul has been”? with this destitution affecting us so deeply, so completely, as to invite a sense of the impossibility of recovery: “no light will ever shine again.”

There are many sources of beauty in the world: a sunset, a full Moon, a flower, a small child, a bird, a seashore, a mountain – we could go on. As we encounter each of these, we might experience a certain upliftment of the heart. We’re inspired. But then we move on to mundane thoughts and tasks and may never again recall the incident.

no light will ever shine again

But when we lose authentic love, we don’t move on. Now, in greatest calamity, “there is darkness where my soul has been”; moreover, we perceive that there will be no healing from this fall into perdition: “no light will ever shine again.” This is existential crisis at its most profound; a magnitude of loss impinging upon not merely what one has but, it would seem, what one is.

the face of God to him; the closest he will ever come to the Divine during the next million years and beyond

The Sacred Beloved has the didactic power to reach her mate as no other pedagogue in the universe. She is “the face of God” to him, an encounter with the supremely mystical, a doorway to knowing the beauty of his own soul. Not for sport is she labeled as "made in the image."

Editor's note: Spirit Guides inform us that Twin Souls are given to each other -- for many reasons -- but, from a cosmic, evolutionary perspective, these Two are meant to help each other develop spiritually. As this is the case, intuitively, I believe, during times of separation, Twins experience a sense of existential calamity, a period of overreaching grief and sorrow, "darkness where my soul has been," when that one person, one specifically created to lead her mate to higher ground, goes missing.

Only she, the Twin Soul, possesses the key to open long-barred psychic strongholds, without which manumission he would ever remain prisoner to his aloneness, never truly perceiving the meaning of “made in the image.”

READ MORE in "The Wedding Song" concerning "there must have been a reason for becoming man and wife."

There are many pretty faces in the world; in their evanescence, we recover from the loss of these; however, there is a particular one whose loss would invite a calamity from which we shall not recover.

the transforming fire

There are those, many, on the other side of life, who do not understand these things; have not yet discovered true love and its transforming fire. In this bereft condition, they slowly drift into a kind of egoic insanity, a "darkness where the soul has been," an unrealistic view of the nature of reality. For them, "no light will ever shine again" until they prepare themselves spiritually for her coming. This is fact, not poetry.