Beauty and the soul:

[Triton]

Beauty and the soul:



"Jung writes, 'The anima believes in the kalon kagathon, the
'beautiful and the good', a primitive conception that antidates the
discovery of the conflict between aesthetics and morals… The paradox
of this marriage of ideas [beauty and goodness] troubled the ancients
as little as it does the primitives. The anima is conservative and
clings in the most exasperating fashion to the ways of earlier
humanity'.

"Plotinus's definition of ugly and beautiful is immediately useful
for psychology. 'We posess beauty when we are true to our own being;
ugliness is in going over to another order'. He further tells us how
we can recognize going over to another order: 'Let the soul fall in
with the Ugly and at once it shrinks within itself, denies the thing,
turns away from it, out of tune, resenting it'. Here is the aesthetic
response. When we feel cramped, resentful, out of tune, then we have
gone over to another order, and have fallen away from soul.."

"Following the signals of beauty and ugliness is an Aphroditic mode of
imagining individuation. This mode maintains Psyche always in
Aphrodite's temple all the while we go through the world making soul.
The motto that the world is the place of soul-making, of course, comes
from John Keats, and it was Keats who also said that Beauty is
Truth.."

[James Hillman - 'Thought of the Heart' p. 50, 59, 60]



"Restless inquiry is not the only kind of knowing, self-examination
not the only kind of awareness. Appreciation of an image, your life
story as studded with images since early childhood, and a deepening
into them slows the restlessness of enquiry, laying to rest the fever
and the fret of finding out. By its very definition, given by Thomas
Aquinas in his Summa theologica, beauty arrests motion. Beauty is
itself a cure for psychological malaise.

That longing in the human heart for beauty must be recognised by
the field that claims the human heart to be its province. Psychology
must find its way back to beauty, if only to keep itself alive….Like
cures like: a theory of life must have a base in beauty if it would
explain the beauty that life seeks."

[Hillman - 'The soul's code' p. 38]



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Beauty, the Face of the Soul:



"For the soul, then, beauty is not defined as pleasantness of form
but rather as the quality in things that invites absorbtion and
contemplation, Soetsu Yanagi, founder of Japan's modern craft
movement, defines beauty as that which gives unlimited scope to the
imagination; beauty is a source of imagination, he says, that never
dries up. A thing so attractive and absorbing may not be pretty or
pleasant. It could be ugly, in fact, and yet seize the soul as
beautiful in this special sense. James Hillman defines beauty for the
soul as things displaying themselves in their individuality. Yangi's
and Hillman's point is that beauty doesn't require prettyness. Some
pieces of art are not pleasing to look at, and yet their content and
form are arresting and lure the heart into profound imagination.

[Thomas Moore - 'Care of the Soul' p. 279]