The Soul Has a Need for Beauty
Rev. Lilli Nye
Feb. 20, 2005
A few years ago, an interesting Neanderthal artifact was excavated from a cave in Slovenia: a small bone flute, made from a bear femur, hollowed out, with four holes bored into it in straight alignment. This little flute could be as much as 80,000 years old, perhaps the oldest known surviving musical instrument.
We know that our long-extinct Neanderthal cousins with their protruding brows and stocky limbs were moved to paint those luminous and graceful images of animals and spirits on their cave walls, and now we know that they expressed themselves in some sort of music.
- Did the flute imitate the sound of the wind?
- The sounds of birdcalls?
- Or did it give expression to their longings, fears, and joys and the spiritual wonderings of their ancient souls?
In exploring our own human need and fascination with beauty, why start with animals or with our ancient predecessors?
Because they suggest that our need to experience and create beauty is encoded into us at a primordial level. It is part of our nature because it seems to be encoded in nature itself. We are instinctively drawn to what is beautiful. We instinctively want to express ourselves through our own acts of beauty and creativity.
Could it be that beauty and creativity are
actually intentions of the universe itself?
Physicist Brian Swimme, claims …
“Allurement. is possibly one of the fundamental
forces in the universe. Allurement, attraction,
operates at every level of the cosmos.”
To emphasize the importance of this idea, Swimme proposes a mental experiment. He writes …
“Bring to mind all the allurements filling the universe, of whatever complexity or order: the allurement we call gravitation, that of electromagnetic interactions, chemical attractors, allurements in the biological, organic and human worlds. Here’s the question:
“If we could snap our fingers and make these allurements.
which we can’t see or taste or hear anyway,
disappear from the universe,
what would happen?
“To begin with, the galaxies would break apart. Stars of the Milky Way would fly off in all directions, since they would no longer hold each other in galactic embrace. Individual stars would disperse, their atoms no longer attracting each other, thus releasing core pressure and shutting down fusion reactions. The stars would go dark. The Earth would break apart as well, the minerals and chemical compounds dissolving, mountains evaporating like huge dark clouds under the dimming sun.
“But even if the physical world retained its shape, the human world would disintegrate just the same.
“No one would go to work in the morning.
“Why should they?
“There would be no attraction for work, no matter what it was.
“Activity would cease.
“Did scientists once find the universe interesting, staying up nights to reflect on its mysteries?
“No longer.
“Did lovers chase each other in the night, abandoning all for the adventure of romance?
“Never again.
“All interest, enchantment, fascination, mystery, and wonder would fall away, and with their absence all human groups would lose their binding energy. Galaxies, human families, atoms, ecosystems, all disintegrating immediately as the allurement pervading the universe is shut off. Nothing left. No community of any sort. Just nothing.”
This is a dramatic case for the necessity of attraction!
An aside, as I read Swimme’s ideas of allurement, was that the Sufi mystics, hundreds of years earlier, gave a sacred word to this same idea. The Sufis call it Ishk, the primary force of attraction in the universe. It is a virtually identical concept, but Sufis believe that the attraction that holds the stars together and the attraction that draws the human heart and soul toward all that it loves are of the same essential impulse: Ishk. Primordial Love. Divine Longing. Allurement.
Swimme further explores the implications of this idea of allurement. All these forms of attraction and desire result in the creation of new forms of being, and the creation of new communities at all levels. This vast universal creative work manifests itself in beauty. He says …
“This primal dynamism awakens communities of atoms, galaxies, stars, families, nations, persons, ecosystems, oceans, and stellar systems. We awaken to fascination and we strive to fascinate. We work to enchant others. We work to ignite life, to evoke presence, to enhance the unfolding of being. Through fascination we bring forth what might not otherwise exist. But this is exactly what love does. Love is the activity of evoking being, of enhancing life.”
Love is our response to what we experience as beautiful, and is also what propels us to generate new forms of beauty. The soul’s need for beauty is about being in touch with our essential nature and our essential call to life. The soul needs beauty because through the experience of it the soul becomes aware of its own existence. Our deep selves are awakened by feeling. We are able to touch something of the vastness of our being, the vastness of the universal community in which we reside.
Thomas Berry calls this “our response to the cosmic liturgy” …
“[We] humans become religious by joining the religion of the universe. [This is what] gives us a sense of awe. Apart from that our souls shrivel and our imagination would be dulled. The greatest and deepest tragedy in losing the splendor of the outer world is that we will always have an inner demand for it.
“We are genetically coded to exist in a world of beauty. Take it away, yet our genetic coding remains oriented to it. We will have desires that can never be satisfied. Our integral spiritual development cannot take place.”
A few years ago I attended a presentation on her work by Michelle Bentley, a minister who worked for a time as a chaplain with young men in prison. It included a slide show showing the urban neighborhoods, housing projects, and schools in which these individuals had grown up, and which constituted their world.
Their environments’ decay, ugliness, and barrenness was crushing!
She juxtaposed these images with the lush green grounds of prep schools and suburban affluence. By going back and forth between these two sets of images, her presentation vividly raised the question of how environments impact the folks living in them. Through the images we saw another dimension of the gap between privilege and deprivation.
Young people need access to places of natural or cultural beauty which can give them peace or can awaken their sense of wonder, soulfulness, and creativity. As theologian Henry Nelson Wieman said …
“Beauty awakens in us a yearning for the highest. Take the world of beauty away, but the inner instinct remains oriented to it. Environments that relentlessly assault or deprive the senses also starve the soul.”
And so, the human need for beauty presents a moral demand on us, as much as the human need for food presents a moral demand on us. In the words of Robert McAfee Brown …
“Concern for beauty leads us firmly into
the midst of all that is going on in our world.
“Where beauty is apparent, we are to enjoy it.
Where there is beauty hidden, we are to unveil it.
Where there is beauty defaced, we are to restore it.
And where there is no beauty at all, we are to create it.”
If we cherish what is beautiful in life, if our souls and senses need to be nourished by beauty in order to feel deeply alive, then we are showing ourselves to be most human.
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