MEDITATION ON BEAUTY
If "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," is there no universal ideal of beauty?
If so, what is it?
Or, is beauty, instead, an acquired, a derived abstraction formed within rather than an image from without?
These meditations on beauty come to me by my reading in the chapter on "Beauty," in the ancient classic book by Plotinus, THE ENNEADS (1991).
Therein this ancient African sage writes:
"Beauty enthrones itself, giving itself to the parts as to the sum: when it lights on some natural unity, a thing of like parts, then it gives itself to the whole. Thus, for an illustration, there is the beauty, conferred by craftsmanship, of all a house with all its parts, and the beauty which some natural quality may give to a single stone.
"This, then, is how the material thing becomes beautiful--by communicating in the thought (Reason, Logos) that flows from the Divine."
P.47-48