Divine beauty ! Crénom de dieu
This Knol is the translation by Astrid ROSART of : Beaute-divine-crénom-de-dieu
Between Lukas Cranach's leaf and the niqab, a difference of size but not of nature.
Between Lukas Cranach's leaf and the niqab, a difference of size but not of nature.
The leaf and the niqab's function is to highlight the beauty of the female body with the single and same goal, multiply its effects. (It's sort of a tribute that the man makes to the woman who has always been superior to him, even if we can regret the perverse use of this beauty by all religions: guilt-tripping to the left, enslavement to the right).
As with the recipe for the lark pâté(*), there are only two ingredients here, the body and the cover. Depending on the Master Chef at the piano, the proportions can, however, vary. For Cranach, it is 99 and 1%, for the other, it is exactly the opposite. Both recipes are excellent. Like all intermediate forms, for that matter.
(* Recall the famous recipe: A horse, a lark)
The beauty of a thing is a quality that is traditionally assessed with the eyes. Beauty is a matter of light and eye. It is a Masonic quality as noted our brother orator in his last board. It is present in the temple, symbolized by both the orient where the eye is and whence comes the light, and by one of the three pillars that bears its name at the opening of construction. But since we are not at the GLNF, what is god doing in this title ?
“All religions are delusions of humanity.”
The sentence is not mine and I forgot my sources, which gives it more value and more strength. The history of Man from its origin testifies it at every moment. These delusions, at first individual, quickly become collective if only a member of the group, smarter than the others, takes on the orchestration of the thing on his own behalf in order to exist, or take the ascendancy over these peers and power at the same time. Unless this is on behalf of rogues even smarter than him and who pull the strings to earn exorbitant profits, and when that is the case, the means matter little. I will not name anybody so as not to pain anyone. But you can imagine that I could easily talk about the Inquisition or show the automatic link that exists between the waving of the specter of death in front of crowds to create panicky fear with the presentation of a successful outcome for all who will have been nice, and the increase of the number of followers.
In this register, the invention of purgatory in the Catholic religion is evil because it allows to blackmail more subtly the more naive of the herd, which for that matter form the vast majority. The invention of indulgences in the same sect is of another nature, it is a material scam that worked to fill the gurus' coffers. But the scam is so big that I cannot pity those who coughed up. They are indefensible. Indeed, taking refuge in a religion to remove the fear of death and comply to all injunctions that this religion issues is in my opinion, more a matter of lack of courage than lack of intelligence. However I am under no illusions about myself, I say this here and now, because I am in good health and in good company. Alone in my last moments, maybe I'll join the herd. But it is not because we will perhaps have a final weakness that we should spend our life crawling. This wouldn't be very Masonic.
Let's return to these individual or collective delusions. They fortunately do not produce only servitude to earn a paradise or atrocities such as we see regularly on TV that recounts the daily life of the Middle East or elsewhere in the world. They can also, often, create beauty. This is what I'll call the Divine Beauty.
Thus who could argue that an Orthodox icon, a statue of a Catholic madonna, a Christian cathedral, are not beautiful?
Who could argue that a Gregorian chant is not beautiful, especially when stealthily enhanced by the voice of a castrato?
What is more beautiful than a woman, Muslim or not, that we easily imagine naked in her impeccable, deep black, prim niqab that only lets appear two deep hazel eyes ? Without this custom that is much decried because misunderstood, produced by the spirituality of a group of people, this masterpiece of beauty would not exist. To appreciate it fully, it is imperative to me to disconnect spirituality and transcendence (in the metaphysical sense of the word). Indeed, in effect transcendence pollutes the spirituality. Spirituality, to be worthy of its name, must be purely and exclusively aesthetic. Le Grand Robert reminds us that Aesthetics is the "Science of feeling" and more specifically for what we are talking about, "Science of beauty in nature and in art".
Who will dare say that a bottle of Guerlain's Shalimar, especially when open, is not beautiful. It is a feast for the eye and nose. It's pure divine beauty because the vial and its contents have both been extensively developed in the delusions of enlightened amateurs who became goldsmiths in their specialty.
This last example shows that beauty can apply to other senses than sight, and even to all the senses at once. Which is terrific. Divine beauty is a creation of delusions that initially massages the eye's depth and quickly causes rapture of the whole being that can lead to ecstasy.
Beauty therefore needs the help of a third party to exist. It is in the pleasure it brings that beauty lies. Without an admirer, without pleasure-seeker, without a viewer, there is no beauty, neither divine nor other.
Since pleasure induces the existence of something beautiful that is its origin, I must mention the intellectual pleasures resulting from the beauty of an action or a gesture. The lives of Mother Teresa and her sister Emmanuelle are only made of beautiful gestures, of good deeds. Religion is not far away, even if deep inside and in her rare moments of lucidity, Mother Teresa did not believe in God, and Sister Emmanuelle has praised masturbation. The delusions are here, and the result is beautiful, it even borders on the sublime. This beauty is matched only by that which occurs in raw nature : sunsets, a flow of lava, flowers like the giant hogweed that inspired Gallé, the Daum brothers, Lalique and Majorelle of the school of Nancy with its art nouveau, or Alfons Mucha, our brother, famous for his graphics inspired by the captivating forms of this evil flower that blooms in the famous posters of Sarah Bernhardt.
Other unsurpassable natural beauties, the bird of paradise or of anywhere else for that matter, like the ara, not Catherine the singer (although... ?), but the colorful parrot that is a regular in our crosswords......
I could go on like this for a long time, as nature is made only of beauty, but before concluding I wish to make a special case of a pure wonder, I'm talking about the Lorraine Pâté, the real one, which is made with love and delectation, following our recipe, that is to say with puff pastry, meat in pieces, half calf half pork, marinated overnight in a dry wine, the gray Vic sur Seille, with the right amount of spices and salt, neither too much nor too little, freshly baked golden , not burnt but burning, the four corners of the rectangle of baked pastry proudly raised, as if in erection under the intense heat, the central chimney formed in the top of the pastry lid releasing its incomparable aroma. Who has not at least once tasted this culinary masterpiece knows nothing of divine pleasure that always has to accompany divine beauty. And if one does not quickly pull himself together by going near Sarrebourg to procure this ephemeral masterpiece, one may die without having lived, which would be outrageous.
(To avoid this unfortunate outcome, see: Recipe for good Lorraine Pâté)
In conclusion, divine beauty is to me what causes both a delight of all the senses and of the mind. For the rationalist that I am, there is no logic to look for in here, there is only healthy pleasure (h e a l t h y) and happiness, and if we owe it to religion, so be it. Let me there, for once, and I will not backslide, shout loudly: "long live religions and their gods, and down with our GADLU, crénom de dieu ! "
I said with great pleasure on the 23rd of October 2007.
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