![]() ![]() ![]() In Athens, Plato celebrates the divine madness that the poet experiences when the muse descends, but he also kicks the poets out of his ideal republic as unreliable, disruptive sorts. In Jerusalem, proscriptions against idols and graven images coexist with paeans to the craftsmanship of God and Bezalel, the artificer (described in Exodus) of the desert tabernacle. The ambivalence about beauty at the heart of western culture begins at the beginning. I don’t mean to say that beauty in art or nature hasn’t been appreciated throughout history-though there have been times when beauty has been the subject of frontal assaults-but simply that when we start getting official, when we get theological or philosophical, beauty becomes a hot potato. In the history of the West, beauty has played the role of Cinderella to her sisters, goodness and truth. STRANGE AS IT MAY SEEM, beauty still needs to be defended. ![]()
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