Is Beauty a "What" or a "Who"?

What is a beautiful soul? In process theology, the soul is not a static, isolated, enclosed part of our being. Rather the soul is a river of experiences, saturated with Divinity and reflecting all creation. A beautiful soul is adaptable, renewing, changing, and flowing toward a wider sea of enriching fullness....Rilke put it another way: “I live my life in widening circles/that reach out across the world.” This reminds me of walking a labyrinth and discovering that, if we are centered in God’s creative-responsive love, we can confidently move out into ever-widening circles with a soul overflowing with the yearning to “love many things.” Thus, a beautiful soul loves many things. The wide and welcoming soul is never static, but flowing as a river of experiences—refreshingly alive to the infinite web of relationships that ground it in the world. Such attention to fattening our souls for the sake of love may be exactly what we need in times of tragedy and uncertainty—times just like these.

Farmer, Patricia Adams. Beauty and Process Theology (Topical Line Drives) (p. 19). Energion Publications. Kindle Edition. 

​NOT ‘WHAT IS BEAUTY?’ BUT ‘WHO IS BEAUTY?’

THE SENSE OF GOD AS A PERSON HAS DIMINISHED CONSIDERABLY IN the Western Christian tradition. New Age spirituality, fundamentalism and mainstream religions all speak of God as a force; either a soft benevolent force, a hard force or a moral force. And yet, perhaps, the sense of divine intimacy and warmth, the sense of divine imagination and the suggestion of the numinous depths of God then become empty. God could become a nameless, bland energy. The beauty of the notion of person is the way it gathers the horizontal and the vertical into one form or centre. This is the way we picture the infinite. It ranges from the deepest depths to the highest summit and it extends on every side, endlessly. When we imagine God as person, it gives all this infinity personality, warmth and intimacy. The cosmos seems no longer anonymous or echoless.

The Christian tradition has been very careful to nuance the concept of person in relation to God. When we acknowledge God as person, we sense an actual someone to whom we can relate. Given that one of the most beautiful things about being human is the ability to encounter another person, it is natural that we should want that experience with the deepest source of everything also to be intimate and personal. The notion of an infinite person who is pure love means we are using the term ‘person’ in a transfigured sense; there is no control or despotic power here, rather a sublime quickening of our every potential for passion, creativity, compassion and freedom.

​Our exploration of beauty has considered many of the forms in which beauty appears. These forms included places, things, events and experiences. However, when we speak of God as beauty, we are speaking of the beauty of who-ness. The who question is the most numinous and mysterious of questions. The self is unlike any other thing in the world: though it appears in time and space, it is beyond them. The who-ness of someone can never be finally named, known, claimed, controlled or predicted. The who is beyond all frames and frontiers and dwells in the mystery of its own reflexivity and infinity. Who has no map. When we claim that God is beauty, we are claiming for beauty all the adventure, mystery, infinity and autonomy of divine who-ness. Beauty is the inconceivable made so intimate that it illuminates our hearts. 

- John O'Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace