Aesthetics: From visible beauty to the hidden sublime

Source: Beauty as an ascending ladder: From matter to spirit

One who approaches this matter in the right way must begin in his youth and turn to beautiful bodies; and subsequently he must understand that the beauty in any one body is the brother of that in another body, and if he pursues beauty according to its very form, he will stumble into grave folly... and afterwards he will value the beauty in souls above that in the body... until the beauty in the body becomes a trivial thing in his eyes. And from pursuits he will continue to the sciences, in order to see their beauty, and thus he will look out toward the expanses of beauty... and he will gaze upon the vast sea of beauty, and give birth to many beautiful and wonderful thoughts and ideas.

(Plato, Symposium, translated by Liebes, pp. 138-139)

Explanation: From body to soul: The rungs of aesthetic awareness

Education in beauty begins with physical beauty, through which a person can learn about a deeper, inner beauty; one who remains fixated on external beauty will falter. Gradually, one learns to value the beauty in souls, coming to see physical beauty as a trivial thing, and goes on to appreciate the beauty found in science and knowledge. From all of these, one can ultimately dwell in a world of abstract rather than graphic beauty.

Perspective: The shifting temptation: From the beautiful tree to eternal truth

According to Plato, reality derives from the abstract, the realm of Ideas, while physical reality is merely a hint and a parable of higher, noble principles. In the view of many scholars, mythology served philosophers as a narrative-mythic canvas upon which to build abstract ideas and moral and theological insights. Instead of rejecting material beauty, one ought to glean from it a more refined inner beauty, redirecting the allure of earthly grace toward an appreciation of scientific beauty and the divine. Eating from the beautiful tree is precisely what gives birth to the longing for knowledge and truth, which are what is truly beautiful.

Going Deeper: Aesthetics as religion: When the sublime meets the divine

At the beginning of the 18th century, a German philosopher named Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten coined the term 'aesthetics.' The word has its roots in Greek, meaning 'sensory perception,' yet aesthetics sought to determine what is beautiful by 'objective' standards—a perfect beauty determined by proportional harmony in nature. Many modern philosophers, from the Renaissance through the 20th century, sought to formulate rules and formulas for the beautiful by studying beauty.

Here are the words of Rabbi Soloveitchik:

The transition from the artistic to the religious is realized through the experience of loftiness... Judaism, which proclaimed the idea of transcendence, presented loftiness as a fundamental attribute of God... The feeling of the sublime and the exalted is the innermost component of the aesthetic experience... God is the source of all that is beautiful, delightful, and pleasant. God reaches out to humanity through aesthetics as well... (Rabbi J.B. Soloveitchik, Worship of the Heart, Alon Shvut 2006, pp. 68–69)

Culture: From Ashtoreth to Aphrodite: When beauty parted ways with idolatry

Ashtoreth, queen of heaven to the Canaanites, Phoenicians, and many other peoples in the region, was one of the foremost goddesses in the ancient Near Eastern pantheon. The Bible repeatedly mentions the Israelites worshipping Ashtoreth during the First Temple period—the counterpart of the Babylonian Ishtar. In the Second Temple era, the Greeks identified Ashtoreth with Aphrodite, followed by the Romans, who called her Venus. Esther, heroine of the Purim scroll, echoes in her name Ishtar and Ashtoreth, a trace of the goddess's cult in Susa as well. While in Babylon and Egypt she was a goddess of war and dominion, among the Greeks and Romans she transformed into the goddess of beauty, love, and fertility. In the bathhouses of the Land of Israel, frequented even by the figures of the Mishnaic period, stood a statue of a naked Aphrodite—a fact that did not prevent the Sages from entering and bathing in its presence (Babylonian Talmud, Avodah Zarah 44b). Eventually, Greek deities even entered the mosaics of synagogues in the Land of Israel as adornment and splendor for the place of God's worship. Scholars presume that by that time, statues and figures had become artistic expressions rather than objects of idolatry, which is why Jews and the Sages permitted them. Beauty, stripped of idolatry. (Pictured: the zodiac mosaic in the Beit Alfa synagogue, featuring Helios, the Greek sun god.)