“The Blow of Beauty”

Beauty as Descent and Ascent in Simone Weil

Abstract

In one of her earliest writings, the essay "Le Beau et le Bien" in 1926, Simone Weil asks herself about the nature of beauty and its meaning. She refers in particular to architecture and underlines how "the temple" shows itself to be a "law unto itself". The temple, therefore, is not an "imitation" or copy in any way at all: its parts are beautiful if considered within the unity of the temple itself and not if looked at in isolation from one another. The same criterion is valid for music, whose perfection appears in its unity, as it is valid supremely also for dance, a "living architecture in movement". Indeed, the elements of dance "are no longer stones but people … taken from their animal existence to be transported into the life of society, that is, the life that is properly human". The reason for this is, in Weil’s view, that dance derives from liturgy and "liturgy is nothing other than the manifestation of society". According to Weil beauty presents itself as something "impenetrable by the spirit and responding to all because of a single, mysterious presence: the symbol of God as object, just like the sphinx". Art prepares for silence and a new way of seeing things; by means of the experience of beauty it possible to come to see things as they are: "Things are as they are: the supreme lesson. Sum qui sum in creation. Space and solitude in painting. Space is solitude, indifference to all things. Some events are no more meaningful than others; also the crucifixion of Christ was no more meaningful that a pine-needle that falls; God wants all things equally … the arts use the materials of space and time, and this indifference is the object they portray". Art, therefore, is the representation of the indifference of all things and in this way, in Weil’s view, it can present itself as the downward movement which is the condition for an upward movement, that is, it is that movement which allows us to return to the reality of things - namely their indifference - and to discern their essence: "seeing the essence beneath existence", seeing the divine lying beneath all things.