The Beauty Of Holiness

[Cole_H]

So, I was at the Catholic bookstore a couple of days ago and found this excellent book. I haven’t read all of it yet but listen to this quote:

St. Thomas points out that Job is told to cloth himself with beauty, but that God Himself is not clothed with beauty. No, His very essence is beauty. Indeed, God is the very essence of beauty. In other words, God is beautiful by essence; His creatures are beautiful by participation in His beauty…In fact, for Thomas, beauty is the splendor of all the transcendentals together, the radiance of the one and the true and the good.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/415-zYkNvYL.SY344_BO1,204,203,200.jpg

I’m loving it so far and can’t wait to delve into this more deeply.

[JasonPratt]

Balthasar has an utter ton of things to say along this line, too. Though I don’t recall reading that in Job’s discussion with God – may be an obscured translation?

Would that St. Thomas Aquinas had recognized what it means for Leviathan (and Bahamut for that matter, though the Great Rebel Dragon is more important for this point) to be beautiful by participation in God’s beauty.

[Cole_H]

Jason,

It’s Job 40:10

Douay-Rheims Bible
Clothe thyself with beauty, and set thyself up on high and be glorious, and put on goodly garments.

English Standard Version
“Adorn yourself with majesty and dignity; clothe yourself with glory and splendor.

King James Bible
Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Young’s Literal Translation
Put on, I pray thee, excellency and loftiness, Yea, honour and beauty put on.

American King James Version
Deck yourself now with majesty and excellency; and array yourself with glory and beauty.

Rotherham’s
Deck thyself, I pray thee, with majesty and grandeur, Yea, with dignity and splendour, thou shalt clothe thyself;

[Cole_H]

Just found this on the web:

For Balthasar the living God, if he is anything, must be supremely concrete; not something abstract, and certainly not a ghostly, forbidding presence with a long white beard. The true God is to be found wherever the “parallel lines” of this world meet, at the converging-point of the common or “transcendental” properties of being that we call Truth, Goodness and Beauty. It is only in Beauty that Truth is good, and that Goodness is true. By losing the sense of Beauty, by closing the spiritual senses that grasp the colours and the contours, the taste and the fragrance of Truth in its radiant body, the theologians had betrayed even the very Master they claimed to serve.

[Cole_H]

Grace is God’s highest beauty, the splendor of Himself. - Cole

[JasonPratt]

Oh, okay, now I remember: it’s one of the places where God is being sarcastic to Job, after Job has finally overstepped his complaints. (Not that this invalidates St. Thomas’ comparative point.)