Suhrawardi, the great twelfth century Iranian theosopher of light, tells this story:

The first creature is a being of light, named insight or mind (in Greek nous, originally meaning “to return”). This being (of return) is endowed by the Most High with three properties: knowledge of God, knowledge of itself, and knowledge of its transience—that first it was not and then it began to be.
By the property of knowing God, beauty arose.
By the property of knowing itself, love arose.
And by the property knowing of that it had not been before it came to be, sadness or nostalgia arose.

These three – beauty, love and sadness – having the same origin, are brothers. Beauty, the oldest, contemplated himself. He had a vision of himself as the supreme good. Thus joy was born in him. He smiled, and millions of angels came into being from his smile.

Love, the middle child, was the bosom companion of beauty. He could not look away. He was filled with a dizzy madness. He was distraught. But sadness, the youngest brother, clung to him. And from this attendant sadness embracing love, the world, heaven and earth, arose. It came into being under the sign, and in the presence, of beauty, which Shelley calls “the awful shadow of some unseen power /(that) floats unseen among us —,/visiting this various world with an inconstant wing/ As summer winds that creep from flower to flower…”

Beauty, like soul, was central in the pre-modern world, but it has no place in the modern world. As George Russell (AE) said, “One of the first symptoms of the loss of soul is the loss of the sense of beauty.” To seek to place psychology under the sign of beauty, then, is to the institute the radical inversion of values by which soul can be returned to the world. Without beauty we can have no guide to what “esse in anima,” being in soul, might mean. Beauty can be neither quantified nor objectified. It is a quality, at once sensuous and ideal. Because it sits between the sense world and the world of feeling-thinking, it belongs to a different world than the scientistic one whose premises shape most modern psychologies. And yet – precisely because of its privileged position spanning body, soul, and spirit – it has always been the prime mover in the overcoming of the dichotomy, the alienation of soul from Soul (or Spirit), which is the alienation of the human from the world.

Here is an image given by Plotinus. As with all images, it contains everything we need. For Plotinus, as for Plato, beauty and love go together. There is no beauty without love. Pure love seeks beauty alone. To love is to love beauty, to be inspired, invaded, arrested, and made mad by beauty. Keats knew this, when he wrote to Fanny Brawne: “All my thoughts, my unhappiest days and nights have, I find, not cured me of my love of Beauty, but made it so intense that I am miserable that you are not with me…I never knew before, what such a love as you have made me feel, was; I did not believe in it; my Fancy was afraid of it, lest it should burn me up…Why may I not speak of your beauty, since without that I could never have lov’d you. I cannot conceive any beginning of such love as I have for you but Beauty…So let me speak of your Beauty.”

Love, indeed, is this: an inflowing of beauty into the soul, opening it and making it a place, a theater, for revelation or theophany,—for what is revealed in the soul by love is always a god. Therefore Plato, in the Cratylus , derives eros from the Greek eron, meaning "to flow in from without": “the stream is not inherent, but is an influence introduced through the eyes, and from flowing in was called eros (influx) in the old time…”

“It is sound, I think,” writes Plotinus, “to find the primal source of love in a tendency of the soul toward pure beauty, in a recognition, in a kinship, in an unreasoned consciousness of friendly relation.” Beauty is of the same nature as the soul. In beauty, by means of it, the soul recognizes at a glance an old friend and becomes one with it. Beauty comes as painful, because forgotten, ancient knowledge to soul and the soul, recognizing it, however inadequate and unprepared it feels, welcomes it. “This is the spirit that beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight.” Indeed, writes Plotinus, “when it sees any of that kin, or any trace of that kinship, it thrills with an immediate delight, takes its own to itself, and thus stirs anew to the sense of its own nature and of all its affinity.” This affinity of beauty to the soul – the way in which beauty, as it were, exteriorizes interiority, the great inner radiance of things – marks the path of the soul’s sight – its gnostic eyes of fire – and gives it vision.

Let us consider these eyes more closely. In his Ennead of Love (III.5), Plotinus speaks of love as ever and unconditionally intent upon beauty and existing thus “to be the medium between desire and the object of that desire.” He is thinking here of Heavenly Aphrodite, the soul at its divinest, born of Kronos, looking, rapt, towards him, rejoicing in the looking, holding to him, and in that love bringing forth the eros through which she continues to behold him. In this sense, he writes, love “is the eye of the desirer; by its power what loves is enabled to see the loved thing. But it is first; before it becomes the vehicle of vision, it is itself filled with the sight…- for desire attains to vision only through the efficacy of love, while love, in its own act, harvest the spectacle of beauty…”

Then he puts it more phenomenologically: “Thus; there is a strenuous act of contemplation in the soul; there is an emanation towards it from the object contemplated; and Eros is born, the love which is an eye filled with its vision, a seeing that bears its image with it…”

Beauty and love, then, meet in the eye – in a sensuous, cognitive perception – creating the image, the eye filled with vision, the seeing that bears its image with it. This eye, this image, is the same of which Meister Eckhart said: “The eye with which I see God and the eye with which God sees me are one and the same.”

The amazing thing is that every phenomenon, contemplated in itself, can become such and eye. As Goethe said, Every phenomenon perfectly observed creates in the soul a cognitive or gnostic organ for its perception: an eye, as many eyes as there are phenomena or worlds. A phenomenon that is not appropriated in this way lies outside us, dead, a body without a soul, a meaningless letter. Such is our normal experience of the world: “The sense of the world is lost. We have been left standing among the letters of an alphabet (Novalis).” Beauty alone allows spirit or meaning to irradiate the letter. Observed, experienced in the love of this beauty, every phenomenon is like Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo: “There is no place in which it does not see you. You must change your life.” As the sun forms the physical eye, so the wholeness or beauty of each phenomenon, by love or grace forms the organ for its perception, organ and phenomenon, organ and phenomenon being an interpenetrated whole. Novalis says: “the seat of the soul is where inner and outer touch, where they interpenetrate. It is in every point to their interpenetration.” Perception is always sensuous, detailed, concrete; but such sensuality is already no longer physical. Such is the path of return of the Fedeli D’Amore, as the Troubadours, those ancestors, well knew.

So that ever phenomenon – every interpenetration of visible and invisible – is itself also an eye – or a seat of the soul and a theophany – whereby one knows and is known. To see with these eyes is to become what one sees, to know oneself as one is known. There is no interpretation, only understanding without interpretation, the interpreter interpreted. This is the mother tongue of human beings. As Goethe says: the phenomena is already the theory, the interpretation. Nothing needs to be added. Any interpretation would be a betrayal of the fidelity, the unconditional love that the presence of the beauty, the wholeness of the phenomenon inspires. Because interpretation is always provisional, uncertain. As Novalis says, “Every reasoned motivation, each speculation on the heart’s reasons is already doubt, hesitation, infidelity.” Similarly, Sophia unbraids Ibn Arabi for speaking of the “fedeli d’amor as being “perplexed in love, exposed to every peril.” “How can a fedeli d’amore retain a residue of perplexity and hesitation when the very condition of adoratio is that it fill the soul entirely?…Where is there room for perplexity?”

Instead of perplexity and doubt, Goethe proposes awe or reverence before the concrete empirical phenomenon as the only fruitful attitude towards such archetypal phenomena. He makes the following observations (which speak for themselves): “The direct experience of archetypal phenomena creates a kind of anxiety in us, for we feel inadequate. We enjoy these phenomena stand unveiled before our senses we become nervous, even anxious. Sensory man seeks salvation in astonishment, but soon that busy matchmaker, understanding, arrives with her efforts to marry the highest to the lowest;” therefore Goethe says to Eckermann, “the highest that one can attain to in these matters is astonishment (or awe, reverence, marvel)…It cannot afford him an experience beyond this. Here is the limit. But, as a rule, men are not content simply to behold an archetypal phenomenon. They think there must be something beyond it. They are like children who, having looked into a mirror, turn it around to see what is on the other side.”

For Ruzbehan of Shiraz, another ancestor, each atom of being is an eye, an inner radiance, filled with vision, totally absorbed in the light which is its source. By these eyes, bearing their images with them, creation unfolds, a great polymorphous organ of vision. Each of these is potentially an eye, a word, for us likewise.

Thus, following an ancient imaginal philosophy of beauty, we have come very close to the Freudian conception, as interpreted by Norman O Brown, of the polymorphous perverse. For Brown’s Freud, the child – pre-linguistic, pre-ego, not yet damned to distinguish soul and body – uses his whole body as a sense organ, as a whole constituted of sense organs, for the sake of delight, companion of beauty: a thing of beauty, a joy forever. For Freud (and Brown) the resurrection of this body of delight is only possible by liberating that dead body of sixty winters from the delusionary, but massive and tyrannical prison of the ego – that doppelganger of unconscious and conscious. The tradition of the imagination is, however, unanimous – single-souled.! Freud recovered it – in a sense. He proposed the “talking cure.” It is perhaps not so far from what I have been talking about. There is, after all, an entire tradition that, instead of speaking of eye and sight, speaks of mouth and word. Where Plotinus says, Become an eye!, Rilke writes, Become mouth! And Celan, Become ear! Perhaps all the senses are but one sense and that one fitted to beauty.

Christopher Bamford is the editor-in-chief of SteinerBooks and Lindisfarne Books. A Fellow of the Lindisfarne Association, he has lectured, taught, and written widely on Western spiritual and esoteric traditions, and is a contributing editor to Lapis magzine. He is the author of An Endless Trace: The Passionate Pursuit of Wisdom in the West and The Voice of the Eagle and is the translator and editor of numerous books, including Celtic Christianity: Ecology and Holiness; Homage to Pythagoras: Rediscovering Sacred Science; and The Noble Traveler.