The profanation of human beauty by the passions in no way authorises contempt for this work of the Creator: despite the good intentions of those who seek to defend virtue at the expense of truth, to disparage this beauty is a kind of blasphemy.

But what we would like to consider now is the actual appearance of man, his physical quality of 'image of God: which distinguishes him a priori from all other creatures on earth, so that to speak of the human body is almost to speak of man as such; our bodily form would in fact be unintelligible if it were not for our faculties of intelligence and liberty; it is on the contrary explicable only in terms of these qualities.

 

Let us say at once that the profanation of human beauty by the passions in no way authorises contempt for this work of the Creator: despite the good intentions of those who seek to defend virtue at the expense of truth and intelligence, to disparage this beauty is a kind of blasphemy and all the more so since the Avatara of necessity synthesises the total Creation in his body and so in its beauty.

 

Some will doubtless insist that all earthly beauty is imperfect and carries blemishes, but this is false in so far as they go on to deduce from this that there is no true beauty on earth. On the other hand, if earthly beauty can be perfect in its kind, it is none the less exclusive of other kinds, and so in a certain sense limited: the beauty of a rose cannot realise that of a water-lily, and in the same way human beauties, whether individual or racial, exclude one another; God alone possesses simultaneously all possible beauty, the Essence being beyond the segmentation of form.

 

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Frithjof Schuon

 

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Quoted in: The Essential Frithjof Schuon

 

 

Done