On Beauty (or, I Could Just Eat You Up)

What do you do with a sunset? You can gaze and forget yourself, sublimated, called forth from your isolated being into the furnace of Deity—watch it gutter like a swamp fire, fade, and drop you back to earth. You can paint it, answer its life-giving blaze with your own small creative powers, slap a frame on it, hang it somewhere, leave it for the spiders. You can take a picture of it, fumble for a grip on its majesty, stuff the eye of God into your phone and hope to reawaken the awe with the tap of a screen. What do you do with it?

In our wiser moments, we remember that Beauty isn't there for us to use it like a toaster oven. It was there before us and it would be there if we were not; it would be closer to the truth to say that we are there to serve Beauty's purposes than the reverse, but that's not quite true either because there's nothing for which Beauty needs us. We are simply permitted to behold it (not to hold it), and the only proper answer is gratitude. And despite my lemme get your attention opening paragraph, gazing and painting and taking pictures are perfectly honorable responses to the sunset, as long as the intent is to honor it rather than to possess it. Beauty comes to us in its own season, and not at our whistle; if we receive it with joy and trust and patience, it'll stay and glimmer quietly below our waking minds.

So all that being said, what emerges as the basic error behind the sin of lust? Obviously, the desire to possess the other, but not the actual person: only the beauty of the person, as if that could be detached and put in our pocket. That's why, as others have pointed out, a man will go to a strip club although he wouldn't go to a restaurant where they slowly unwrapped a burger, waved it around, and then put it away again. Tacitly, he believes that a woman's beauty is a thing he can pull off of her like Peter Pan's shadow and consume without any need of her. You can make the same philosophical mistake with a sunset, but it's less pernicious because you can't get your hands on the sun. A man who sleeps with a woman in the desire to ingest her beauty and discard the person like a peanut shell, actually does the opposite: her beauty can't be owned and his desire therefore won't be satiated, but her personhood can be progressively devoured until she's an object in her own eyes as well as his.

But here's the insane part. You can't hold a sunset, you can't consume a woman's soul. But the source of all beauty, Beauty Himself, has made Himself physically consumable. A tiny wafer, the sort of thing you might gobble by the dozen while you watched the Super Bowl—a commodity. Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, all fit easily in your wallet like a silver dollar. Bizarrely glorious indignity. Now life's question: what do we do with it? What do we do with Him?