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From Forests Dark to Stars of Light: How Beatrice’s Eyes and Aristotle’s Wisdom Reveal the Path to True Happiness
All upward movement begins with an intrusion of beauty into our lives.
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We have a special treat for readers today. The following article was written by Eugene Terekhin, the man and the mind behind the publication Philosophy of Language.
Philologist, philosopher, translator, and author Eugene Terekhin explores in Philosophy of Language the secret literary theory behind the fantasy worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Owen Barfield who believed that when words are spoken aright, they invoke the invisible reality from behind the veil of the world. He is a voice of much needed wisdom in our day and age, when so much of true art is being eviscerated and trivialized.
He is the author of the following books and I have read three of his books and highly recommend them:
and The New Exodus: Escaping One Man’s War
We urge you to subscribe to Eugene’s insight-packed newsletter filled with the wisdom of the inklings, poets, philosophers, writers and great thinkers by clicking the button below:
This article originally appeared on Philosophy of Languagehere. I’m sharing it with The BoldBrush Letter because in it, Eugene has explored an important topic, perhaps the most important topic for creative people.
Editor’s Note: In two days, this post will be locked and is available only to paid members because we don’t want this duplicate content on the open web in a way that might draw traffic away from Eugene’s original post. If you are not a BoldBrush paid subscriber, you can still read the entire post here.
From Forests Dark to Stars of Light: How Beatrice’s Eyes and Aristotle’s Wisdom Reveal the Path to True Happiness
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“A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God… A saint is a person who has lived their own life, not someone else’s or a projection of what others think a life should be.” — Thomas Merton
How do you live your own life?
Aristotle defined happiness as “the performance of the activities inherent in our being.” (Eudemian Ethics). For him, unhappiness is when we perform activities not inherent in our being. They proceed from some other source.
When our activities don’t flow from who we are, we are unhappy. According to Dante, this happens when we betray our desires. All the people in Dante’s Inferno have betrayed their true Desire by giving in to “surrogates.” Betrayed desires drag you down. Fulfilled desires make you fly.
“Desire fulfilled is a tree of life.” — Proverbs 13:12.
That’s what Dante bitterly realized when he was 35. He was at the pinnacle of his earthly career. He was rich and famous — one of the six rulers of Florence. And yet, he opens his Inferno with these words,
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward path had been lost.
The realization that you live a life that is not your own is bitter indeed. The wider the gap between who you are and what you do, the more profound this realization. It is a dark forest. You feel lost.
And yet, there was a star in Dante’s life — Beatrice’s eyes. They met only twice, but that gaze struck him to the core of his being.
“And as I turned and was struck by what was shining in her eyes, my mind was overcome by what the vision revealed, to the point that I no longer could bear the intensity of its beauty.”
What came through those eyes was a vision of celestial beauty symbolized by stars. In Dante’s imagery, a star is the only thing that reaches you, even though you can’t reach it. You can’t reach the stars no matter how hard you try. They are too far away. But they can reach you with their light — even long after they are gone.
Beatrice was long gone, but her eyes were the stars that reached Dante at the lowest point of his life. Those eyes moved him so much that he started moving upwards with the help of poetry — guided by Virgil whom he loved.
All upward movement begins with an intrusion of beauty into our lives. We can’t reach it — it reaches us. We are always moved by the unreachable that reaches us. The starlight is the metaphor for the ultimate intrusion of beauty into our lives that awakens us to our true being. It moves us, and we start moving — back to ourselves.
A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God…
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By Eugene Terekhin
A place for the outlaws of poetry and the written word. One of the aims of Poetic Outlaws is to revive the Promethean fire of the dead poets and artists in an attempt, however futile, to elevate the modern soul out of the sludge of the status quo.
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