Love of the Beautiful

Philokalia: love of the beautiful. A reading of the condition and its remedy — and the recognition the reading made possible.

Premise

While reading John Michael Talbot’s Meditations in the Spirit, I was led to the Philokalia. I found a copy in a used bookstore. What that volume had to say about my curse and my condition is the subject of this essay: discernment received from a world devoted to prayer and asceticism — harsh diagnosis, and the beginning of a rule of attention.

What the essay will hold

• Talbot’s Meditations in the Spirit as the door that named the Philokalia
• The used bookstore find — the book arriving as a synchronicity of place and need
• What the Philokalia said about the passions, watchfulness, and the nous
• Diagnosis of the condition: exile of attention, restlessness, the war on stillness
• The remedy as practice, not slogan — prayer, discernment, a rule that forms perception
• The title’s plain meaning: philokalia is love of the beautiful — the book says what it is called
• Reading toward the uncreated light, and what it claims about who can bear to see
• The faces: one remembered and not chosen; one at three years old, shining in the same way; and — years later — one recognised without deliberation. Let the count stay unannounced; the reader who is counting will count. (Beats placed — the prose is Stephen’s.)
• Why the middle face settles it: the same light in a child cannot be desire, so it must be a kind of light, shown according to what each one is
• Isaac the Syrian’s one fire, received according to the state of the receiver — the sentence the whole recognition turns on
• How this receiving of a rule rhymes with Vision’s keystone, Removing the Veil, and with the practice offered on Take Flight in Return of the Scriptorium

Series position

Part of the Identity sequence of creative nonfiction — the life that parallels the keystone essays without announcing the full parallel. This panel belongs with Vision: the seeing, received and recognised. The vow it led to belongs with Quest, in The Wayfarer’s Chapel.