Lovely and Unlovely Beauty

A thing of beauty is a joy forever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

Initial lines from the Proem from Endymion by John Keats

Contrast this Romantic view by Keats to the Classical view espoused by Blaise Pascal in The Passion of Love (Article XXV, 56).

"He no longer loves the person that he loved ten years ago. I believe it; she is no longer the same, nor he either. He was young and she also; she is altogether different. He would love her perhaps still, such as she was then."

Pascal's view seems outrageously heartless. On the other hand if we reflect over Keat's view we see how naive it really is. Perhaps that is why these two periods (the Romantic and the Classical) were in such great conflict. With Pascal we see the exaltation of reason, whereas in Keats emotion is exalted. But the reality of the matter is best filtered by C.S. Lewis when he writes...

"When we fall in love with a woman, do we cease to care whether she is clean or dirty, fair or foul? Do we not rather then first begin to care? Does any woman regard it as a sign of love in a man that he neither knows nor cares how she is looking? Love may, indeed, love the beloved when her beauty is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.” Yet even though He loves you and sees you, positionally, spotless He wants to work in you to make you spotless practically as well."

Again, Lewis writes, "To ask that God’s love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labour to make us lovable."

Or Thomas Traherne, "Love can forbear, and Love can forgive...but Love can never be reconciled to an unlovely object...He can never therefore be reconciled to your sin, because sin itself is incapable of being altered; but He may be reconciled to your person, because that may be restored."

Trahe