Metamucil for the Asian Soul: Beauty

Over the last weekend, we dropped our latest episode of our podcast Awkward Asian Theologians.

In that episode, Daniel and I looked at the transcendental of Beauty, and we might, just might, have compared that particular transcendental with dietary fibre. Something necessary for movement…for the soul!

We looked at what it means for Beauty to be a transcendental, namely as a property of being. This was important because we tried to distinguish beauty in and of itself from a beautiful thing, whilst at the same time keeping the connection between the two alive. This then allowed us to ask “what is going on when we encounter a beautiful thing”?

We tackled that old chestnut that said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and surmised that it is unhelpful, largely because it does not define what Aquinas would call the criteria of beauty (which were wholeness, harmony and radiance). When we did look at the criteria of beauty, what became apparent was that we find beautiful things moving, because beauty is a crack through which the transcendent breaks into the immanent and communicates itself to us, causing a wound in our hearts that finds healing only in the search for beauty.

In addition, beauty constitutes a communique of sympathy to us. We looked at Pseudo-Dionysius to look at how beauty communicates sympathy and also incorporates us into a community of sympathy. Beauty then has a profound communal dimension that makes us aware of otherness. This was probably something I could have worked on more intentionally in the episode, but Daniel was really on a roll in this episode with the insightful questions. Beneath all my bombast, this was really his episode with all the quiet Asian wisdom.

“Metamucil for the Asian Soul” can be listened to in full on Spotify, Amazon Music and Apple Podcasts.