Form cannot be simply a form, it must be the form of something. Physical beauty is, then, the sign of an internal beauty, which is spiritual and moral beauty; and this is the foundation, the principle, the unity of the beautiful.[109]
All the beauties that we have just enumerated and reduced compose what is called the really beautiful. But, above real beauty, is a beauty of another order—ideal beauty. The ideal resides neither in an individual, nor in a collection of individuals. Nature or experience furnishes us the occasion of conceiving it, but it is essentially distinct. Let it once be conceived, and all natural figures, though never so beautiful, are only images of a superior beauty which they do not realize. Give me a beautiful action, and I will imagine one still more beautiful. The Apollo itself is open to criticism in more than one respect. The ideal continually recedes as we approach it. Its last termination is in the infinite, that is to say, in God; or, to speak more correctly, the true and absolute ideal is nothing else than God himself.
God, being the principle of all things, must for this reason be that of perfect beauty, and, consequently, of all natural beauties that express it more or less imperfectly; he is the principle of beauty, both as author of the physical world and as father of the intellectual and moral world.
Is it not necessary to be a slave of the senses and of appearances in order to stop at movements, at forms, at sounds, at colors, whose harmonious combinations produce the beauty of this visible world, and not to conceive behind this scene so magnificent and well regulated, the orderer, the geometer, the supreme artist?
Physical beauty serves as an envelope to intellectual and moral beauty.
What can be the principle of intellectual beauty, that splendor of the true, except the principle of all truth?
Moral beauty comprises, as we shall subsequently see,[110] two distinct elements, equally but diversely beautiful, justice and charity, respect and love of men. He who expresses in his conduct justice and charity, accomplishes the most beautiful of all works; the good man is, in his way, the greatest of all artists. But what shall we say of him who is the very substance of justice and the exhaustless source of love? If our moral nature is beautiful, what must be the beauty of its author! His justice and goodness are everywhere, both in us and out of us. His justice is the moral order that no human law makes, that all human laws are forced to express, that is preserved and perpetuated in the world by its own force. Let us descend into ourselves, and consciousness will attest the divine justice in the peace and contentment that accompany virtue, in the troubles and tortures that are the invariable punishments of vice and crime. How many times, and with what eloquence, have men celebrated the indefatigable solicitude of Providence, its benefits everywhere manifest in the smallest as well as in the greatest phenomena of nature, which we forget so easily because they have become so familiar to us, but which, on reflection, call forth our mingled admiration and gratitude, and proclaim a good God, full of love for his creatures!
Thus, God is the principle of the three orders of beauty that we have distinguished, physical beauty, intellectual beauty, moral beauty.
In him also are reunited the two great forms of the beautiful distributed in each of these three orders, to wit, the beautiful and the sublime. God is, par excellence, the beautiful—for what object satisfies more all our faculties, our reason, our imagination, our heart! He offers to reason the highest idea, beyond which it has nothing more to seek; to imagination the most ravishing contemplation; to the heart a sovereign object of love. He is, then, perfectly beautiful; but is he not sublime also in other ways? If he extends the horizon of thought, it is to confound it in the abyss of his greatness. If the soul blooms at the spectacle of his goodness, has it not also reason to be affrighted at the idea of his justice, which is not less present to it? God is at once mild and terrible. At the same time that he is the life, the light, the movement, the ineffable grace of visible and finite nature, he is also called the Eternal, the Invisible, the Infinite, the Absolute Unity, and the Being of beings. Do not these awful attributes, as certain as the first, produce in the highest degree in the imagination and the soul that melancholy emotion excited by the sublime? Yes, God is for us the type and source of the two great forms of beauty, because he is to us at once an impenetrable enigma and still the clearest word that we are able to find for all enigmas. Limited beings as we are, we comprehend nothing in comparison with that which is without limits, and we are able to explain nothing without that same thing which is without limits. By the being that we possess, we have some idea of the infinite being of God; by the nothingness that is in us, we lose ourselves in the being of God; and thus always forced to recur to him in order to explain any thing, and always thrown back within ourselves under the weight of his infinitude, we experience by turns, or rather at the same time, for this God who raises and casts us down, a sentiment of irresistible attraction and astonishment, not to say insurmountable terror, which he alone can cause and allay, because he alone is the unity of the sublime and the beautiful.
Thus absolute being, which is both absolute unity and infinite variety,—God, is necessarily the last reason, the ultimate foundation, the completed ideal of all beauty. This is the marvellous beauty that Diotimus had caught a glimpse of, and thus paints to Socrates in the Banquet: