Socrates on Beauty - March 2019
Creative living is expected to become one of the defining characteristics of the coming age. This is the result of attempts to render oneself sensitive to the world of significant realities and the effort to reflect those realities in daily life. This idea resonates with teachings from Plotinus, the great Neoplatonist teacher of the third century AD:
“Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue.”
Someone who set about realising this teaching to great effect was Socrates whose life exemplifies the process of transformation. He defined himself as a philosopher, someone who pursues wisdom but is not yet wise. But Socrates was not always a philosopher: from his youth he was taught by his father to be a stonemason and sculptor and he worked on the construction of the Parthenon. He learned to make beautiful buildings and statues. And although he worked very hard to make his sculptures perfect, he was never satisfied with the results. No matter how beautiful the outer forms were, they never displayed the qualities of virtue and wisdom for which he was striving. He asked many more experienced sculptors for their help but could not find the answer he was seeking. Although they were experts and created excellent work, he saw that they didn’t express excellence in their lives.
Socrates then ceased sculpting stone and began working on himself, developing the virtues and wisdom which he had tried to build into his statues. When he explained to his friends that he wanted to make himself beautiful, they laughed heartily because he was one of the ugliest men: it was often said that he looked half man, half goat. Despite this it seems that Socrates achieved his goal because all who knew him came to agree that, although his outer form was indeed unsightly, that which shone forth from within was the essence of beauty.
He described his new profession as being similar to the profession of his mother, a midwife, but rather than helping to bring children into the world his aim was to lead people into becoming wise themselves. By asking others about the nature of their own lives and work, he sought to encourage them to seek for truth within themselves and in this way to share the inner beauty that he had discovered.
As an individual Socrates sought to aid others to reach greater enlightenment and in this respect, it resonates with the Triangles meditation where selfless group effort assists increased enlightenment and fashions a global network of goodwill. Contacting the inner realms of divine inspiration, the Triangles work distributes constructive and healing energies, aiding the creation of a new and more beautiful world to the benefit of all.