The Anatomy of Melancholy

If ordinary beauty and everything lovely and fair have such privilege and power to draw to themselves the eyes and ears, hearts and affections of all who behold them—to move, win, entice and attract—how will this divine form transport our souls, being the fountain and purest essence of all beauty? “Heaven is beautiful, but heaven’s maker is more beautiful.” If heaven is so beautiful, the sun so beautiful, how much more beautiful must he be who made them beautiful? “For, through the greatness and beauty of created things, their maker is seen by analogy,” Wisdom 13:5.

If simply looking at a beautiful person gives such pleasure, and a pleasing sermon moves us so deeply, what will the beauty of God himself do, infinitely more beautiful than all created things, human beings, angels and so on? “All the beauty of flowers, human beings, angels and all the most beautiful things, compared with God’s beauty, is night and darkness.” All other beauties are night itself, sheer darkness beside this inexplicable, incomprehensible, inexpressible, eternal, infinite, wonderful and divine beauty.

This radiance, “the most beautiful of all beauties”—this beauty and “splendour of the divine Majesty”—draws all creatures towards it, to seek it, love, admire and adore it. Those heathens, pagans and philosophers, through the remnants of God’s image still left in them, are so far inspired that they not only acknowledge a God, but also, though according to their own inventions, stand in admiration of his bounty and goodness, worship and seek him.

The magnificence and structure of the world itself, the beauty of all his creatures, his goodness, providence and protection compel them to love him, seek him, fear him and worship him, though in the wrong way. But as for us Christians, born again, his adopted sons, enlightened by his word, with the eyes of our hearts and understandings opened—how beautifully he offers and reveals himself! “God courts us,” Augustine says, “with his gifts and his beauty.” He woos us with his beauty, gifts and promises to come to him.

“The whole of Scripture is a message, an exhortation, a love letter for this purpose, to stir us and invite us”: “God’s letter to his creatures,” as Gregory calls it. To captivate us still more, he portrays his Son and his Church in that wedding song, the mystical Song of Solomon,

comparing “his head to fine gold, his curling locks black as a raven,” Song of Solomon 4–5; “his eyes to doves beside streams of water, washed with milk; his lips to lilies dripping pure juice; his hands to rings of gold set with chrysolite”; and his Church to “a vineyard, an enclosed garden, a fountain of living waters, an orchard of pomegranates, with sweet scents of saffron, spikenard, calamus and cinnamon, and all the trees of incense, like the finest spices; the fairest among women, without a spot in her; his sister, his bride, undefiled, the only daughter of her mother, dear to her, fair as the moon, pure as the sun, looking forth like the morning.”