Narcissus fell in love with himself when he saw his reflection in a stream. It ended well; he turned into a flower. So the polytheistic Greeks believed. But they liked a good story more than they liked worrying out the truth. And often the truth is much less fascinating than the good story. Ovid knew this when he got people thinking about Narcissus.
The story lingers. We call people preoccupied with their own matters narcissistic. It is a kind of world-rejection and rejected with it is any idea of a Creator God. It is true that the Scriptures tell lus that God made man in his own image but that conveys aspects of humanity such as robustness, thoroughness, harmony, venturesomeness that contribute to a productive socity, indeed a productive universe. And not only does the story linger because we meet a Narcissus every day. The Narcissus has its beauty. Like the Affodil (as the daffodil was once called) it takes the imagination of a Wordsworth by storm and overwhelms by numbers.
We humans have an itch to find beauty. We very soon recognise tht it does not exist in solitary splendour but is often entangled with its opposite. There is such a thing as ‘terrible beauty’. If what we all once called sin is parasitic, negative, what it clings to must also attract it.
We should find very few people who would decline to say ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. Keats cut the Gordian knot with: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty… that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know’.
If Keats was saying that beauty if one of the prime avenues of human venture that we should take if we are to be fully human, we can accompany him on his journey. But in Mark 13 Jesus warned us to be wary of fine buildings; they were ephemeral. A true beauty is for ever.
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