In a time as fraught with despair and evil as ours, the need to remember the everyday presence of divine beauty becomes ever more important for our very survival.
Instead of envy, celebration of one another’s gifts, talents and beauty. Instead of competition, celebration. Instead of sadness, joy. Instead of loneliness and rugged individualism, community.
So we find ourselves meditating on the role of beauty and art in its many manifestations. In Saturday’s DM, we cited Thomas Aquinas celebrating the divine beauty in whom we and all creatures shine with beauty ourselves.
Aquinas declares that “the beautiful is God” and is the end of all things. “The beautiful, which is God, is the end of all like the final cause of all things. For all things have been made in order that they imitate the divine beauty in whatever way possible.” We exist to imitate the divine beauty.
While goodness and beauty “are the same,” they differ insofar as “beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty.” The good simply pleases the appetite, while the beautiful is something pleasant to apprehend. Sight and hearing are most drawn to the beautiful. Thus music, theater, film and video feed both the intellect and the imagination.*
Meister Eckhart identifies beauty and grace. “Grace does no work—rather it infuses all beauty into the soul. This is abundance in the kingdom of the soul.” Grace is that which infuses all beauty into our souls. Grace “is a conveyor of fullness….God is one: that is the blessedness of the soul and its beauty and its repose.”
Beauty touches us in extreme ways. Indeed, “all souls are driven mad by the divine beauty and a sense of one’s own divine nature.” Does divinity and our own share in divinity drive you mad from time to time? Does ecstasy do that for you?
Eckhart teaches that the ultimate in beauty is compassion. Our compassionate works of healing, celebrating and bringing about justice, renew all things, bring beauty alive and return us to our original state of goodness and blessing. “Compassion divinely adorns the soul,” he tells us. And it constitutes our origin, a return to compassion is a return to our source. Both compassion and beauty are divine attributes.
Compassion is about deeds as the prophet Isaiah reminds us, and the beauty of compassion accompanies the work of the prophets. (Isa. 58.3-11) Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 25 does the same.
Eckhart calls the human soul “exquisite” and praises how it resembles divinity and, like a “temple, gleams so beautifully and shines so purely and clearly.” Only the “uncreated God” excels its splendor. Eckhartian student John Caputo says Eckhart sees “the world which God ‘gives’ us…resplendent with divine being and beauty.”**
How else do beauty and justice connect? Beautiful is what a movement of oppressed people is about, as in the slogan, “Black is beautiful.” Or in Gandhi’s statement, “real beauty is my aim.” Or in Simone Weil’s belief that “beauty constitutes the only finality here below…Beauty is eternity here below.”
Arturo Paoli, Italian activist priest who rescued Italian Jews in the Mussolini days, says, “to be religious is to give your life so that the world may be more beautiful, more just, more at peace; it is to prevent egotistical and self-serving ends from disrupting this harmony of the whole.”***
We are undergoing much dis-rupture and disharmony of the whole these days. Beauty is integral to the healing.
* The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times, pp.174-176.
** Passion For Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart, pp. 191, 383f., 412, 425f., 431ff., 456, 462f.
*** Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality, pp. 209, 229, 201.
To read the transcript of Matthew Fox’s video meditation, click HERE.
Banner Image: Divine Beauty shining through. Photo by Erik van Dijk on Unsplash.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you agree with Aquinas that we exist to imitate the divine beauty? And with Eckhart that grace infuses all beauty into the soul? And with Simone Weil that beauty is eternity here below? And with Pauli that true religion is rendering the world more beautiful, just and at peace?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth.
Christian Mystics: 365 Readings & Meditations.
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness With Social Justice.
Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ.
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society.
Charles Burack, ed., Matthew Fox: Essential Writings in Creation Spirituality.
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance.
5 thoughts on “Beauty & Grace, Aquinas & Eckhart: Medicine in a Time of Despair”
Yesterday’s (July 12, 2026) celebration of Brother David Steindl-Rast’s 100th birthday was a delightful and healing immersion in beauty, gratitude and compassion [ https://vimeo.com/event/5918519/380419b4ad ].
School boards risk horrible results when they cut programs that engage students (+ their families and their communities) with beauty. As Jesus said, if you take the salt (or zest) out of life, with what will it be flavored? Often with bile, alienation, discord and violence. When poverty deprives souls of joy, they often get despondent and make ugliness out of plainness.
“Often” doesn’t mean always, because a creative spark can turn a desert into a dreamscape. God took dust and made humanity by adding God’s spittle, according to Genesis. God gives humans such creative, transformative talents. What art collectors cherish as rare and unique beauty is accessible to all humans for the deep and persistent needs all have for peace, justice, sufficiency and health, the signs of beauty or integrity in life.
YES! YES! YES! YES! Thank you Matthew for today’s DM which beautifully summarizes the spiritual values of Creation Spirituality which you further expound upon in your book, “Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality,” and the other books of yours listed under “Related Readings” in today’s DM. I always heartedly recommend Creation Spirituality and dailymeditationswithmatthewfox.org to my spiritual friends on the internet.
Beautiful! I always appreciate the joining of the premodern mystics wth the modern mystics with art and truth and justice! More mystics please! I am saddened when they are absent! Thank you!
Wholeheartedly agree. I think we know intuitively that beauty is connected to our source, origin, God. Beauty is manifested in many ways and each we are part of. There is no end to the importance.