RATZINGER ON THE WOUND OF BEAUTY AND THE WOUNDS OF CHRIST: This is obviously only the beginning of meditation, but there’s so much food for thought here. And our new Pope has a real ear for apt, provocative quotations. Here’s an excerpt:

…An early awareness of the fact that beauty has to do also with pain is undoubtedly present also in the Greek world. Let us look, for instance, at Plato’s Phaedro. Plato considers the encounter with beauty to be like the healthy emotional shock that brings man out of himself, and makes him “enthusiastic” by drawing him to something other than himself. Man, says Plato, has lost what he conceives as the perfection of his origin. Now he is perennially in search of the primeval healing form. Remembrance and nostalgia lead him to the search, and beauty takes him out of accommodation to the daily. It makes him suffer. We could say, in a Platonic sense, that the dart of nostalgia hits man, wounds him, and precisely in this way puts wings on him, lifts him upwards. In Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium, he states that lovers do not know what they really want from each other. On the contrary, it is evident that the souls of both of them are thirsting for something other than amorous pleasure. However, the soul does not manage to express this “other,” “it only has a vague perception of what it really wants and speaks to itself of it as an enigma.” In the fourteenth century, in the book on the life of Christ by the Byzantine theologian Nicolas Kabasilas, we find this experience of Plato’s again, where the ultimate object of nostalgia continues to remain nameless, transformed by the new Christian experience. Kabasilas states: “Men who have inside them a desire so powerful that it goes beyond their nature, and long and desire more than is suiting for a man to aspire, these men have been struck by the Bridegroom Himself; He Himself has sent a burning ray of His beauty to their eyes. The extent of the wound shows what kind of dart it was, and the intensity of the desire gives insight into Who it was that sent the dart flying.”

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Via the Old Oligarch.