The most fundamental beauty is found in the balance between a beautiful attitude and a beautiful creature, between admirer and admired.

We might think of beauty as the "harmony of contrasts."  On the level of sense experience, this could mean, for example, the harmony or balance of concave and convex curves, or of the two sides of an object.  Or, it might involve the balance between sound and silence, landscape features like mountain and valley, or between contrasting character traits - like humility and self-confidence, earthiness and otherworldliness, humor and intensity, solitary self-possession and the need for community.  Sometimes we use the word "symmetry" to describe this perception of balance.  However, a thing doesn't have to be physically symmetrical to be beautiful. As the beauty of  character traits illustrates,  it can be inward.

Puritan philosopher Jonathan Edwards spoke of this kind of balance - both inward and outward - as "secondary beauty."  It is the balance occurring within a  SINGLE object or being or setting.  For him, secondary beauty was a reflection of a more fundamental kind of beauty, which he called "primary beauty."  Edwards defined this as "the consent of being to being."  Primary beauty is thus inherently RELATIONAL.  For example, when two people love one another, this is an instance of primary beauty.  So is the "symmetry" that occurs when, for example, males and females both respect one another equally, or when people of various cultures and backgrounds throughout the world all have enough to eat.  In any case, because Edwards experienced primary beauty as intensely vivid and real, he viewed it not as a mere concept, but as an actual PRESENCE - the "Holy Spirit," the relational aspect of the Divine.

One of the most important forms of primary beauty occurs when an object or person becomes capable of revealing their beauty because they are valued by someone with a beautiful attitude; that is, by an admirer who loves and appreciates them.  As John O'Donohue says, "If our style of looking becomes beautiful, then beauty will become visible and shine forth for us . . . Only if there is beauty in us can we recognize beauty elsewhere: beauty knows beauty.  In this way, beauty can be a mirror that manifests our own beauty . . . There is a profound balancing within beauty."  May all of us have the grace to possess a beautiful attitude of love and respect that enables other creatures to finally come out of the shadows and reveal their own innate beauty.

Photo: Avalanche Lily, Mt. Rainier National Park, WA; July 22, 2012