A beautiful passage on beauty from Leo Schaya’s The Universal Meaning of the Kabbalah (spellings edited for consistency with Kabbalistic vocabulary used elsewhere on the anomablogue):

The essential principle of divine beauty is the identity of the absolute (ayin) – which excludes all that is not itself — and of the infinite (ein sof) — which includes all that is real; it is the unity of the more than luminous darkness of non-being with the dazzling plenitude of pure being, the supreme and most mysterious of unities, which is revealed in the saying (Song of Songs 1:5): I am black, but comely. This essential principle of divine beauty, from which radiate both the pure truth of the only reality, eclipsing all that is not it, and at the same time unlimited bliss in which each thing swims as though in a shoreless ocean, is nothing other than keter, which encloses all the polar aspects of God, eternally and without distinction. When keter reveals itself, its infinite and unitive aspect is expressed by chokhmah and by chesed, while its absolute or exclusive character is manifested by binah and by din [gevurah].

These two kinds of antinomic emanations are indispensable in view of creation; we have seen how, in order to create, both rigorous truth and generous bliss are necessary; or, in other words, measure in all things, judgement of their qualities, universal law on the one hand and on the other the unlimitedness of grace, giving rise to all life, joy and freedom. And in order that these two opposites, in which are concentrated, in one way or another, all the divine aspects, may be able to produce the cosmos, there has to be, not only absolute identity ‘above’ between these two, but also their interpenetration and existential fusion ‘below’. This fusion or synthesis of all the revealed antinomies of God, which can be summed up in the two general terms ‘grace’ and ‘rigour”, takes place in tif’eret, ‘beauty’. In tif’eret, the rigorous truth which God alone is, differs in no way from his mercy which unites everything with him. In God’s ‘heart”, the eternal measure of things is as though dissolved in the incommensurability of his redemptive grace. When divine beauty is manifested, grace crystallizes mysteriously in the created ‘measures’ or forms and radiates through them, leaving the imprint of its author on the work of creation.

It has been a few minutes since I’ve written an exclamation and star in the margin of a book. *!

Holy words.

I needed a taste of bliss this week, and I am grateful for it.

A side note on Schaya’s The Universal Meaning of the Kabbalah. This is the only major work on Kabbalah from the Traditionalist/Perennialist school (Guenon, Schuon, Coomaraswamy, Burkhardt, Cutsinger, etc.).

I was exposed to this theosophy early in early adulthood, and despite early incapacities to comprehend it (or, rather, my early incapacity to reduce all intellection to comprehension!) and despite my animosity toward its reactionary retro-rigidity, I cannot shake my deep conviction that the problems I have with Perennialism are not with its truth, but my own understanding.

I read this book with extreme, respectful caution. Another passage from this book:

Grace and rigour are essentially one, that One who rules over all things and who, according to the Zohar (Beshallah 5Ib), is comparable to “…a king who combines in himself the balance and harmony of all attributes, and therefore his countenance always shines like the sun and he is serene because of his wholeness and perfection; but when he judges, he can condemn as well as acquit. A fool, seeing that the king’s countenance is bright, thinks that there is nothing to be afraid of; but a wise man says to himself, ‘Although the king’s countenance shines, it is because he is perfect and combines benevolence with justice. In that brightness judgement is hidden, and therefore I must be careful.'”

This distrustful trust is the essence of transcendent orientation. It can also appear as a humble hubris, or any number of cheap, priceless paradoxes.