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let us consider first the beatific
vision
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one of the most beautiful symbols of
which can be found in the great
Cathedral of Notre Dame
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st. Thomas Aquinas who would have known
this building when he was professor of
theology in Paris said that the human
spirit is structured in such a way that
it pushes beyond itself toward the good
the true and the beautiful the mind
seeks the truth and it finds it to some
degree in this world but it's never
enough because the mind seeks absolute
truth the will seeks the good and it
finds it to some degree within this
world but it's never enough
finally to satisfy the will the soul
seeks the beautiful and to a limited
degree it finds it it achieves it in
this world but it's ordered toward the
beautiful itself there's a kind of holy
longing in us there's an aching a
restlessness that pushes us beyond
anything in this world toward a
transcendent truth a transcendent
goodness a transcendent beauty
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this is why as CS Lewis so clearly saw
the most exquisite experiences in life
aesthetic pleasure sexual intimacy deep
friendship are always accompanied by a
certain aching sadness a sense that
there must still be something more
heaven is what corresponds to that
desire beyond desire and to that
searching beyond searching the mind and
the will despite or because of all their
achievements here below still want
definitively to see
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I first laid eyes on an orthros window
at notre-dame Cathedral in Paris on June
the 12th 1989 when I saw the Rose window
I stood mesmerized for 20 minutes by its
sheer beauty then every single day that
I was in Paris until I returned home for
Christmas I went to that spot and stare
the Great Wheel of the North Rose window
with its myriad parts and harmonious
interconnection and with the sunlight
shining through it certainly qualifies
as a beautiful thing
but its beauty is in service of a higher
good for it's meant to be a foretaste of
the beauty of the beatific vision one of
the clues of this transcendent purpose
is in the windows numeric symbolism
around the central figures of Christ and
his mother are eight small circles then
on the next major row we find 16
circular images Madeo in French and on
the next twice 1632 images and then
finally another row of 32 if we add 32
32 16 and 8 we arrive at 88 in a word
the entire window is an artistic
meditation on the number 8 then we
recall that 8 is a symbol of eternity
since it stands immediately outside of 7
which evokes the 7 days of the week or
the completed cycle of time another clue
is found in the very complexity and
inexhaustibility of its composition
why was i drawn for so many days to look
at that rose partly because there was
just so much to take in the vision of
God is like that saint burner ended us
that the beatific vision is not
something we take in all at once rather
the more we see the more we want to see
the more we know of God the more we want
to know the more we explore the hungry
we are to explore even more Thomas
Aquinas said that the saints in heaven
realized to their delight just how
incomprehensible God is
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