Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all you know on Earth, and all you need to know. Beauty is the eternal splendor of the One showing through the Many. That is, in the many different forms in our Universe, the One shines through and gives splendor and meaning to all. This holds good as far as many are concerned at any rate, for most never hesitate in their choice of attitude; it leads people to adopt the Christian attitude as the only possible one. Several people are born, grow up, and always remain within the Christian inspiration. When considering the great trilogy of Beauty, Truth and Goodness, we often place Beauty at the top because Beauty is harmony, and whether Truth or Goodness are harmonious is the test of their integrity. Goodness gives a person self-respect, Truth gives gratification, but Beauty gives peace and joy simultaneously. Goodness, or ethics, consists of acting in a way that is harmonious with our fellow human beings, and this makes the action testable by its beauty. Much confusion exists today about the roles of men and women. We tend to be uncertain about what it means to be a man or a woman, and this uncertainty adds to the fears that keep us from knowing, accepting, and affirming ourselves. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

At one time in our history little confusion existed concerning these roles, for there was a rather clear social expectation. The man was expected to be the head of the home. When a final decision was to be made concerning important matters affecting the family, it was his responsibility to make that decision. If he chose to consult his wife for her opinion that was fine and gentlemanly of him, but he was not required by social custom to do so. Now, even in those days—some might say “good old days”!—women probably were the real rulers in the home more often than the men would have cared to admit. However, at any rate there was a social standard that man should have dominion over woman. However, times have changed and we now even have Internal Women’s Day to honor the achievements of women. Our society granted women the right to vote. Increasingly it gave them additional legal rights. In times of national emergency it encouraged them to work, and they made themselves so indispensable that many of them continued to work when the emergency was over. Gradually, virtually all professions were opened up to them. Equal educational opportunities became available to them and they increasingly took advantage of them. With all these changed taking place it was inevitable that the woman’s role, and man’s too, within the home and in relationship to each other would change. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

However, in what ways? As so often occurs in times of social transition, the old ways tended to be abandoned without a clear definition as to what the new would be. As others have pointed out, certain periods of history are characterized by particular forms of neurotic behavior. A good case can be made for believing that our basic neurosis, our fear of love, has been expressed  in many of our reactions to the shifting roles of men and women that occurred in the rush to fill the vacuum created by the changing times. Although the changes unquestionably opened the door to the possibility of new and exiting opportunities for emotional closeness between men and women never widely experienced before, we have frequently avoided this dangerous intimacy. Some of us reacted in extreme ways against the former roles. Others avoided the hopeful possibilities with more or less desperate attempts to cling to the old ways in male-female interaction while the World moved on. When women overact against the old system, it often means turning to a strongly competitive role in relation to men, sometimes subtly, sometimes openly, expressed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

The woman often appears to make a fetish, suggesting a deep insecurity about herself, of proving to the World, and probably most of all to herself, that she is not only the equal of any man but also superior to most. She may even attempt to dominate men as men dominated women in the past. This approach to life often leads to a de-feminization, which creates a veneer of hardness that seems to defy any man to attempt genuine intimacy with the woman. She may not shy away from physical closeness, for part of her platform of equal rights may well include a revolt against the double standard and a frenzied effort to prove that she is as free as any male. However, her fear of domination, her mistrust of herself and of her partner, may make it impossible for her to allow herself to experience genuine warmth and affection for a man. Strong reactions against feelings of dependency are often involved. All of us—men as well as women—have desires to be take care of, protected, and sheltered by another loving person. However, the woman who is afraid she may not be able to avoid domination is very threatened by such feelings. She may go to great lengths to suppress and even deny to herself these feelings of need for another woman. Some women feel that by enjoying a relationship with a man that they are giving up some of their independence to him, and it can cause them great anguish to have to release some of their power they worked so hard to achieve. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

In some cases, women actually deny their desires for a man and these struggles are so serious that they can cause her emotional and physical harm, as she may take the issues out on herself. This is why some women are cold, or seem unemotional. For men, overreaction against the old ways often leads to a near abdication of any meaningful role in the home. Convinced that one dare not dominate the home, he may abandon all leadership and leave the administration of home, household finances, and the discipline, education, and open expression of love of his children to his wife as her exclusive sphere of activity. Of course other factors, such as modern industrialization and our commuting ways, which often make the man’s workaday World a vastly different existence far separated from the home, both physically and psychologically, have encouraged this trend. The result is that, in the home, where the man might hope for emotional intimacy with a wife and children, he often seems, and may even adopt the role of, an inferior, bumbling, ineffectual creature who is a nonentity at best and at worst someone who disrupts the efficient routine that his wife has in operation when he is not around. He may feel like an outsider. While this may appear to be a caricature of American males today, there are many who fit the picture and many more who tend in that direction—men who appear to be afraid to be genuine persons in relation to their wives and children. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

Furthermore, our society appears likely to proceed further in that direction since a snowballing effect can be observed. Since family life is increasingly centered around women, it spears that girls are likely to emulate their mothers. Boy, on the other hand, confronted with a dominant mother image and a largely absent and apparently weak father, are likely to identify with the dominant mother and become increasingly feminized, and yet at the same time be frightened of women, who for them seem all-powerful. As one man put it, “I have never won an argument with a woman in my life! They are so good at repartee.” Another man, speaking of his wife, said, “When we fight, she has the supreme court behind her and I have new Lawyer from New York Law who just passed the bar exam.” This changing role of men is likely to lead to many symptoms of emotional disturbance. The man may express his fear of women and his (perhaps largely unconscious) rage by becoming impotent. He may turn toward homosexuality, as he seeks to satisfy his need for some kind of intimacy with follow males, who pose less threat to his damaged sense of personal identity. He may make conquests of pleasures of the flesh with women, in his workaday World, that involve little genuine intimacy. He may even adopt any one of many distancing devices, since the fear of love is magnified by his perspective of women. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

The woman, of course, is in a similar bind. For as the man tends in various ways to withdraw from her, her, own protective devices come into play. Without quite knowing what is going on, she feels frustrated, hurt, and abandoned. The risks of expressing love and understanding seems too great, so she goes on her way, substituting control and irritable nagging for the love she longs to give and receive, but which she fears. Vanity and narcissism—the compulsive needs to be admired and praised—undermine one’s courage, for one of them fights on someone else’s conviction rather than one’s own. When one act to gain someone else’s praise, furthermore the act itself is a living reminder of the feeling of weakness and worthlessness: otherwise there would be no need to haughtily display one’s attitude. This often leads to the cowardly feeling which is the most bitter humiliation of all—the humiliation of having co-operated knowingly in one’s own vanquishment. It is not so bad to be defeated because the enemy is stronger, or even to be defeated because one did not fight; but to know one was a coward because one chose to sell out one’s strength to get along with the victor—this betrayal of one’s self is the bitterest pill of all. There are also specific reasons in our culture why acting to please others undermines courage. For such acting, at least for men, often means playing the role of one who is unassertive, unaggressive, gentlemanly, and how can one develop power, including sexual potency, when one is supposed to be unassertive? #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

With women, too, these ways of gaining admiration militate against the development of their indigenous potentialities, for their potentialities are never exercised or even brought into the picture. The hallmark of courage in our age of conformity is the capacity to stand on one’s own convictions—not obstinately or defiantly (these are expressions of defensiveness not courage) nor as a gesture of retaliation, but simply because these are what one believes. It is as though one were saying through one’s actions, “This is myself, my being.” Courage is the affirmative choice, not a choice because “I can do no other”; for if one can do no other, what courage is involved? To be sure, at times one has simply to cling with dogged determination to a position one has won through courage. Such times are frequent in therapy when a person has achieved some new growth and must then withstand the counterattack of anxious reaction within oneself as well as the attacks of friends and family members who would be more comfortable if he had remained the way he was. There will be plenty of defensive actions at best; but if one has conquered something worth defending, then one defends it not negatively but with joy. When in a person’s development courage begins to emerge—that is, when the person begins to break out from the pattern of devoting one’s life to getting others to admire him or her—an intermediate step generally occurs. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

The person in this intermediate stage takes independent stands, to be sure, but they defend their actions at the court in which the laws are written by the very authorities they have been trying to please. It is as though they demanded the right to be free, but, like the American colonists before the Revolution, they have to argue their case on the basis of laws written by those from whom they demanded their rights. People in therapy in this stage often dream literally of trying to persuade their parents of the justice of their case, of the right to be themselves. It may well be that this stage is the farthest that many people reach in their development toward freedom and responsibility. However, in the final analysis this halfway station leaves the person in a hopeless dilemma: for in granting one’s parents or parental substitutes the right to draft the laws, and in arguing before their court, one has already tacitly admitted their sovereignty. This implies one’s lack of freedom, and one’s guilt if one asserts one’s freedom. The hardest step of all, requiring the greatest courage, is to deny those under whose expectations one has lived the right to make the laws. And this is the most frightening step. It means accepting responsibility for one’s own standards and judgments, even though one knows how limited and imperfect they are. This is what we mean by the courage to accept one’s finiteness—which is the basic courage every human must have. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

Accepting our finiteness is the courage to be and trust one’s self despite the fact that one is finite; it means acting, loving, thinking, creating, even though one knows one does not have the final answers, and one may well be wrong. However, it is only from a courageous acceptance of finitude, and a responsible acting thereon, that one develops the powers that one does possess—far from absolute though they may be. To do this presupposes the many sides of the development of consciousness of self which we have discussed, including self-discipline, the power to do the valuing, the creative conscience, and the creative relation to the wisdom of the past. Obviously this step requires a considerable degree of integration, and the courage it requires is the courage of maturity. For those who live as they should, passing away is the instant when, for an infinitesimal fraction of time, pure truth, unassisted, certain, and eternal, enters the soul. Life leading to this good is not only defined by a code of morals common to all, but also consists of a succession of acts and events strictly personal to one, and is essential to one who leaves them on one side never reaching the goal. Even when people are faced with inward darkness, one must have the everlasting conviction that any human being, even though practically devoid of natural faculties, can penetrate to the kingdom of truth reserved for genius, as long as one longs for truth and perpetually concentrates all one’s attention upon it attainment. One thus becomes a genius too. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

Under the name of truth, we also include beauty, virtue, and every kind of goodness, as it is a conception of the relationship between grace and desire. The Christian idea of love for one’s neighbor is a form of justice and it is so beautiful. The duty of acceptance in all that concerns the will of God, whatever it may be, is impressed on the minds of many, as it is a duty we cannot fail in without dishonoring ourselves. This experience enables us to get a better understanding of the possibility of loving divine love. It is a beautiful love that one can experience with all of one’s soul and bear witness to the tenderness it enshrines. It is as if Christ comes down and takes possession of one. It allows for in the midst of suffering to feel the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms. Give beauty in the inward mortal, and may the outward and inward mortal be at one. The timelessness of beauty saves us from worshipping at the shrine of progress, or kneeling at the altar to pray that tomorrow we will make more money than today, and the future will be better than the past, until we are caught up in the sordid merry-go-round that makes it impossible for us to appreciate the delicious calm of a moment of timelessness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

Beauty has nothing to do with progress. Who will be so rash as to proclaim that our present buildings are more beautiful than the Parthenon? Or our present churches more beautiful than Chartres? Or our present dishware more beautiful than Greek vases? Or modern music better than Mozart and Bach? Beauty is beyond the confines of progress. Progress must not be identified with evolution, a very different thing. Even evolution does not guarantee that our species and our World are getting better and better; many species have been dropped out, and why should we be evolutions darling? The one thing we can be sure about is the timelessness of beauty. Let us, as Walter Pater entreats us, seek the desire for beauty, the experience of poetic passion, the love of art, the highest quality of each moment for its own sake. The great explosion of creativity which occurred in Fifth Century Greece has bequeathed to us an endlessly rich mine of beauty in which to spend precious hours and days in the company of great spirits. The Greeks were willing to live and die for beauty. It is fascinating to note how the scientists have kept alive the sense of beauty since Grecian times. The astronomer Kepler believed his discoveries were in direct line with Pythagoras, and that the revolution of the planets around the Sun was beautiful in the same sense as the vibrations of a violin string are beautiful. No wonder he spoke of the harmony of sphere, and broke out in a cry of joy, “I thank thee, Lord God our Creator, that thou allowest me to see the beauty in thy work of creation.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

Kepler also wrote, “Mathematics is the archetype of the beauty of the World.” Researchers of physics recognize truth by the splendor of its beauty. After this I came to feel that Plato was a mystic, that all the Iliad is bathed in Christian light, and that Dionysus and Osiris are in a certain sense Christ himself; and my low was thereby redoubled. We mistaken assume that beauty is passive, which is no doubt the influence of our culture which does not have time to listen to the active powers of beauty. However, listening is an active process. Every since Plato, beauty has been experienced by the sensitive persons as an active agent: it is the sign of the splendor of truth, and it speaks out through this splendor to the mathematicians, physicists, and all those who listen patiently. The effect of this practice is extraordinary and surprises me every time, for, although I experience it each day, it exceeds my expectation at each repetition. At times the very first words tear my thoughts from my body and transport it to a place outside space where there is neither perspective nor point of view. The infinity of the ordinary expanses of perception is replaced by an infinity to the second or some third degree. At the same time, filling every part of this infinity of infinity, there is silence, a silence which is not an absence of sound but which is the object of a positive sensation, more positive than that of sound. Noises, if there are any, only reach me after crossing this silence. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

The stars in the Heavens sing a music if we only had ears to hear. The useful combinations are precisely the most beautiful, I mean those best able to charm this special sensibility that all mathematicians know. Sometimes, also, during this reflection or at other moments, Christ is present with me in person, but his presence is infinitely more real, more moving, more clear than on that first occasion when he took possession of me. It sometimes seems to me that when I am treated in so merciful a way, every sin on my part must be a mortal sin. And I am constantly committing them. However, for as to the spiritual direction of my soul, I think that God himself has taken it in hand from the start and still looks after it. What a lovely World we could live in if we would listen more frequently to this splendor! Beauty alone confers happiness on all, and under its influence every being forgets that one is limited. However, the sense of limitations is crucial to our creating beauty. We actually create beauty out of the endeavor to come to terms with the paradox on one hand of freedom and on the other of destiny. Our limits come from being both nature and spirit, finite and infinite, objective and subjective. No one knows this struggle better than the artists, be they painters or musicians or sculptors or dancers or any other figures in the arts. Sculptures or paintings or a piece of music is genuine beauty, a gift to the World. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14