## THE ASCETIC AESTHETE: HOW ASCETISM IS THE RIGHT RELATIONSHIP TO BEAUTY, REAL CARE FOR THE SELF, AND LOVE FOR THE WORLD

## Alexandra Hayes

## ABSTRACT

What is the role of beauty for the individual navigating the modern world? What does it say about the moral status of people, the value of matter, and the relationship between the two? I will argue that the right relationship to beauty is an ascetic one, a practice of saying no to the self, in order to truly care for the self and love the world. This is a matter of constant training, re-evaluating, and witnessing ourselves and the world

## KEYWORDS

Beauty, Asceticsm Self-Care, Love, Consumption

## INTRODUCTION

What is the role of beauty for the individual navigating the modern world? What does it say about the moral status of people, the value of matter, and the relationship between the two? I will argue that the right relationship to beauty is an ascetic one, a practice of saying no to the self, in order to truly care for the self and love the world. This is a matter of constant training, re-evaluating, and witnessing ourselves and the world.

Drawing on longstanding traditions of ascetic practice to remind us of something that we have seemingly forgotten: saying no to ourselves is a way of caring for ourselves and loving the world. Popular conversation about self-care abounds because many of us feel individually over-stimulated, over-committed, and frankly, burnt-out. This is all taking place as many feel we are in the midst of a collective crisis. The two are related, I will argue, in our commodifying view of beauty. Instead of this, the care that is needed ought to be understood in the context of aesthetic virtue and discipline. Beauty becomes possible when the freedom to say no, and therefore yes, is present.

I hope to show that a view in which self-denial is required, beauty is a final value, and the self and the material world are good, is a completely coherent position, and one worth considering. I will first show why it might seem to be incoherent, especially when we have the wrong idea of beauty in mind, or confuse the consequences of beauty with beauty itself. With the right understanding of beauty, I argue, we get a view that is disciplined, but also hopeful, positive and life-affirming.

## THREE ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES

Before I explore my answer, I will discuss three other options we have in theorizing about the complicated relationship between beauty, the moral status of people, and the value of matter, and why these other routes are confused and unsatisfactory. The first route is one of self-denial and forgetting about beauty as a value. One might think beauty is frivolous and that pursuing it for its own sake is really just indulgence of the very self that requires discipline. We might think the predicament we find ourselves in-that is, a world of over-consumption, wastefulness, and even lack of regard for others, actually stems from an obsession with beauty. It is often directly claimed to be an obsession with materiality. This view gains traction when you think  of  how  much  of  our  resources  are  devoted  to maintaining our personal style, our attractive home, and so on. Wanting to be trendy or aesthetic can be the reason for some to discard perfectly wearable clothing, or toss perfectly usable household goods. If you find yourself concerned with this predicament, it is tempting to think we just need to stop focusing on beauty. Perhaps we should just learn to live in faded or outdated clothes, and keep those dish towels even if they are stained, etc.

The problem with this view is that keeping our style to date or our appliances new is not what it looks like to genuinely pursue beauty, though beauty is a consideration in what ultimately amounts to a self-pursuit. Beauty, in a case like this, is a consideration as a mere means, not an end in itself. Even if we think personal style is one of the greatest consequences of aesthetic life, it ought not be pursued as its own end. In fact, we ought not pursue any consequences of aesthetic  life  (be  it  community,  self-expression,  pleasure, etc.),  no matter how great, directly.

This pursuit is problematic for our relationship to ourselves and the world. To start, I want to discuss just how problematic it is even for our relationship to beauty. Pursuing beauty's outcomes -which on my account is always a kind of self-pursuit-is likely not the best way to attain the outcomes anyway. 1 Trying to keep up with trends is not likely to give you a personal style, whereas genuinely caring about high  quality  materials  and  well-made  processes  of  beautiful garments likely will. But more importantly, even if we can attain the outcome by pursuing it directly, we might miss the independent value of beauty, and that is no small thing to miss. 2

Also, pursuing a consequence of beauty encourages a different selection of aesthetic objects. It prefers the aesthetic object that is most inclined  to  give  one  a  sense  of  self-expression,  community,  or pleasure, not what is most beautiful. It even encourages a different way of attending to those aesthetic objects. We might as well ignore the bits that work against our ends or even do not directly serve them. If you think community is the ultimate value of aesthetic activity , you might listen to songs searching for a witty line to memorize and whip out at your next party with your friends, but that is not to truly listen to a song. Arguably the most problematic thing about pursuing the ends of aesthetic life instead of beauty itself is that it might even encourage an abandonment of aesthetic activity if something achieves that end better. 3 If self-knowledge is what you seek, visiting your therapist might get you there quicker than visiting your local museum.

The consequences of aesthetic life, when pursued directly, promote the self. Consequences, when not pursued directly, efface the self. 4 Of course, some might want to double-down on the idea of self-pursuit and the pursuit of consequences. Here we get the second route to answering the questions I have posed that states that we ought to pursue beauty and the self. This will seem like an especially attractive route to those that are wary of the Platonic idea of pursuing 'beauty itself,' and think the idea of pursuing consequences is the only sensible way to conceptualize our pursuit. Some might argue that what the self really needs is a certain kind of 'self-care' where indulgence is good. This is the kind of branded and heavily advertised self-care of consumption where 'taking care' of the self looks like buying expensive beauty products, luxury clothes, etc. We might think that this kind of 'self-care' commitment represents a commitment to our natural goodness and saying yes to ourselves is just how we promote this goodness. I think this is just as confused as thinking aiming your aesthetic life at personal style is a genuine pursuit of beauty.

Kathleen Higgins discusses a similar mistake we make in pursuing what may seem like beauty but is really what she calls 'false paradigms of beauty.' These false paradigms are ultimately not self-affirming, but self-sabotaging. She writes:

The quests for flawlessness and glamour are both self-sabotaging, a premise on which the marketing of beauty depends. These false paradigms of beauty have obscured the fact that human beauty manifests an ideal of balance and health that is neither self-conscious nor a consequence of deliberate effort. I will defend the relevance of this ideal to beauty to our personal and cultural well-being. 5

The quest for flawlessness and glamour, or any other confused picture of beauty, is not real care for the self, but is instead the kind of self-indulgence that says you are not enough as you are, but with the addition of the right commodities, you will feel and eventually be better. We might think this at least represents a view that values materiality, but that is not even the case. This is a view that gives matter only an instrumental value as a commodity, not any inherent value. Again, this does not seem to be what pursuing beauty as an end really looks like, just a means of pursuing the self as an end.

It is possible to hold beauty as something positive, even a final value, in a new paradigm. We need a paradigm that does not laud beauty's value ultimately as the immaterial form that we only come into knowledge of by the shadow of its material presence, nor one that is suspicious of its 'coercive or manipulative' ways and ultimately gives it a negative value. Because the former may feel like the only way to coherently explain a view where beauty is a final value, modernity has settled on the latter extreme as a response. This modern suspicion of beauty, Higgins writes, sees beauty as 'far from Plato's salient manifestation of absolute truth. Instead, it is an aesthetic form of lying.' 6 But Higgins spots this as a confusion, I think rightly, and calls this 'aesthetic form of lying' kitsch instead of beauty. 7

Whether we call it 'kitsch' or something else, the kind of pursuit that hurts us or leads us opposite of our own well-being or integrity ought to be understood as something other than beauty. If we are open to beauty being defined by our self-forgetting experience, we can see how this could apply to a myriad of aesthetic objects. This is not to say that there are not more or less beautiful things in the world, but categorizing these will not be my aim here.

Indeed, it is possible to hold beauty even as a final value, something it seems like Higgins might not want to do, evidenced by her statement that 'further consideration of the notion of living well as a more fundamental goal than beauty and the place that beauty might play in life would, I think, be worthwhile.' 8 However, perhaps she would be open to the idea that beauty's (as long as we are correctly conceiving of beauty in the right paradigm) final value is ultimately compatible with the ideal of living well. That is, it is possible to say that the things that are independently valuable, like beauty, are the very things that do contribute to our flourishing and well-being. Or, in other words, the things we have reason to seek as ends in themselves are also instrumentally valuable for us. I will speak more about this compatibility claim in the following section. Before I do so, I would like to consider one final alternate route to answering the question about the relationship of the self, to beauty and matter.

The last route one might take in this predicament (which I will call 'Murdoch's route') is to think that beauty is good, and that we 'unself' in the face of genuine beauty. Unlike the other approaches which seem to fundamentally misunderstand what beauty is, I am happy to adopt Murdoch's definition of beauty: 'beauty is the convenient and traditional name of something which art and nature share, and which gives a fairly clear sense to the idea of quality of experience and change of consciousness.' 9 That quality of consciousness can be called 'un-selfing' to use her term directly. Though I think this is an experience that contributes to our well-being and our integrity, it does not need to be understood instrumentally, or framed, as Murdoch does, under the guiding question 'how can we make ourselves better?' 10 Part of this understanding is resultant of not, or at least  not  necessarily,  taking  on  the  Murdochian  commitments. Perhaps this experience of un-selfing is not the instrumental solution to our problem of selfishness, but a more natural state for us that is indicative of our alignment with final values. If, unlike Murdoch, we are not committed to the pointlessness of life, we might think this final value is secured by some purpose.

We might think that we need to say no to ourselves or that we need self-discipline, because we are naturally selfish and we are inherently obstinate and vain. This is the most attractive of the three options, but notably-and this is part of the reason I will not be taking this route either-beauty might not be seen as the real end here either. Instead, the end is pulling ourselves out of our sorry state for which beauty plays an undeniably unique role. Ultimately beauty's purpose is somewhat instrumental even here because it takes us out of our naturally selfish state. I will expand on Murdoch's view in contrast with mine in the following section.

## 3.   MY APPROACH

Though I agree with Murdoch's route that genuinely pursuing beauty is  a  self-forgetting  practice,  Murdoch  states  clearly  that  she  is starting from the assumption that there is no external point or telos , and that humans are naturally selfish. 11 I want to explore a position where these are not our starting assumptions. I hope to show that views we might assume are incompatible are not only compatible, but might show us a way forward as we theorize about these complicated matters, and try to implement a practice that will be good, in itself, but also for ourselves, and for our world.

There are three compatibility claims I would like to make. Though I myself will take both assumptions and commitments not everyone may want to take on, a more skeptical route might be to see these commitments as representative of the logical extreme of the compatibility of views that might be simply assumed as incompatible. One may wish to be more neutral on certain matters while I will be quite positive, for example, on their view of the value of matter and the moral status of people. However, the more neutral view is an even easier argument for compatibility. So, by showing the compatibility even with a more extreme view like mine, the reader is left with even more options in theorizing about these matters.  Firstly, I hope to show that a view in which there is an external point or telos is compatible with the material world still being valuable, even cherished, and that an openness to an external point or telos does not commit us to a view that the material world with which we engage is nothing more than a mere sign toward that externality, like a Platonic form, that we ultimately ought to get 'beyond.' Perhaps the term 'external' might be responsible for an assumption of incompatibility because I think an openness to the idea that our life has a purpose does not have to commit us to a view that there are things beyond the material necessarily, but perhaps not every thing is visible. Secondly, I hope to show that there is a compatibility with the idea that beauty is a final value and that it greatly benefits the self. We can debate welfarism versus non-welfarism perhaps without realizing that perhaps the very things that are of the highest intrinsic value just so happen to be the things that contribute highest to people's well-being. Lastly, I hope to show that prescribing a practice of un-selfing is compatible with a neutral or even positive view of the self-its existence, its fundamental moral status, and its flourishing. In fact, I would like to propose that un-selfing can be a form of genuine self-care, when done correctly.

If we think that our predicament of selfishness is not inherent (that is not to say that we do not have a natural propensity toward it, being susceptible to passion and inclination), we may also see that though it may be at times helpful, practically, to see our relationship to beauty as the solution to this selfishness, it may be more accurate to see it as the very cause. That is, it is precisely in our losing touch with the right relationship to beauty that we become self-obsessed. Beauty is not a mere cure in our path toward goodness but the tangible symbol of goodness itself.

If beauty is a symbol, what is the significance of the individual object? Could we exchange any one object for another? This concern is much weightier with fully Platonic or Murdochian commitments. If we are not on board with those commitments, however, we might still see material objects as valuable and significant, both as a part of the whole and as a representative of the whole.

For me, the strongest Platonic commitment is the idea that there is something unifying the particular things we call 'beautiful' that we can and ought to pursue, which is Beauty itself. That said, the movement from the particular to the universal is not a movement from  the  physical  to  the  immaterial,  though  it  is  sometimes  a movement from the visible to the invisible. Neither bodies nor persons are vilified in my view, but they do require training to be receptive not to only what is seen, but what is unseen. This training is a way of affirming both the natural goodness of persons and bodies, and is the highest form of care. It is a radical act of love toward the self and for the world. Therefore, mine is a more positive and hopeful view, but it also might be seen as a more demanding one. It requires a confrontation with reality that, unlike Murdoch's route, is beyond mere appearance. Beyond confrontation, it requires affirmation, both of the materiality of the particular objects and their unifying source.

This brings me to my most pronounced deviation from the Platonic view, which concerns the value of matter. Matter is good (this goes against at least a reading of Plato), and not just pointlessly so (this goes against the Murdochian view). 12 If you read Plato as endorsing Diotima's 'staircase' account of beauty, you might think the point of particular beautiful things is merely a step toward loving the immaterial form of Beauty itself. 13 In my view, the material reality of particular beautiful things is not good merely as a prompt for the reflective practice of the mind, though this can be a good thing. Matter is also not good merely as a way to see the connection to what is immaterial. In fact, it is better to think in terms of what is visible and invisible. This is consonant with my reading of Emerson, where we celebrate the goodness of both what is seen and what is unseen, both the image and what is beyond the image. Emerson writes, 'things more excellent than every image […] are expressed through images […] Things admit of being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part.' 14 Again, particular objects are not interchangeable or unimportant. In fact, their importance is strengthened by their symbolic significance, and relation to the whole.

The  second  most  pronounced  deviation,  particularly  from  the Murdochian view, is the inherent moral status of people, what the goal of morality really is, and the role of beauty in this. On the face, it sounds similar. Murdoch, too, thinks beauty is the starting place for many of us in our paths towards goodness, and that this path is un-selfing. Murdoch writes, 'I take this starting-point [beauty], not because I think it is the most important place of moral change, but because I think it is the most accessible one.' 15 In my view, beauty is not a starting place just because of its accessibility, universality, or even because it is 'the only spiritual thing we love by instinct.' 16 There cannot be a more important place for moral change because beauty, goodness, and truth are inseparable. Timothy Patitsas, a contemporary theologian, tries to revive what he considers to be the Orthodox Christian view of 'beauty-first,' where beauty is as fundamental a need and meaning for human life as truth or goodness. This meaning is found in ascetic practice and struggle. 'Beginning with Beauty means beginning with feeling-not with passionate emotions or opinions, but with purified feeling,' 17 and this 'purification comes not from moral struggle, but from ascetic struggle.' 18 This supports my idea that we need training and care in our approach to beauty. We need even to be wary of the things we do thinking they are in the pursuit of beauty, but are merely veiled self-pursuits, such as the aim for style or self-knowledge, but even to become critics or experts. We see this in Emerson's suggestion:

Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a critical speculation, but in a holy place, and should go very warily and reverently. We stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance, and Unity into Variety. 19

Though this is a view that is committed to the reality of being beyond mere  appearance  (a  commitment  shared  with  Plato,  and  not Murdoch), the very appearance is also not something to disdain or merely get beyond. Instead, this place is considered holy. It is a place that requires great reverence and care, which requires us to take an honest look at our approach, and discipline the self towards the  right  relationship  to  such  a  holy  place.  This  asceticism  or training, though honest, is not scornful, but loving.

We need the kind of discipline that recognizes our natural goodness and guides us back to our fundamental state of loving what is good. In this way , our relationship to beauty is not a solution to the problem of our state of selfishness, but the very face of it. It is in our relationship to beauty that we assess how truly selfish we have become. We need to return to the state of the Emersonian child with regards to our relationship to beauty. The challenge is more than just a change of perspective on what is seen, but a conversion of the heart toward what is unseen. This is something a child has, but we need to relearn.

## This is what Emerson means when he says:

to speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward sense are still truly adjusted to each other; who has  retained  the  spirit  of  infancy  even  into  the  era  of manhood. 20

It takes adults discipline and training to return to this state-'the spirit of infancy'-though of course the goal is not to remain a child. The goal is to grow in wisdom in adulthood whilst remaining childlike, abounding in curiosity and resisting commodification of both nature and beauty. We see this here:

Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted this simplicity of his childhood. 21

The substantial problem of a poor relationship to beauty will not get solved with a hatred towards ourselves or towards the world. People are good and matter is good, and our ascetic training has to be an acknowledgement of that very goodness. Out of love for ourselves and the world, we need discipline to guide us back to a good relationship with beauty. Maria Antonaccio defends the ancient virtue of asceticism in a modern consumer world. In this, she draws on Kallistos Ware's notion of 'natural asceticism' . Natural asceticism is a simplification of material life whereas unnatural asceticism is a mortification of it. This is a helpful distinction in understanding how 'saying no' or disciplining the self can be a commitment to caring for oneself and loving the world: 'Natural asceticism is understood as 'warfare not against the body but for the body,' in which 'refinement, not destruction […] is the aim.' 22

Food is one of the best, if not the best, places to think about the value of matter. It has often been deemed too low, or too bodily, to be taken seriously as a thing of beauty, but it is so known as a source of sensuous gratification, that it is of the first things one will deny themselves if looking for an ascetic practice.

Robert Farrar Capon speaks of 'the modern reductionism about food ('Food is only a necessity.' Food is nothing but nourishment.')' and offers instead a cookbook that claims that 'food and cooking… are not low subjects. In fact, there are no low subjects anywhere in the physical universe. Every real thing is a joy, if only you have eyes and ear to relish it, a nose and tongue to taste it.' 23 This claim gives people 'solid reasons for glorifying in the truth they had suspected all along; namely, that food was life, and that life was good.' 24 But he also acknowledges that this is 'a hard insight to keep track of. Food these days is often identified as the enemy.' 25 To interject a diagnosis here, I think that, on some level, we know that temperance is good for us and unreflective indulgence can be bad for us, but it is easier to externalize the problem. 'Butter, salt, sugar, eggs' he continues 'are all out to get you. And yet at our best we know better. Butter is…well, butter: it glorifies almost everything it touches. Salt is the sovereign perfecter of all flavors. Eggs are, pure and simple, one of the wonders of the world. And if you put them all together, you get not sudden death, but Hollandaise-which in its own way is not one bit less a marvel than the Gothic arch, the computer chip, or a Back fugue.' 26

Knowing this truth also does not mean that we eat nothing but hollandaise all the time. Not only would the diet of only hollandaise diminish the pleasure of hollandaise, but we might forget what gives it pleasure. Genuinely acknowledging the goodness of matter makes us want to be temperate and not wasteful.

For the life of the body, many spiritual practices recommend fasts. To fast from a particular food in a way that is self-denying but still life-affirming is not to say that food is bad. It is, in a sense, to acknowledge its goodness, but in a way that is free and not compulsory. It is to take the chance to see beyond its pleasure, and judge why it gives pleasure. Fasting, voluntarily and temporarily, can be a way of affirming the goodness of matter-a way of having a body instead of the body having you. Fasting is just one practice that helps one understand the relationship human beings have to things of value. We need to be able to step outside of our own pleasures in the consequences of beauty, too, in order to truly understand the beautiful. As Augustine has said, this is how one 'may be bold enough to make a judgment about what delights human beings. In this way, you see, he is raised above it and not held by it, while he does not make judgments by, but upon, such delight.' 27

Discipline is refinement, saying no, quieting the self down, so that you witness pure beauty in a selfless way. We can do this with fasting from food and we can do this with temperance in our approach to things of beauty. Interfering-with criticism, for example-is only to detract from true beauty. The demand is high in the sense that beauty asks you to lay every bit of yourself down. On the other hand, the burden is easy, in that beauty simply asks you to open your heart toward what is unseen, like the wind that rushes through the eolian harp. It is no accident that Samuel Taylor Coleridge chooses the breeze to represent beauty itself. It is mostly an invisible force, though it can become visible, and its effects certainly are. It is, however, clearly material: air is a fundamental element, an element as universally recognized and lauded as earth and fire. Once we recognize this force, what response are we to have but love? Coleridge writes:

Methinks, it should have been impossible Not to love all things in a world so filled; Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air Is Music slumbering on her instrument. 28

Because beauty fills all things, it seems impossible not to love all things. But it is not impossible. We can lose our way, and forget how to love properly. True beauty is only recognized in love, but that is all we need-not a perfect style, a critical eye, or even expertise. This is why the recently canonized St. Gavrilia says, 'If you have love for all the world, the whole world is beautiful.' 29

Emerson alludes to Coleridge's 'Eolian Harp' when he suggests that it takes the delicate ear to enter into the space 'where the air is music'-it is only there that 'we hear those primal warblings.' 30 These forces of inspiration are not of human creation and therefore not created from, or best understood by, our rules. For Emerson, it is not that God created some beautiful things of the universe, but that God is Beauty, and God as Beauty itself created the universe. 31 It is our role to be simply aware enough and perceptive enough to recognize this beauty and write down the poetry 'that was written before time was.' 32 This act of translation is never perfect. We inevitably get in the way, so we train ourselves toward this delicate ear. We discipline our impulse to interfere but all for the sake and love of beauty. Even the creation of new beauty is, or at least ought to be, a selfless act. It is an inspiration, and an outpouring of love. Beauty fosters creativity that fosters more beauty . Emerson writes, 'Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature re-forms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.' 33 Beauty is meant to inspire us, not just for the imaginative exercise of reflection, but also the imaginative exercise of creation. When we create beauty, we are speaking the language of symbols.

## NOTES

| 1     | For some of the contemporary views on the value of art and beauty, see Peter Goldie, 'Towards a Virtue Theory of Art,' British Journal of Aesthetics 47, no. 4 (2007): 372-87; Peter Goldie, 'Virtues of Art and Human Well-being,' Aristotelian Society Supplementary 82, no. 1 (2008): 179-195; Peter Goldie, 'Virtues of Art,' Philosophy Compass 5, no. 10 (2010): 830-839; Dominic McIver Lopes, 'Virtues of Art: Good Taste,' Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 82, no. 1 (2008): 197-211; Dominic McIver Lopes, Being for Beauty: Aesthetic Agency and Value (Oxford University Press, 2018); Nick Riggle, 'Toward a Communitarian   |
|-------|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| 2     | For a discussion on the aesthetic value question, see James Shelley, 'Punting on the Aesthetic Question,' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 102, no. 1 (2021): 214-219; James Shelley 'Simple Theory of Aesthetic Value' Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 81, no. 1 (2023): 98-100; James Shelley, 'Beyond Hedonism about Aesthetic Value in Disinterested Pleasure and Beauty: Perspectives from Kantian and Contemporary Aesthetics, ed. Larissa Berger (De Gruyter, 2023), 257-274.                                                                                                                                                |
| 3     | For a further discussion on aesthetic value, see Keren Gorodeisky, 'Aesthetic Value: The View from Here,' Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 81, no. 1 (2023): 85-86.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          |
| 4     | For a further discussion of the relationship between beauty and consequences, see Alexandra Hayes 'Wisdom Regarding Beauty. Self-effacement and One's Right Relationship to Beauty,' Contemporary Aesthetics 21 (2023).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             |
| 5     | Kathleen Higgins, 'Beauty and its Kitsch Competitors,' in Beauty Matters, ed. Peg Zeglin Brand (Indiana University Press, 2000), 87.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                |
| 6 7 8 | Higgins, 'Beauty and its Kitsch Competitors,' 90. Higgins, 'Beauty and its Kitsch Competitors,' 90. Higgins, 'Beauty and its Kitsch Competitors,' 106.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              |
|       | Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (Ark 1970/1985), 84.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          |
| 9     | Paperbacks,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         |

- 10  Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good , 78.
- 11  Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good , 78.
- 12  Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 86.
- 13 Plato. Symposium (Hackett Classics, 1989), pp. 57-60, Kindle.
- 14 Ralph Waldo Emerson, 'The Poet,' in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson (Harvard University Press, 1844/1971), 292.
- 15  Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 85.
- 16 Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 85.
- 17 Timothy Patitsas, Ethics of Beauty (St. Nicholas Press, 2019), 96.
- 18 Patitsas, Ethics of Beauty, 98.
- 19 Emerson, 'The Poet,' 293.
- 20  Emerson, 'The Poet,' 5.
- 21  Emerson, 'The Poet,'5.
- 22  Maria Antonaccio, 'Ascetism and the Ethics of Consumption,' Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 26, no. 1 (2006): 84, https://doi.org/10.5840/ jsce200626122.
- 23  Robert Farrar Capon, 'The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection' (Modern Library Food, 2002), xxvi.
- 24  Capon, 'The Supper of the Lamb,' xxvii.
- 25  Capon, 'The Supper of the Lamb,' xxvii.
- 26  Capon, 'The Supper of the Lamb,' xxvii.
- 27  Saint Augustine, On Christian Belief, trans. Edmund Hill (New City Press, 2005), 32.59, https://wesleyscholar. com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Augustine-OnChristian-Belief.pdf.
- 28  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 'The Eolian Harp,' Poetry Foundation, accessed 20 May 2025, https://www. poetryfoundation.org/poems/52301/the-eolian-harp.
- 29  Nun Gavrilia, The Ascetic of Love, trans. by Helen Anthony (Sea Salt Books, 2022), 290.
- 30  Emerson, 'The Poet,' 293.
- 31  Emerson, 'The Poet,' 293.
- 32  Emerson, 'The Poet,' 293.
- 33  Emerson, 'The Poet,' 12.