How the Soul Gives Birth to Beauty
On the offspring of the soul
You must know your soul’s offspring.
Many act as if love were a cheap feeling, a barren emotion unworthy of discipline or deep consideration.
But love is never sterile. When your soul loves something, it is always fecund—it always generates something.
Here is how you can learn the parts of your soul, their loves, and their offspring.
Learn how you can love beauty and bring beauty into the world.
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A Quick Map of the Soul
Everyone wants to feel fulfilled, happy, and at rest. The primal desire of your soul to satiate in beauty and be happy is called eros, your erotic love. It is a need-love, a self-love, the desire to possess good and beautiful things and delight in them. Eros is the primordial force of the human condition, the drive of mankind—the hunger of the soul that animates humanity.
The question of eros is the question of mankind.
What is man and what does he desire?
And it is said that the soul has three parts and each part loves a certain beauty. The intellect loves truth, the spirited part loves nobility, and the appetitive loves pleasure. The intellect (nous) must govern the soul with the assistance of the spirited part (thumos) as the appetitive part (epithymia) and its love for pleasure will dominate if left unchecked.
And it is also said, whether in the books of the Platonists or the Christian saints, that each part of the soul has a virtue that perfects it—a virtue being, as Socrates stated, a type of health or beauty of the soul.
In other words, how does each part of the soul guide its erotic appetite for beauty according to reason?
In sum, the soul is guided by the four cardinal virtues—which are articulated both by Plato and the Old Testament. Prudence guides the intellect, courage guides the spirited, and temperance guides the appetitive.
What of justice? Justice perfects the whole soul, making it beautiful by arranging its parts in harmony and order.
But there is another aspect of the soul that is rarely discussed.
Its offspring.
The Beautiful Offspring of the Soul
Eros is always fecund. When eros satiates in beauty it always produces something in the soul. But how does this work with the three parts of the soul?
When the intellect, the noetic power, embraces truth, it produces wisdom—wisdom is knowledge of the whole. In the Old Testament the author is desirous of Lady Wisdom, and asks for her to be with him always (Wis 9:10), and amongst the Greeks we see the pursuit of truth finds its zenith in philosophy, the “love of wisdom.”
When the spirited part, or thumotic power, embraces nobility, it produces fame, glory, and honor. In the Old Testament, one could think of King David and the glory his deeds wrought, and amongst the Greeks the classic example par excellence is Achilles—the unbridled thumos incarnate. In fact, all the heroes of Troy seek their kleos, their glory, and are desirous of their aristeia, their supreme moment of glory merited by courage on the battlefield.
When the appetitive part embraces pleasure, the zenith of this act is found in the sexual act, hence the normative association of the term erotic, and it produces children. In the Old Testament, as Pope Benedict XVI observes, this erotic desire is set within marriage, and the framework is given within the first human relation: Adam and Eve. Men and women come together in marriage and become one flesh and multiply. Amongst the Greeks, marriage is not stressed as it is amongst the Hebrews, but children are still seen as the zenith of the appetitive, as noted by Diotima in the Symposium.
And the offspring of the soul reveal something more existential about your erotic desire.
It is endless.
And each offspring of the soul hints at deep desire hidden within the human heart.
The Human Desire for Immortality
You always want to be happy. You never want to be unhappy. Thus, if eros is the desire to possess beautiful things and be happy, your erotic appetite is endless. For all things in this life are finite and exhaustible, but your eros is infinite and inexhaustible. You simply and always want more.
This human desire for the infinite can lead to an insatiable desire to consume, an irrational desire to satiate, to possess—what the Greeks call pleonexia. In a Christian setting, you would speak of avarice, envy, and lust.
Yet, in another way, the natural hierarchy of the soul attempts to satiate the soul’s natural desire for infinitude by offering it an immortality of sorts.
In other words, every natural beauty loved by the soul gives it a type of infinity, a type of immortality.
In the intellect, the love of truth leads to wisdom, and wisdom, in the Platonic tradition, is the contemplation of the Ideas, the eternal Forms. St. Augustine placed these Ideas within the Divine Mind, the Logos, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity that became flesh in Jesus Christ. In other words, wisdom leads to the participation of something eternal, something infinite.
In the thumotic, the love of nobility leads to fame, glory, and honor, and these provide a type of immortality—a name that is never forgotten. Again, one could turn to Achilles who elected to die in Troy and receive immortal glory.
In the appetitive, the love of pleasure, which has its zenith in sex and, in the Christian tradition, sex within marriage, produces children—and children are a type of immortality. The self lives on through its offspring, through copies of itself and its beloved.
In fact, to love someone, to want to marry them, is, in a way, a desire to make more of that person in the world. You see something beautiful and good in them, and you want to bring more of that into this world—and in doing so, you achieve a type of immortality that satisfies the infinite longings of the soul.
But only one thing can truly satisfy the soul.
The Final End of Eros
God enkindled eros within your soul to lead you back to Him. The endless desire of your erotic appetite is not the curse of pleonexia but the invitation to ascend to God. For your infinite eros was designed to satiate on an Infinite Beauty, God. For God is Beauty-itself, the All Beauty, for whom the soul desires at its most primal, intimate state.
All beauties are but signposts to the soul to ascend to the Beauty, God.
And it is only in that beauty that the restless hunger of the soul finds rest. The endless desire to consume to be happy slows and delights in a moderate and ordered appetite for lesser beauties.
For the love of God does not replace lesser loves, but rather perfects them—there is a divine refulgence that cascades back down into the soul and its loves.
For example, a man who loves God will love his wife more. The love is perfected. Both because his soul is now filled with God’s love but also because he is not putting the full weight of his erotic desire for happiness on his wife. In other words, many marriages fail, because their spouse attempts to receive from other what can only be given by God.
Now, even the Platonists saw the divine as the final end of eros, but Christianity proclaims another level of intimacy—the God has invited you to participate in His own divine life, His grace. You are invited to live forever with God in the Beatific Vision.
Here, the desire for immortality is not only satisfied but overwhelmed—as the soul cannot receive the full delight of God, Beauty-itself. The cup is filled and then overflows.
The soul rests in the Beauty for which it was made.
Like this writing on eros? Check out Rediscovering Holy Eros and Women as Icons of God.
Dcn. Harrison Garlick is a deacon, husband, father, Chancellor, and attorney. He lives in rural Oklahoma with his wife and five children. He is also the host of Ascend: The Great Books Podcast. Follow him on X at Dcn. Garlick or Ascend.