Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry: 41 (Brill Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures)

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All this bounty of God is held forth to us in Christ. He is “fairer than the children of men” (Psalm 45:2). The word “fair” is repeated twice in the original Hebrew to note a double excellence. The word means lovely, amiable and acceptable. It means pleasant and sweet (2 Samuel 1:26). He is “white and ruddy” (Song 5:10). His “countenance is as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars (Song 5:15). His countenance is “as when the sun shineth in his strength” (Revelation 1:16). All the beauty of God is put forth in Christ (Isaiah 33:17). Christ is the brightness of His Father’s glory (Hebrews 1:3. The light of the sun in the air is the indirect reflection of the sun’s beams. Christ is the real reflection of the Father’s light and glory because He is God: equal with the Father and the same God. The Transcendent Beauty of Christ Sa‘di did not celebrate beauty for beauty’s sake, like some late 19th century decadent. Deeply rooted in the intellectual controversies of his times, Sa‘di mobilized the arguments and the concepts of philosophers like Avicenna and theologians like Ghazali to argue that the contemplation of beauty leads us to a more direct experience of God. That is why Sa‘di was called a “sheikh” in his lifetime, and why his Seljuk and Mongol patrons financed the creation of a Sufi lodge for him, in a period that saw Mawlana Rumi creating his own Sufi school. But Sa‘di’s legacy was not an enduring Sufi organization like the Rumi’s dancing Dervishes. Rather it was the Persian ghazal lyric, which he perfected and bequeathed, among others, to Hafez. Everlasting love! Faithfulness! These are perhaps the two most undeserving gifts that we receive from the Lord! The truth is that we are guilty of faithlessness to God and not loving Him supremely, which is what He is worthy of. So if we don’t give to God what He is deserving of, how could He possibly love us and be faithful to us? In a word: grace! There is a ravishing beauty of Christ in communion with God. Christ sees a beauty of holiness when the soul comes to Christ ( Psalm. 110:3) and He is taken with this beauty ( Psalm 45:11; Song 4:9-11). Z ion is “the perfection of beauty” (Psalm 50:2). All this beauty and sweetness comes from Christ. There is no such thing in the people of God, they are sinful men considered in their natural condition. It must therefore be fountain-beauty in Him, as the cause and origin of beauty. Conclusion

Vivian Diller, a New York-based psychologist and co-author of “Face It: What Women Really Feel As Their Looks Change,” divides perception of beauty into three things: contributing factors from genetics, grooming and how people reacted to your appearance in early life. That makes sense, since we see every single blemish in ourselves, whereas there are plenty of people we consider beautiful to whom we don’t get close enough to examine all the little flaws. Perception of beauty may weaken when we do start to recognize those defects, Zeki said. The legal system may even take beauty into account – a variety of studies have found effects suggesting that attractiveness helps when it comes to verdicts and sentencing. It may be that attractive people are less likely to commit crimes as serious as unattractive people, or that there is a societal view that pretty people are “good” and wouldn’t do bad things, Catherine A. Sanderson writes in the book “Social Psychology.” Title: Beholding beauty : Sa’di of Shiraz and the aesthetics of desire in medieval Persian poetry / by Domenico Ingenito.

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On the flip side, you can view your body as a source of power – for instance, after running a first 5 kilometer race or even marathon, some people feel proud of what their bodies can do. t he desirability and loveliness of His nature and all infinite perfections a s this pleasantness offers itself to His own understanding and the understanding of men and angels. The European Enlightenment relished Sheikh Sa‘di of Shiraz, 13th-century Persian poet and moral philosopher for his work, The Rose Garden, a witty mixture of prose and poetry, morality and ribaldry, lyric and proverbial wisdom. Iranians can cite its verses by heart, including this favorite:

And with the help of computers, it has become apparent that morphing a lot of faces together typically produces an end product that is highly attractive. The reasoning goes that this blending gets closer to the face “prototype” that may underline attractiveness – the ultimate idea of a face is the most average one. Since sexual relationships are more costly for female primates – they bear the kids – females are the choosier sex. And scientists are still trying to figure out what makes things and people beautiful. In some ways, it’s like asking whether your vision of “red” is the same as someone else’s – there’s just no way to know for sure, says Denis Pelli, professor of psychology and neural science at New York University.Let us imagine that millions of suns in the sky were all amassed and put together in one sun and likewise the sense of seeing that is in all mankind that have ever lived or may yet live combined. Such a sun would still far excel the combined faculty of seeing. Likewise suppose that the Lord should create an understanding faculty in either mankind or an gels which is millions of degrees stronger and more capable than if all mankind and a ngels (or could ever be created) were merged into one, yet this understanding could not see God’s transcendent and super-excellent beauty without unseen treasures of loveliness remaining. It is an eternal contradiction that the creature could ever see to the bottom of the Creator. The Beauty of God in Christ Studies have shown that people who are perceived as being more attractive also appear more competent and successful, said Jasmin Cloutier, researcher at the University of Chicago. Farrokhzad, Forugh (2008). La strage dei fiori: poesie persiane di Forugh Farrokhzad, translated by Domenico Ingenito. Napoli: Orientexpress. The well-known culture critic Judith Butler, chided for using overly baroque vocabulary and syntax, once explained that the point of difficult prose is to make you think harder about what you thought you understood, to force you to discover something new. Ingenito uses this approach. His dense prose can be exhausting, but it is usually worth the effort of decryption (something I do not always feel when I read books grounded in new critical theory). In particular the critical theory language seems to be a good way to look at Avicena’s and Gazali’s aesthetics. On the other hand, I found it revealing to see that in an article he published about Hafez in Italian, he uses much simpler language. Perhaps the language of Dante does not lend itself to the verbal somersaults that post-Lacanian English does. Hence heaven is seeing God face to face ( Revelation 22:4; Matthew 18:10). Now, God does not have a face; but the face of a man is the most heavenly, visible part in man. There is majesty and gravity in it; much of the art and goodliness of the creature is in his face. To see God’s face is to behold God’s blessed essence – so far as the creature can see God.

In fact, a 2011 study in the journal Economics and Human Biology found that people with asymmetrical faces tended to come from more difficult and deprived childhoods than those with more symmetrical features. It appears that adversity in childhood is associated with facial features that are not perfectly aligned and matching, although there’s no proof that one of these phenomena causes the other. Readers will see three themes in this poem. First, that Sa‘di’s love poetry is imbued with homoeroticism, as evoked by the beloved boy in the bathhouse. Second, that Sa’di believes that beauty can transform us from a lower to a higher state, from mud to a rose. Finally, that this parable of transformation points us to the presence of God.

For models, there are unrealistic expectations of beauty all around – not only in magazines and television. The ones who do well are those who don’t assume they have to be perfect to be beautiful, Diller said. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2021. | Series: Brill studies in Middle Eastern literatures, 15715183 ; volume 41 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Thus this kind of beauty formally is not in God because He does not have a body. Neither are we speaking about Christ’s bodily beauty as man. Yet beauty, by analogy and eminently, must be in God. So, just as there are things in the creature which make up beauty to the bodily eye, there are, by proportion, those same things in God. Samuel Rutherford was one man who was certainly entranced by the beauty of God. He often refers to the spiritual beauty he found in fellowship with Christ in his well-known letters. He gives a fuller definition of God’s beauty in another less familiar book called Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himself. It is a brief example of some of his soaring thoughts about Christ and the glory of God’s being. He is speaking of what it in Christ that draws us to Him. One of them is delight in the beauty that is in God. We experience this in communion with Him. What is Beauty? This means that by faith in Jesus, we are now loved by God in the same way that the Father loves His Son! It’s an everlasting love that has always been and will always be! It’s a faithful love that cannot waiver due to our unfaithfulness!

My account

Book launch: Domenico Ingenito’s “Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry”. CNES, UCLA, 1/27/2021. Ingenito, Domenico (1391/2013) “Hāfez dar itāliyā.” In Hāfez (zendegi va andishe), edited by Kāzem Musavi Bojnurdi and Asghar Dādbeh, 337–351. Tehran: Markaz-e Dāyerat al-Maʿāref-e Bozorg-e Eslāmi. Ingenito, Domenico (2010). “«Sedavo il dolore ardente dei giorni con l’acqua del canto poetico»: I versi della Dama del Mondo (Jahān Malek Khātun).” Semicerchio: rivista di poesia comparata 43 (2010): 40–60.