otherness in beauty

Desire is not a natural state; it is a response to a lack. Divine Beauty, when perceived by the soul, inscribes itself as a possibility. The image of God that is our highest part, our nous, responds to Beauty by desiring it. But this desire is not our primordial state, nor is an absolute possession of Beauty, which somehow later becomes sullied through indifference or boredom, etc., as Origen would have it. The question here is whether we desire to possess Beauty, or to be Beauty. Do we desire to become "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4) or do we desire to exist as God, as that Beauty which is the first fruit of the divine life, to speak Platonically? Our being as persons naturally rebels against the stasis of eternity, yet we also desire an eternal ek-static be(com)ing as our person. Our "biological hypostasis," to use John Zizioulas's term for the erotic love that seeks immortality through procreation, recognizes only the tragic expression of personhood in time. The beauty we find in erotic love is but a pale reflection of the true beauty of noetic life. Yet even the noetic life requires time for its expression. Both the contemplation of the eternally changeless divine Beauty, and the hypothetical state of being God, are modes of existence in time. The genesis-kinesis-stasis schema of existence, as put forth by Maximus, posits a Beauty that cannot be lived, but only experienced. Without the tension found in a network of differentation arising from desire, knowledge of Beauty is impossible, and so is love of Beauty.

Beauty is not a substance, it cannot be defined objectively as something to which accidents may be applied. As Christos Yannaras has explained, if I understand him correctly, ousia is contemplated only as relationality, as eternal presentations of an ek-static being that is always bringing Being to light, as Heidegger might put it.

Is there perhaps a flaw in the Platonic notion that like naturally desires like? Self-knowledge is only possible through objectification, of becoming other to one's self. The person relates to itself first before it relates to others, and provides the others with the necessary ground upon which to express, in turn, their personhood. If God is a person, as Christianity proclaims, then difference and otherness must be at the heart of God, as it is at the heart of the human person. The Beauty that inspires desire must contain within it its own opposite.