Chapter 106
Of four conditions, which are requisite for the making of any thing beautiful; and how all of them, are wanting to a soul, that is in sin.
WE have made a long digression, from the question that we asked, How the soul could come, by such beauty, as that God should be drawn to a desire of it. But the cause of this digression, was the doubt, of our conceiving, that the King perhaps might care for the beauty of the Body. Let us now return to our purpose.
Thou art to know, that for the making a thing to be of perfect beauty, four conditions are necessary. The first, That it must have all the parts that belongeth to it; for if any of them be wanting; as a hand, or foot, or the like, it cannot be termed beautiful. The second is, that one part have proportion with another; and if it be the picture of any life, it must be made, very like the original. The third is, that it must have purity of colour. The fourth, that it must have a competency of greatness. For that which is little, though it be well proportioned, will not arrive to be absolutely accounted beautiful.
Now, if1 we consider all these conditions in a soul, that is sinful; we shall find that it hath no one of them. Not completenes; because if it want either faith, or charity, and the gifts of the holy Ghost, which it was to have; that cannot be called beautiful, to which so many things are wanting. Again, one part thereof carrieth no proportion to another; for neither doth sense, obey reason; nor reason, God. Especially, considering, that the soul, being created after the image of God; it was reason, that for the preservation of her beauty, she should have resembled her Original, in virtue, as she doth in the natural being which she hath. But now God, being good, and the soul being wicked; God being pure, and the soul polluted; God being mild, and the soul impatient; and so in the rest; how can there be beauty, in that image, which is so unlike to the original? As for the third, which is, a certain spiritual light of grace, & the notions which are to refresh, & as it were revive the beauty of the soul (as colours do of the body) they are also wanting to it; for it walks in darkness; and it is obscured, beyond2 the black of coals, according to that lamentation of Hieremy. Lest of all, hath it, the fourth condition; since there is nothing so miserably little, as to be a sinner; who is nothing, and less than nothing. So that, all the conditions of beauty being wanting, to such a soul, it will not fail to be deformed. And because all those souls which are infused into the bodies that descend of Adam, be3 ordinarily sinners, it will follow, that they are all deformed.
Footnotes
Chapter 108 of 115