No Beauty We Could Desire: Thoughts on Beauty and Faith

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Sir Thomas Browne

"[I]n this Mass of Nature there is a set of things that carry in their Front, though not in Capital Letters, yet in Stenography and short Characters, something of Divinity, which to wiser Reasons serve as Luminaries in the Abyss of Knowledge, and to judicious beliefs as Scales and Roundles to mount the Pinacles and highest pieces of Divinity.  The severe Schools shall never laugh me out of the Philosophy of Hermes, that this visible World is but a Picture of the invisible, wherein as in a Pourtraict, things are not truely, but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some more real substance in that invisible Fabrick."

 

(C. S. Lewis marked this passage in his copy of Browne's Religio Medici.)

(How do I know?  Because I visit the Wade Center. Highly recommended.)