© 2004 Jean-Claude Romeuf
© 2004 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
Supreme beauty, the pinnacle of finished art, is the epic of the unification of the immensity of cosmic extremes, the Creator and the creature.
Beauty is absolute and divine. Heaven is the physical archetype of material forms of beauty.
It is an attribute of beings endowed with personality. It is then in the image of God, the Father of personality.
These two origins make beauty an omnipresent quality. It is not limited by space or time. It is the quintessence of things, animals and people. It decreases in splendor as one moves away from the Central Island but retains the sweetness of its origin. In the Supreme, it becomes experience and participates in the culmination of the Supreme Being.
Beauty is a gift from heaven when it is perceived by the material senses. It is then easy to recognize: what is more beautiful than a sunset, a sea rocking a spring morning, a night dotted with stars in a scent of wet earth?
But beauty is also subject to experience and culture. It remains hidden for those who go quickly, for those who do not develop their faculties of curiosity, their artistic talents, their intellectual research, their desire to always go higher.
While the scientist can find it perfect in a DNA molecule or in a mathematical formula, it is rare that an artist considers his work finished. There is always a final touch to put on the canvas, a chord to slip into a melody, a flower to put in a bouquet. To copy identically on one’s easel the physical representation of a thing is to betray the nature of this thing, because it carries within it the harmony of the high spheres which has the original flavor of the universes. It is the divinity sublimated in each object, in each being represented which makes the masterpiece. The masterpiece is not born by chance. It is not the result of idleness, of a hobby! When the love that one has in oneself does not find the possibility of expressing itself, it becomes a mountain torrent overflowing its bed. It is this bubbling of love which concretizes the work of art. All artists are lovers.
It is possible to conceive of beauty associated with truth without the intervention of personality. Truth purifies beauty, because truth loves simplicity, it rejects make-up and everything that masks it. Truth rids beauty of all superfluity, of all embellishments. It gives it the purity and song of crystal. Four words are enough for a poem, three strokes of the pencil for a drawing. The true artist seeks first to create truth, beauty is also a gift in his work.
Unlike its two companions, goodness is always personal and remains an attribute of the spiritual world. When the three coordinate in the experience of a wise human being, the result is a growing desire for love that stabilizes the personality by endowing it with a heightened cosmic consciousness. It is then that art becomes the open door to the stars, the marriage of earth and sky, the kiss of man to his Creator.
A beam of light leaves the earth; crossing the celestial vault, it traces the path to freedom.
Jean-Claude Romeuf