On the Relationships Between Love, Beauty, and Peace — Mapping the Web of a Harmonious Life

Much of the human journey can be spent in endeavoring to find a way toward Peace —toward encountering a form of deep rest for the soul or psyche. Whether it be in sacralized or secularized pursuits, both spiritual and scientific, there is one thing that we hold in common: we human beings often attempt to orchestrate our worlds in such a way that we create a sort of stability that gives us a sense of order and rest in the turbulence of our lives.

For many, the slippery notion of Peace is not easily retained, nor is it simply an acknowledgement of the absurd, nor is it the absence of tension, as it is often defined. Rather, Peace is something that is trained into — it is more the learned skill of trusting that joyful dirge providing the soundtrack to a life of both ecstasy and pain. One cannot move through this life without encountering both tragedy and beauty, and more often than not, intense moments of experience transcend our ability to categorize them well as solely ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Thus, Peace must somehow be comprehensive of the whole of our lives — not dismissing any element, but rather bringing them together in a sort of critical, creative, and healing harmony.

So then, how are we to familiarize ourselves with Peace in such a manner that, when it shows itself to us, we are able to learn its contours, recognize its nature, and cultivate more of it in our hearts and our world?

I believe there is a way that we human sojourners can clear a path toward Peace — and it has to do with a simple calling to remembrance the very threefold soul and pattern of things that includes Love, Beauty, and Peace. We must first learn to give what things actually are in-and-of-themselves a name and then take a life-posture that reflects this reality and moves us in the direction of Peace.

Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue has noted that the soul is not necessarily in the body, but rather that the body is in the soul — that cosmic whole that encompasses all of reality. Similarly, 20th century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead has laid out a cosmological scheme that puts language to this cosmic soul by talking directly about the core of things, and whose corresponding value theory gives us a helpful scheme to encounter exuberance in our lives as we aim toward Peace. It needs to be said here at the outset that Peace is not merely some ethereal notion, philosophically explored. Rather, the philosophy of Peace from a process-perspective implies actions precisely because reality is a process of activity, and thus Peace must too be cultivated — or enacted. Pacifism is not passivism. And so, the way of Peace is always the way of Peace-making.

I’d like to make a simple claim about this threefold pattern— namely that humans can find Peace if we learn to live our lives through the lenses of both Love and Beauty.

This pattern flows as follows: Love → Beauty → Peace.

This is the movement in our lives that we should take notice of. We should learn to root ourselves in Love, then harvest Beauty, and consequently hope and trust in Peace.

We’ll begin by reflecting on Love. Whitehead’s cosmology has what philosophers call an “event-based ontology,” which claims that the realest things in reality are not substances (matter itself) but events (waves, feelings, emotive energies, etc. beneath what shows itself to us as matter). These events, in Whitehead’s terms, are deeply and thoroughly affectual and relational, which is to say that they consist mainly of their felt relationships to one another.

Said another way, relationships are the very heart of the universe.

These relationships are what mediate our experiences to us, and so its no wonder that when we delve deeply into our relationships, the primary product of this exploration is Love. To be sure, countless historic tomes have been written to try and encapsulate the meaning of something like Love.

From expressions like those on the pages of Shakespeare’s scripts or the Romanticist movements in both poetry and art, to the embodiment of the Jesus way of living that calls one to ‘love their enemies,’ Love calls to us from a place deep in our bones and gives us the language of life. Its almost as if we have an intuitive sense that somewhere deep down Love is what we were made for.

Love is simply the name that we give to relationships we have with both people and things when those relationships are functioning to promote a certain level of Beauty in our collective existence.

Hopefully, the word ‘love’ has a positive connotation — conjuring up for us the very best of our humanity as we ourselves are creatures-in-relationships. Love is the word we use when we feel as though we are in life-promoting relationships. The phrase, “I love you,” is a phrase we use to describe our affection or exuberance for another or for ourselves, whatever that word might be directed toward. “Love,” as Franciscan theologian Richard Rohr has so elegantly stated, is also “the unceasing stream of reality.”

Love is also our name for the harmonious relationality of aliveness.

As I have noted before, love is our beginning and it will be our end. It is a way to describe what enfolds our every moment — no matter what difficulties the current moment holds. Love is a zoomed-out statement about the entire web of reality whose cosmic relationships support life that is larger than our collective suffering. And, it is also a completely zoomed-in statement about the intricacies of how entangled life works together to curate our experiences — even in the very depths of something like suffering. Love is the glue that holds together the fragile tissue of our cosmos.

And so, the question on the path toward Peace is, “If we start by committing to this form of relational, intrinsic Love, how does that Love lead us to Peace?”

Love is a close kin to Beauty. It could be said that Beauty is the firstborn of Love — the eldest child of relationality. It could be said that, in this sense, the Universe has been loving as long as it has been becoming. But Love, as we also know, is risky. It creates opportunities for tragedy. Its absence can cause hearts to shatter. With great Love can come great suffering as the two need each other to exist. But Love, when functioning properly, promotes the highest quality of our lives — Beauty. Whitehead, in his book Adventures of Ideas, reflects on the nature of Beauty by calling to remembrance the tragic quality of its fleeting nature:

“At the heart of things, there are always the dream of youth and the harvest of tragedy. The Adventure of the Universe starts with the dream and reaps tragic Beauty.” (p. 296)

This acknowledgement is important for a couple of reasons. For one, it is important to note that in Whitehead’s mind, Beauty is a “wider, and more fundamental notion, than truth” (AI p. 341) — which is to say that for him, Beauty is the highest value that (especially in relationship to the other philosophical transcendentals) is somehow inclusive of both truth and goodness. Secondly, Beauty is also the primary product of every moment of our existence. Beauty is what the Universe reaps. It is a product or quality of the loving relationships between the ontological events themselves.

Perhaps spoken more succinctly, this means that Beauty is the quality produced by Love.

So then, if Love is the naming of our relationships, then Beauty is the name we give to what Love offers us in our lives. If we were to reflect upon those moments in our lives that were most beautiful to us, they would all be steeped in loving relationship:

• Making love with a partner — the relationship between two lovers.
• Holding one’s newborn child for the first time — the relationship between parent and child.
• Witnessing a staggeringly gorgeous sunset that overwhelms the senses— the relationship between human and cosmos.
• Lingering over a slow, intentionally prepared meal that excites the senses— the relationship between person and earth.

The list could obviously go on. But, the point here is that Beauty is the product of our relationality. It is truly, like Cotton only claims to be, the very fabric of our lives. And so, it could be said here that when we show Love to one another and to our planet, Beauty is the natural result. In Whitehead’s thinking, Beauty is measured by both massiveness and intensity, which are ways of describing its breadth and depth — not so that Beauty might become two-dimensional, but so that it might be ever expanding in every direction, which is another way to say that it is all-encompassing.

Beauty is then the natural product of the unceasing stream of loving re(lation)ality that characterizes every experience and moment of becoming in our cosmic epoch.

And so then, committed to Love, we must also seek to become saturated in Beauty, to let it soak through to the marrow of our lives. It is only then that we can come to know the Peace of aliveness as beings who face the sure and certain tragedy of death. It is only then, with Love as our jumping off point, that we can come to see clearly the path laid out for us toward Peace through Beauty. And unsurprisingly for many of us, the path is one of faith — of trust.

Whitehead has courageously offered up a statement that defines the evasive notion of Peace in stating that:

“Peace is primarily a trust in the efficacy of Beauty…the trust in the self-justification of Beauty introduces faith where reason fails to reveal the details.” (AI p. 285)

To be sure, many great Ways of being have trod intersecting paths toward Peace, but, for Whitehead, Peace is simply the resting of one’s heart and mind on the inherent truth and goodness of that highest and most affectual value — Beauty. Said another way, Peace is that wave that crashes over us and enfolds us when we befriend Beauty.

In our postmodern landscape, deep Beauty has often evaded us. It has been banished from nature and relegated to the eye of the beholder (thanks, but no thanks Immanuel Kant), and has moved in our thinking from an intrinsic value baked in to the cosmological order of the nature of things to something like the cosmotological reordering of the human face. This is a result of our Enlightenment philosophical inheritance that has divvied up the beautiful and the sublime, which is a bifurcation that Whitehead has worked to overcome in a sort of restoration of the harmonious nature of Beauty.

So, if Peace is then a sense of the potency of Beauty, that it has value for the human soul and that it is in-and-of-itself enough for us, then in the process I am laying out here, Peace comes through trust — a trust that Beauty is real. It comes through a sort of faith-full embrace that Love is at the very center of our cosmos, holding it together as it bursts forth with Beauty.

Peace is then the grand product of a deep sense of the nature of things — one that roots itself in Loving relationality and welcomes and cultivates the Beauty-full.

This Peace is not devoid of suffering, but is rather an harmonic effect that includes all experiences for the sake of a more massive encounter with that great Harmony of Harmonies. In the Great Harmony, Love and Beauty lie interned, as Peace is the resting place of both Beauty and Love. Peace carves out within us an inner landscape that recognizes both the primacy of Love and the efficacy of Beauty. It is not an achievement. It is not a possession.

Peace is rather an increasing sense across the whole of our lives’ journeys that we can trust our aliveness — that our experiences of the qualities of both Love and Beauty are not facades or mental laminates, but that they are good and true. This flow from Love → Beauty → Peace offers us an alluring description of our deepest felt intuitions about reality — one which, when properly ordered, expands our internal and external abilities to live in harmony with an active reality.

Thus, by definition, Peace cannot be inactivity…although it often gets portrayed as some enlightened posture that one can take solely in solitude. If that definition alone was Peace, our experience of the world would be greatly impoverished. Instead, Peace is brought about precisely by its relationship to both Beauty and Love — and therefore, a Peace-ethics is one in which one chooses to act on that which is most loving and beauty-full for those involved in any given event. To be sure, there are personal-internal, and social-external dimensions to the way of Peace-making that have both private and public implications, but the goal here is to begin with this benevolent, threefold soul and pattern in the very nature of reality.

My hope is that this simple idea that Peace as the expanding sense that Love and Beauty can be committed to, trusted, and that they are efficacious for one’s life, helps us all to rest a little easier when confronted with the lofty and evasive concept of Peace. My hope is that we might be reminded that we can encounter it as a strengthening and catalyzing reality in the depths of things and in the everyday relationships of our lives amidst the most hopeless circumstances we face. It’s no wonder that the wisdom of Jesus of Nazareth encourages us to look inward for the Kingdom of God, for that is where this divine Peace always dwells — within bodies, both local and cosmic.

Peace cannot be won and lost in battles or brought about by empires. Peace humanizes us. Peace holds a place for death. Peace returns us to the clay, to the web of our relationality, beckoning us to be loving presences who live beautifully. Peace, when transcended, always places us gently back into the world to commit to Love once again so that, through noticing and cultivating the Beauty of our many relationships, more Peace might be created once again — no matter how bruised, damaged, or broken we may feel from our experiences.

Peace always challenges us to trust Beauty and Love once again beyond the horizon of our last experience. It asks us to dare once more past our willpower to climb out of the recesses of our pain with a kind of faith that holds out that more Beauty and Peace are available when we choose Love.

Peace is a radical statement about the natural ephemerality of things. It is a recognition that all becoming entails perishing, and that the tough, evanescent truth of reality is that life is always on the other side of death — that kind of relational life that we cannot be removed from that always offers us another chance to find Love and Beauty once again out beyond our harshest frontiers of want.

In short, Peace is the wild call deep within our nature that insists upon: “More Love, more Beauty, and more Life.”

And so, may we all be blessed in our pursuits of Peace — that, in choosing Love, our lives might be filled up, overflowing with an exuberant Beauty that becomes the very effect of Peace in us and through us for a world in need of greater Harmonies.

You can connect with me on Twitter here: @tdburnette.