Beauty

Love of beauty is equated, by Socrates, by Buddha and by Plotinus, with love of good. Plotinus states that to make the soul good and beautiful is to make it like God, because God is beauty; and Plato, that beholding true beauty with the eye of the mind generates and nourishes virtue and makes the beholder a friend of God. This may, perhaps, be tempered by the comments of the Sufi Ruzbihan Baqli, who refers to witnessing of beauty as demanding "intoxication, ecstasy and turmoil". In this context, beauty is seen as a feminine attribute, and relates to the inner or spiritual realm. It is contrasted with the masculine attribute of majesty which is a more outward or bodily oriented.