On The Soul Should Be Beautiful

On The Soul Should Be Beautiful

For since our God is pure, or rather the highest light, he comes to the pure, and as he has placed a pure soul in us, he will also ask it from us pure. For since it has been made according to God's image and likeness, that is to say as a figure of the divine beauty, it has also shared in that beauty. And knowing this the poet speaks thus, "Lord, by your will you granted power to my beauty" [Psalm 29,8], that is to say to the beauty of the soul, lest, having turned away towards the ugly passions of sin and become disfigured, it fall from God and his divine rewards.

Since therefore it is agreed that our soul should be like this, lovely and beautiful, and that we should give it back to God like a pledge on the last day, the day of resurrection, I beg and urge that we love this beauty and carefully guard this loveliness, not turning back to the fair things of the present age or to the beauties of flesh and blood. They are not beauties, but idols of beauty; they are rather corruption and change. And this we can learn from the end of things, for one who today is outstandingly beautiful and fair of face is tomorrow cast into a tomb, stinking and abhorrent.

So there is nothing fair and loveable but exemplary virtue, which should be our chief pursuit, my brothers. But if admittedly it frequently happens that the soul grows slack and is defiled by unseemly thoughts -- for who will boast that they have a pure heart? -- let it be quickly made clean again and brought back to its former condition, lest by delaying in evil it gives birth to death.

And let no one ever say that they cannot be made clean again, stained as they are by many sins, when they listen to the One who said, "Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. Though they are like crimson, I will make them white as wool" [Isaias 1,18]. Do you see God's ineffable love for humankind? Not only has he promised to purify, but to bring the one who repents to the pinnacle of loveliness.

St. Theodore the Studite
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