Beholding Beauty explores the powerful ways painting, poetry, music, and drama embody the creativity of the Original Artist, the triune God. The authors invoke our praying imagination to comprehend how culinary hospitality, fashion faithfulness, cinematic revelations, and storied truth serve as rich resources for worship. This uniquely collaborative effort draws on biblical wisdom and pastoral care to inspire the priesthood of all believers to grasp artistically how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.” In fact, even babies respond more positively to attractive, symmetrical faces. But babies appear to respond more to faces deemed attractive than those that are purely symmetrical, suggesting there’s something else going on. White and red excellently blended together bring pleasure and delight to the eyes and (through these windows) to the mind and heart also. In the same way, a sweet intelligibility arises from the nature of God and His attributes. David desires no other life but to stand beside God and behold God with the eyes of his mind and faith. He longs to see God in His nature and attributes as He reveals Himself to the creature. The Queen of Sheba came on a far journey to see Solomon, because of his perfection and some common people desire to see the king. The Lord is a fair and pleasant object to the understanding. God’s Beauty is Perfectly Proportioned Early experiences of being the apple of your mother or father’s eye goes a very long way about how you feel about your own looks,” Diller said. Readers will see three themes in this poem. First, that Sa‘di’s love poetry is imbued with homoeroticism, as evoked by the beloved boy in the bathhouse. Second, that Sa’di believes that beauty can transform us from a lower to a higher state, from mud to a rose. Finally, that this parable of transformation points us to the presence of God.

And the kind of man that women are attracted to can vary according to phases of the ovulation cycle. Studies showed that during periods of high fertility, women are more drawn to more rugged, dominant-looking men. Subconsciously they may be perceiving beauty in accordance with evolutionary forces, since dominance can indicate genetic fitness. Incidentally, women also buy sexier clothes when they are most fertile. Putting it all together, a 2007 study in Perception & Psychophysics suggests that symmetry adds to the attractiveness of “average” faces. Ingenito, Domenico (2011). “Questi versi una fica li ha cantati – La Dama del Mondo (Jahān Malek Khātun): la maggiore poetessa dell’islam medievale.” Testo a Fronte: teoria e pratica della traduzione letteraria 44 (2011): 37–76. When it comes to facial attractiveness, there are reasons to believe that specific features and biologically based factors guide our assessment of beauty. Ingenito, Domenico; Miglio Camilla (2013. “Die Reise des Hāfez von Shiraz über Istanbul und Wien nach Weimar: Oder: ‘Europa hatte nie eine reine Seele’.” Rivista dell’Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici 2 (2013): 247–265.All this bounty of God is held forth to us in Christ. He is “fairer than the children of men” (Psalm 45:2). The word “fair” is repeated twice in the original Hebrew to note a double excellence. The word means lovely, amiable and acceptable. It means pleasant and sweet (2 Samuel 1:26). He is “white and ruddy” (Song 5:10). His “countenance is as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars (Song 5:15). His countenance is “as when the sun shineth in his strength” (Revelation 1:16). All the beauty of God is put forth in Christ (Isaiah 33:17). Christ is the brightness of His Father’s glory (Hebrews 1:3. The light of the sun in the air is the indirect reflection of the sun’s beams. Christ is the real reflection of the Father’s light and glory because He is God: equal with the Father and the same God. The Transcendent Beauty of Christ Vivian Diller, a New York-based psychologist and co-author of “Face It: What Women Really Feel As Their Looks Change,” divides perception of beauty into three things: contributing factors from genetics, grooming and how people reacted to your appearance in early life. There is a ravishing beauty of Christ in communion with God. Christ sees a beauty of holiness when the soul comes to Christ ( Psalm. 110:3) and He is taken with this beauty ( Psalm 45:11; Song 4:9-11). Z ion is “the perfection of beauty” (Psalm 50:2). All this beauty and sweetness comes from Christ. There is no such thing in the people of God, they are sinful men considered in their natural condition. It must therefore be fountain-beauty in Him, as the cause and origin of beauty. Conclusion

All these things that are required in beauty must be natural, and truly and really there. Borrowed colours and painting the face (as Jezebel did) are not beauty. The Lord in all His perfections is truly that which He seems to be. Beholding God’s Beauty Guess what: He chose to place His faithful and never-ending love upon you before He even laid the foundation of the world (Eph. 1:3-4)! This love is so strong that the Father was willing to give up His Son on the cross so that you could be brought into the family of God as an adopted child. This was not a cheap transaction! That makes sense, since we see every single blemish in ourselves, whereas there are plenty of people we consider beautiful to whom we don’t get close enough to examine all the little flaws. Perception of beauty may weaken when we do start to recognize those defects, Zeki said. As in roses, gardens and fair creatures there is something pleasant that ravishes eye and heart, so there are in God so many fair and pleasant truths to attract the mind. God is so capacious and so comprehensive a truth. He is so lovely, such a bottomless sea of wonders. To the understanding that beholds God’s beauty there is a desirability, goodliness, splendour, irradiation of brightness, loveliness, and drawing sweetness of excellence diffused throughout the Lord’s nature. Farrokhzad, Forugh (2008). La strage dei fiori: poesie persiane di Forugh Farrokhzad, translated by Domenico Ingenito. Napoli: Orientexpress.

c) Stature. If the stature is not duly proportioned beauty is no beauty: e.g. if the person has the stature of ten men and is too big, or has the stature of an infant or a dove. Even though such a person had everything else in due colour and proportion, their beauty is no beauty but an error of nature. They are not as they should be. Dear Christian, you are to hate and do battle against your sin, but never believe the lie that your sin has affected God’s love for you! You are forgiven of your sin; you are declared to be righteous; you are an adopted child of the Lord God; you are the apple of His eye; you are loved with an everlasting love, and you can count on the faithfulness of God being shown to you forevermore! Praise be to God! If men would have something to do with their hearts and their thoughts, that are always rolling up and down (like men with oars in a boat), after sinful vanities, they might find great and sweet employment to their thoughts upon Christ. If those frothy, fluctuating, and restless hearts of ours would come all about Christ, and look into His love, to bottomless love, to the depth of mercy, to the unsearchable riches of His grace, to inquire after and search into the beauty of God in Christ, they would be swallowed up in the depth and height, length and breadth of His goodness.