Beauty Looks After Herself

As Catherine Pickstock so forcefully demonstrates in her brilliant introduction to this new publication of Beauty Looks After Herself, for 600 or more years, the Real has been progressively stripped of transcendental content, so that today an “unbearable lightness of being” presents us with the terrible spectacle of numberless possibilities evacuated of all substantive content. A middlebrow landscape of normal nihilism surrounds us at every turn. Eric Gill saw through our dilemma long ago. Here, in essays on industrialism, architecture, stone-carving, lettering, clothes, philosophies of art, and much else, Gill emerges as the unabashed proponent of “every man an artist” — ”every man as the crafter of the liturgy of the ordinary,” as Pickstock so aptly puts it. In these essays is issued a call for the recovery of the Real in all its glory, especially the transcendental of Beauty, in which Truth and Goodness coinhere — a call to return to the Real once again its rightful and actual plenitude.