Admiration is not a pair of wings I carry. It is the pair of wings that carry me!
[Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Sept. 27, 1980]
In This Chapter
God admires! For example, admiration for His creatures shines when Our Lord says: “Look at the lilies of the field.” If so, why should we, poor creatures, not admire?
Admiration, Love, Idealism
Admiration is the first element of love.
The Commandment, “Love God above all things,” includes “admire God above all things.”
That means recognizing God’s sublimity and transcendence above all excellence and as the ultimate end of all imaginable sublimities and excellences. [Folha de S. Paulo, Feb. 7, 1971]
God Looks at Creation…
“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they labor not, neither do they spin. But I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these.” [Mt. 6:28] Listening to this phrase, I suddenly realized that when Our Lord spoke of the lily, He was admiring it.
I saw Him admiring and singing the glory of something smaller than Him by saying: “Consider the lilies of the field; they neither labor nor spin.”
Now comes the glorification: “Not even Salomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these”!
Note how His infiniteness leans down on Creation. How beautiful it would be to watch Him saying, “Consider the lilies of the field” and caressing a lily petal with His fingers. What an extraordinary scene! A lesson for us!
We are at a loss for words to characterize this lesson. Our vocabulary is exhausted, and we do not know what to say.
… and Leans Down on Little Things
What immensities can arise from the admirative analysis of small things!
One sees the completion of a circle of admiration: Our Lord admiring the Eternal Father, Our Lord admiring Our Lady, Our Lord admiring other men as equals to Him in human nature, and then leaning over and watching the little children.
Then one understands His words: “Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come to me: for the kingdom of heaven is for such.” [Mt. 19:14] He also showed admiration, protection, respect and dedication.
“How clean, how pure these souls are! I, God, author of all purity, contemplate Myself when I see this boy. I see in him a created reflection of Myself.”
Admiring the Inferior
He is not content with admiring only what is superior but also turns to the inferior with respect and tenderness, without egalitarianism, but something worth incomparably more: seeing an image of God in the minor things and rendering Him glory because He deigned to manifest Himself in these things.
As He walked upon the waters, Our Lord admired water and air and felt reflected in both. He could say, “How magnificent! They imitate my magnificence. How beautiful is this water and this air that I created!”
Thus, one can understand how admiration runs a complete cycle.
The Queen’s Coins
Imagine a prodigiously rich queen. She has everything. Suddenly, she sees a coin rolling on a table in her royal palace.
It is the smallest of the coins in circulation in her kingdom, a coin of copper or nickel, a non-noble metal. She takes the little coin, looks at it, and sees the effigy of her son, the king, who is minted in it. She looks at the coin and says, “My son!”
That is how we must be toward the things of God. He put “coins” of such caliber into circulation that each is a sun. All stars in the firmament are manifestations of God’s glory.
But he also put men into circulation – so much weaker than all that but endowed with an immortal soul. Because of this, they resemble Him much more than any sun.
An Exercise in Marveling
He admires the souls He created so much that He dies to save them.
Therefore, everything we see is an exercise in marveling. There is no word for this in Portuguese. In French, they say émerveillement.
Each thing invites man to imagine how it would be if it were marvelous.
God admires! How much will He, who said: consider the lilies of the field which do not labor, etc., love what man composes with enthusiasm and then turn to Him because, from marvel to marvel, at the top one finds Him!
God’s Admiring Gaze
You will thus easily understand how Our Lord Jesus Christ’s example of admiring even small things and loving them with special tenderness is a lesson for us to have a soul prone and quickly led to admiration.
God’s admiring gaze, Mary’s admiring gaze lands and alights on a mediocre or sordid person, who begins to live as if in the waters of the Pool of Siloam.
Admiration has attained the lowest level and reached the end of its story. The admiration that looks down is symmetrical to the one that soars.
Thus ends the “story of admiration.” [Sept. 27, 1970]
What We Admire Penetrates Us
Everything we admire enters our soul and penetrates us more or less profoundly.
It’s impossible for something we admire not to penetrate us. Therefore, when facing something bad, we must know its opposite, the Good, and admire it. With admiration, Good enters into us.
Nothing makes us suffer so much as lying in inglorious self-contempt by conniving with our defects.
Our policy regarding our faults should be to examine them in their entirety and all the way to the end rather than stopping halfway.
We will never correct ourselves if we do not consider the extreme they can take us. [Jan. 15, 1969]
Chenonceaux’s guardhouse
Admiring in Daily Life
A few clouds or a lovely moonlit night are everyday things in life. But they are filled with great beauty and values, to which we must pay attention and be very receptive and sensitive lest we become unable to appreciate things that are higher.
One thing that constitutes the high class of European civilization is the excellent level of everyday life.
For example, it is not sufficient to say that Europe has the Castle of Chenonceaux, which is undoubtedly beautiful. But the guard house at Chenonceaux, entirely eclipsed by the castle, is a little jewel in its own right.
Something similar exists in some British panoramas. A little brook gurgling alongside a stone wall, swans swimming in it, ducks under a little bridge from which hangs a vine with red or blue flowers are little things of everyday life that European civilization has refined splendidly.
Thus, life becomes populated with something more necessary to man, in a sense, than super-sublime marvelous.
Take, for example, the sun. I can see greatness in a star that is at a fabulous distance. There is grandeur in this. But to the human eye and mind, one cannot say that greatness is found there “as in its headquarters” as in the sun.
The king star presents a kind of culmination of all perfections, which is irresistible to all below. So to speak, it concatenates and coordinates everything with legitimacy and strength.
Therein lies its greatness. [Feb. 2, 1975]
The city of Bagnoregio (Italy), where St. Bonaventure was born, is shrouded in clouds that sometimes cover it.
Feeling Small and Comfortable Facing Mystery
Uncertainty can be very beautiful. One needs to say: What a marvel! It is beyond my comprehension!
What I understand is beautiful, but this mist goes beyond my understanding. How beautiful!
Before that mist, one should reverently say: What an image of God, mysterious and unfathomable!
One must acquire a taste for feeling small, enormously surpassed, and overtaken beyond imagination.
With such humility, one understands and appreciates the beauty of mists.
Thus, one acquires the true Catholic spirit, which is made of admiration. He whose soul is not turned to admiration does not have the Catholic spirit.
Objectively, we must note that we are small, not just as a literary image. Each one of us is zero. And when feeling as a zero, one has an enormous joy seeing Him par excellence, and Her by participation, Who are not zero.
He who lacks the joy of feeling small does not admire but immediately goes into a dispute: Is that one greater than me on this point? Is he lesser on that point?
He who rushes into competition knows neither life nor the joy of living and is incapable of admiration.
Instead, he who feels small finds this mystery natural and comfortable inside. [May 15, 1976]
Statues [gisantes] of the Constables of Castile in the Cathedral of Santa Maria in Burgos (Spain)
To Practice Virtue, Admire It
People are taught more to practice virtue than to admire it. But we need to have a profound and rational admiration for every virtue stemming from an intellect enlightened by the Faith. After paying this homage of admiration to virtue, one logically (not chronologically) has the disposition to practice it.
Only after admiring virtue as we should will we be in a position to understand the malice that exists in sin, and only after admiring virtue and trying to practice it are we able to understand the severity of sin, the reparation it requires, and the need to make that reparation before God’s justice.
This is why it is moving to see, for example, those recumbent statues on medieval graves; at times, husband and wife lie side by side on those stone beds with stone pillows. If they were noble, they wore a crown on their heads and folded their hands.
One gets a sense of conjugal chastity that enthralls us. [Aug. 16, 1968]
Admiration and Sacrifice
When a person seeks to live in God’s grace, there is in his soul a form of rectitude before God, Our Lady and the Church whereby, by dint of admiring, he wants to sacrifice himself.
The desire for sacrifice is not something God imposes and should be considered an aberration. If that were so, it would be absurd to sacrifice oneself; the normal thing would be not to do it.
Souls who think so are in a state incompatible with love. True love seeks sacrifice, and life would be frustrated and empty without it. [April 18, 1981]