Wisdom, spiritual beauty, and Christianity
The Georgian philosopher Zura Shiolashvili has fashioned for us a magnificent and beautiful book, The Prelude of Divine Wisdom in the Art of Aphorism. It’s a powerful tour de force in the realm of religious philosophy and spiritual aesthetics, as the author brilliantly dismantles and overturns Friedrich Nietzsche’s often-celebrated arguments against Christianity — and especially against the traditional Christian understanding of beauty and morality — using Nietzsche’s own language and thought processes against him. Hence, in one of his aphorisms directed against Nietzsche’s glorification of sensual/animal pleasure, he writes: ‘A human being separating himself from the beauty of the soul involuntarily becomes swine-like’ (p. 82).
