As Corbin writes (Man of Light): Beauty is that great category which specifically refers to the Deus revelatus, "the supreme theophany, divine self-revelation." As the gods are given with creation so is their beauty in creation, and is the essential condition of creation as manifestation. Beauty is the manifest anima mundi-and do notice here it is neither transcendent to the manifest or hiddenly immanent within, but refers to appearances as such, created as they are, in the forms with which they are given, sense data, bare facts, Venus Nudata.
Aphrodite's beauty refers to the luster of each particular event; its darity, its particular brightness; that particular things appear at all and in the form in which they appear. Beauty as Plato describes it in the Phaedrus (250b) is the manifestation, the showing forth of the hidden noumenal gods and imperceptible virtues like temperance and justice. All these are but ideas, archetypes, pure forms, invisible didactic talk unless accompanied by beauty . "For beauty alone," he says, "this has been ordained, to be the most manifest to sense .. ." (250d). Beauty is thus the very sensibility of the cosmos, that it has textures, tones, tastes, that it is attractive. Alchemy might call this cosmic gloss, sulfur.
If beauty is inherent and essential to soul, then beauty appears wherever soul appears. That revelation of soul's essence, the actual showing forth of Aphrodite in psyche, her smile, is called in mortal language, "beauty." All things as they display their innate nature present Aphrodite's goldenness; they shine forth and as such are aesthetic. Here, I am merely restating what Adolf Portmann has elaborated at Eranos for forty years: the idea of Selbstdarstellung ("self-presentation") as the revelation to the senses of essential Innerlichkeit ("interiority"). Visible form is a show of soul. The being of a thing is revealed in the display of its Bild ("image").
Beauty is not an attribute then, something beautiful, like a fine skin wrapped round a virtue; the aesthetic aspect of appearance itself. Were there no beauty, along with the good and the true and the one, we could never sense them, know them. Beauty is an epistemological necessity; it is the way in which the gods touch our senses, reach the heart and attract us into life.