In this installment of ‘Reaching Within: What Traditional Art Offers the Heart,’ we look the story and a painting about the famous Old Testament figure Samson.
Beauty is an inclusive thing. Let me explain. Plato suggests that beauty leads to love because we find beauty in those things that remind us of the heavens, and we truly love our homes in heaven. Yet beauty is not always attached to what is good, and sometimes even the ugliest of things can be presented beautifully.
Beauty is like the adornment that can make anything pleasurable. There are many instances in which beauty and love are manipulated to destroy.Samson: The Mistakes of God’s Servant
One of those instances occurs in the biblical story of Samson. As the story goes, Samson’s mother was visited by an angel who told her that her son was to be a Nazirite and would deliver the Israelites from the Philistines. Nazirites were those who abstained from pleasures, specifically wine; they were not to touch dead bodies, and they kept uncut hair. They were sometimes thought to be chosen by God and would experience divine ecstasy and other heavenly gifts because of their abstentions. 
