Radiance, understanding, serenity, joy, gladness, innocence

“And at last I saw and came to know the people of this blessed earth. They came to me themselves. They surrounded me. They kissed me. Children of the sun, children of their sun—oh, how beautiful they were! Never on our earth had I beheld such beauty in man. Only perhaps in our children during the very first years of their life could one have found a remote, though faint, reflection of this beauty. The eyes of these happy people shone with a bright luster. Their faces were radiant with understanding and a serenity of mind that had reached its greatest fulfillment. Those faces were joyous; in the words and voices of these people there was a child-like gladness. Oh, at the first glance at their faces I at once understood it all, all! It was an earth unstained by the Fall, inhabited by people who had not sinned and who lived in the same paradise as that in which, according to the legends of mankind, our first parents lived before they sinned, with the only difference that all the earth here was everywhere the same paradise.” Pages 275-276
“Religions were founded to propagate the cult of non-existence and self-destruction for the sake of the everlasting peace in nothingness. At last these people grew weary of their senseless labors and suffering appeared on their faces, and these people proclaimed that suffering was beauty, for in suffering alone was there thought. They glorified suffering in their songs. I walked among them, wringing my hands and weeping over them, but I loved them perhaps more than before when there was no sign of suffering in their faces and when they were innocent and—oh, so beautiful!”
The Dream of A Ridiculous Man, Pages 282-283


Beauty is where God and the devil join battle, and their battlefield is the heart of man

“I’d like to tell you something about insects – the ones endowed with sensuality by God’s eternal joy: ‘Gives the insects sensual lust.’
“I’m just such an insect, Alyosha, and that verse applies specifically to me. All we Karamazovs are such insects and one lives in you too, my angel brother, and it will stir up storms in your blood too. Storms, because sensuality is a storm, even more than a storm. Beauty is a terrifying thing! It’s so frightening because it’s indefinable and it’s indefinable because God has surrounded us with nothing but riddles. Here the shores of a river meet, incompatibilities coexist. I am not an educated man, brother, but I have been thinking about this a great deal. There are so many mysteries; so many riddles that weigh man down to the ground. He is expected to solve them somehow or other and to climb dry out of the water. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? What I really can’t bear, though, is that a man with a noble heart and a superior intelligence may start out with the Madonna as his ideal and end up with Sodom as his ideal. It is even worse for one already striving for his Sodom ideal, who has not renounced his Madonna ideal, which still sets his heart ablaze, as it did when he was young and innocent. Yes, sir, a man’s range of feelings is wide, too wide even, and if I had my way, I’d narrow it quite a bit. It’s a hell of a situation, you know: what the head brands as shameful may appear as sheer beauty to the heart. But can there be beauty in Sodom? Yes and, believe me, it is precisely there that beauty lies for most men. Weren’t you aware of that secret? The terrible thing is that beauty is not only frightening but a mystery as well. That’s where God and the devil join battle, and their battlefield is the heart of man.”
The Brothers Karamazov, pages 126-127

Look upon beauty with reverence
"Now he whose vision of the mystery is long past, or whose purity has been sullied, cannot pass swiftly hence to see beauty's self yonder, when he beholds that which is called beautiful here; wherefore he looks upon it with no reverence." Plato, Phaedrus 250e

Plato, Phaedrus
"When he that loves beauty is touched by such madness he is called a lover. Such a one, as soon as he beholds the beauty of this world, is reminded of true beauty, and his wings begin to grow; then is he fain to lift his wings and fly upward; yet he has not the power, but inasmuch as he gazes upward like a bird, and cares nothing for the world beneath, men charge it upon him that he is demented." 249e
"Now he whose vision of the mystery is long past, or whose purity has been sullied, cannot pass swiftly hence to see beauty's self yonder, when he beholds that which is called beautiful here; wherefore he looks upon it with no reverence."

The soul of man is stupefied by the light of the natural sun
“That high philosophy of Beauty which the ancient writers delighted in; for they said, that the soul of man, embodied here on earth, went roaming up and down in quest of that other world of its own, out of which it came into this, but was soon stupefied by the light of the natural sun, and unable to see any other objects than those of this world, which are but shadows of real things. Therefore, the Deity sends the glory of youth before the soul, that it may avail itself of beautiful bodies as aids to its recollection of the celestial good and fair.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Love, 106
VERY good description of Plato’s view of beauty, pages 105-106, The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Resources
"Few indeed are left that can still remember much, but when these discern some likeness of the things yonder, they are amazed, and no longer masters of themselves, and know not what is come upon them by reason of their perception being dim." 250b
"Beauty it was ours to see in all its brightness in those days....Pure was the light that shone around us, and pure were we, without taint of that prison house which now we are encompassed withal, and call a body, fast bound therein as an oyster in its shell." 250b & c
"Beauty alone this has been ordained, to be most manifest to sense and most lovely of them all." 250d
Phaedrus, several pages near 250. Extremely good!
See several pages near 250.

The difficulty of seeing inner beauty, the danger of failing to do so. The connection to divinity to the divine.

Beauty which is acquired at the cost of justice is an abomination
"Beauty which is acquired at the cost of justice is an abomination and should be rejected for its loathsomeness. All values are esteemed only to the extent that they are worthy in the sight of God, for only through the Divine Light is their light seen." "The criterion by which we judge beauty is integrity, the criterion by which we judge integrity is truth, and truth is the correspondence of the finite to the infinite, the specific to the general, the cosmos to God."
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, 59

“Mere splendor of appearances does not appeal to the man of piety…Shining garments, a smiling countenance, or miracles of art do not enchant him when they cover vice or blasphemy.”
Man Is Not Alone, 283

“You grasp the essence of the here by conceiving the beyond – for this world is the reality of the spirit in a state of trance. The manifestation of the mystery is partly suspended, with ourselves living in lethargy. Normal consciousness is a state of stupor, in which sensibility to the wholly real and responsiveness to the stimuli of the spirit are reduced. The mystics, knowing that man is involved in a hidden history of the cosmos, endeavor to awake from the drowsiness and apathy and to regain the state of wakefulness for their enchanted souls.”
The Earth is the Lord's, 71

☆ “It is easy to appreciate beauty, and hard to see through the masquerade of the ostentatious.” page 414
“According to the Bible, the ‘inner’ life of nature is closed to man. The Bible does not claim that things speak to man; it only claims that things speak to God. Inanimate objects are dead in relation to man; they are alive in relation to God. They sing to God…Whose ear has heard the trees sing to God? Has our reason ever thought of calling upon the sun to praise the Lord? And yet, what the ear fails to perceive, what reason fails to conceive, the Bible makes clear to our souls. It is a higher truth, to be grasped by the spirit.” 97
“What, then, is reality? To the Western man, it is a thing in itself; to the Biblical Man, it is a thing through God. Looking at a thing his eyes see not so much form, color, force and motion as an act of God. The world is a gate, not a wall.”
God in Search of Man, 97