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I certainly did not mean to imply—in my post on the subject of “Vanity“—that we should take no interest in our physical or external appearance. The young woman who had written me, and to whom I was responding, had confessed to being “rather obsessed” with looking at herself in a mirror, and it was with this in mind that I recommended a momento mori on the inevitability of bodily death and decay.
But no, I am very far from suggesting that a person should “cultivate slovenliness”. In fact I have sometimes been accused by my readers and students of going too far in the other direction, notably in the chapter called “The Practice of Beauty” in my Advice to the Serious Seeker. Summing up Schuon’s stress on the importance of beauty in one’s day-to-day life, I wrote as follows:
We must strive for a balance that avoids both an obsessive perfectionism and a cynicism or slovenliness which thinks that anything is permitted. The most important key is conformity with the natural environment. You should try to make sure, within whatever the realistic limits are in your case, that the materials, colors, and kinds of things in your ambience are as consistent as possible with the simplicity, humility, and dignity of nature. . . .
You might not ordinarily think of things this way, but your ambience actually begins with your physical body. It is your closest or most immediate environment, and beauty must be honored beginning there. How beautiful a given body or face might be is not of course within a given person’s control, though he is to some degree responsible for the manner of his aging. To this extent our attentiveness to beauty is closely bound up with maintaining our health and physical vigor. But the beauty of the body resides not only in its static appearance. It also involves such things as carriage and movement. . . .
Then there is the matter of how we dress and adorn our bodies. It is quite remarkable how utterly indifferent most of our contemporaries seem to be to their clothing. Many people whose rectitude we have no reason to doubt, and whose character we may even admire, seem nevertheless completely oblivious to their appearance. The rule once again should be consistency or conformity with nature.
Sloppiness should be eschewed at all costs, for as Schuon points out, “Spirituality has an aristocratic air by definition”, which is fundamentally opposed to the “democratizing untidiness” of our times. Aristocracy, however, is not the same thing as an artificial formality. Powdered wigs and lace were in their own day just as unnatural as the opposite extreme is in our own. Dignity and simplicity go hand in hand. . . . Like icons we are not to call attention to ourselves but to be translucent (pp. 132-34).