But this opens up a wide problem. If Beauty be the formulated intuition of Reality, which, because of its incompleteness, represents in symbols things that are beyond its immediate purview, and if Reality be, as we have elsewhere argued[14], grounded on Personal Relationship, the self-expression of Love, does beauty cease when personal relations become perfect? For we have argued that a symbol belongs to the domain of the imperfect, not the perfect[15]. If so, has beauty any meaning for God? At this point we clearly come into contact with the problem of God’s creative activity. We have said[16] that the creation of God must be the creation of something new. We have said that Love, of its own nature, demands expansion, is centrifugal as well as centripetal, and in this centrifugality of love we sought the Divine Impulse to create new personalities. But behind lurked always the question “How could a God whose experience was perfect and embraced already all Reality, create anything that was new?” The reciprocity of perfected love would be new for the personal beings He had created; but His self-limitation which the freedom of those beings necessitated would not be new for Him, for self-abnegation is an eternal part of love, since love is substantiated as itself by creative self-surrender, transcendence by immanence. Would the _result_ of His self-limitation be new for Him, implicit as it is in His Being as Love? Would the experience of the reciprocal love of His children be a new thing for Him? No doubt the problem, as belonging to the domain of the Transcendent, is not soluble for us, whose transcendence, whose intuition of the Real, is so incomplete. But because in such measure as we do know the Real we are ourselves transcendent, we can at least hope to touch the fringe of His garment; and Croce’s proof that pure intuition--which Bergson also urges to be our _point d’appui_ with the Real--belongs to the domain of aesthetic, gives us a fresh clue in our investigation. Beauty is expression. This is Croce’s statement; and in it we find what we need, provided that we expand the definition into ‘the expression of Relation.’ If there be a Personal God as we believe, whose experience is Reality, He must always be expressing that Reality. There is no consciousness without expression. But the expression of knowledge of the Real is Beauty. God’s Being must be full of an overwhelming Beauty. But part of His Nature, as Love, is centrifugal. That centrifugal part must also be expressed. The artist follows his expression by technical application; he paints for eye or ear, to satisfy himself and to communicate his intuition. In so far as he fails in his expression, the result is ugly. In so far, also, as God’s creation fails, through its own inevitable condition of the freedom of man, the result is ugly. Ugliness is the aesthetic, or theoretical aspect of sin; in its practical aspect sin is uneconomic, un-moral.