In his new book on, among other things, Christian mysticism, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark, James K.A. Smith gives us this quotation from Natalie Carnes's book, Beauty, where she summarizes Gregory of Nyssa thusly:

What is the difference between a person who sees the beauty of a flower or a statue and the person who can also see beauty on the face of the hungry? ... Only the one wounded by love can see the beauty of the Wounded one who chose to be bound to the wounded of this world ... To see the beauty of the wounded is to see the beauty of our own wounded selves and to see the way the Wounded one is healing those wounds by turning them into openings for greater dependence on one another and on Christ, which is to say, on Love. ❧