Lyne - wonderful post. For my part, please keep mentioning Dom Bede and Max Behr as often as you like, especially in the same post. That line of Behr's about golf as an aesthetic experience is, I think, vitally important. I'm guessing about this, but I think Behr is suggesting that the aesthetic is a human faculty and mode of perceiving every bit as important and legitimate as are the intellect, the spirit, and physical skill -- and this for the golfer and architect both. That might seem obvious and a given, but it can't have be either (then or now), otherwise golf course architecture would've evolved much differently than it has. (I think is was it Keats who wrote: 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'. I think it's that kind of philosophy Behr is getting to.) By the way, you may know that Dom Bede was first a student and later a life-long friend of CS Lewis. And Lewis wrote something like this once: The less a man acts on what he feels, the less he'll soon be able to act, and eventually the less he'll be able to feel. (I butchered that line, but it was something like that). CS wasn't talking about golfers, but maybe he could've been.... it sure seems to align with what Mr. Parsinens is suggesting in the line you quote. And Dom Bede, meanwhile, may have been trying to do a similar thing, i.e. to lessen the absolute primacy of rational thought in the modern world (and the clear cut 'facts' and 'prescriptions' it seem to demand and engender), and to suggest that the more subtle and mysterious wisdom of intuition be given its due...
Peter