The early Fathers of the Christian Church were too deeply absorbed in their immense theological tasks to be drawn into speculative or analytical inquiries that could not be brought directly to bear on their immediate concerns. They had, first, to work out a viable theological system that would explain what can be explained of God and man’s relations to God; and, second, to strengthen and defend Christian teaching, and the Church itself, against its enemies, especially pagan religion and philosophy. Neither of these tasks invited extensive study of the problems of aesthetics, though, as we shall see later in this chapter, the first one led into problems that, though only tangentially aesthetic at first, were to have important aesthetic consequences. Together, the two tasks left little time for original reflection on art and beauty. The outstanding exception among the early thinkers is St. Augustine, whose abundant energy and intellectual drive found occasion for some thought about everything that came his way. As the scholastic movement developed, in the later Middle Ages, the most powerful thinkers became fascinated by metaphysical and epistemological problems, and problems of ethics and social philosophy, and their aesthetic remarks tended to be brief and peripheral to their main thought. This is true even of St. Thomas. In its period of flourishing and triumph, scholasticism made but one contribution to the history of aesthetics comparable in significance to its work in other philosophical fields—and this in the philosophy of language and symbolism, which will be discussed in the section on interpretation below.
Yet even in the early period there was one aesthetic problem that the philosophers of Christendom had ultimately to come to terms with. That there is such a thing as beauty (however mysterious its nature and attraction), and especially in human bodies, could not be gainsaid, but what is the proper attitude toward it? Is it, so to speak, from Satan or from God—part of what the Christian must be prepared to turn away from and renounce, along with other tempting but unworthy things, or something he may embrace? Among the early Christians, Isaiah’s words, “He hath no form or comeliness,” were sometimes taken to be a repudiation of physical beauty in Christ. But it could not be forgotten, either, that according to Genesis man is made in the image of God.
From the beginning, the Church exhibited a similarly ambivalent attitude toward the arts, and for two basic reasons, which are Christian analogues of Plato’s two great attacks on poetry in Book X of the Republic. First, and fundamentally, artistic activity is the sign of a strong interest in earthly things, which is necessarily, or at least can easily become, a rival to the true Christian’s central and absorbing concern with salvation for another life. Second, and more specifically, the arts were closely associated with the cultures of Greece and Rome, from whose false religion Christianity was come to rescue the world. Some early Church leaders, such as Tertullian (writing around the beginning of the third century), wished to renounce all secular learning and profane studies. This counsel did not prevail, and the later acceptance of the trivium and quadrivium—the seven liberal arts—as the basis of education, meant that important parts of classical learning, or what remained of it, were acknowledged to be legitimate stages in the individual’s progress toward theological knowledge.
Tertullian characterized literature as “foolishness in the eyes of God” (De Spectaculis xvii; cf. x, xxiii), and his condemnation was echoed in other terms by Jerome, Gregory, Augustine, and Boethius in his Consolations of Philosophy (I, i)—though in his De Musica, number and proportion are said to be the principles of reality, through which music expresses the divine. In some of these writers, especially Jerome and Augustine, there was also a contrary strain—an appreciation of classical literature and a sense that it may have a positive use in education. This favorable view was expressed by Origen, by Clement of Alexandria, by Basil the Great. And on the whole poetry was victorious, though not the drama: the Church remained for a long time strenuously opposed to acting and playgoing—which Augustine also attacks in several of his works.
Since the chief classical productions of visual art with which the early Christians were acquainted represented gods or self-deified Roman emperors, and were thus the objects of a hateful idolatry, visual art itself came under suspicion, and there were some who believed that the introduction of any images into churches would tempt the Christian worshiper into a similar idolatry. Much later on, this attitude was revived by the Iconoclastic movement, which developed in the Eastern Church in the eighth and ninth centuries. But the alternative view prevailed. Gregory, in the sixth century, was defending pictures as necessary for religious instruction, especially with illiterate people, and as legitimate if they are not themselves worshiped, but only used to lead the mind to God. Though a synod under Constantine V, meeting at Constantinople in 754, condemned the attempt to depict in visual terms the nature of the incarnate Logos, a General Council at Nicaea in 787, under Constantine VI, reversed the condemnation and declared that “honorable reverence” is due to religious pictures, as to the cross and the Gospels. “For the honor which is paid to the image passes on to that which the image represents, and he who shows reverence to the image shows reverence to the subject represented in it.”1 The mainstream of Christian thought became, as time went on, more and more open to sensuous aids of religious worship—plainsong and then polyphony, statues and paintings, the great architectural triumphs of the cathedral age.2
ST. AUGUSTINE
In the course of his agonized review of the moral and intellectual pitfalls into which he had fallen before his conversion to Christianity—a cross-section of the evils and errors of his age, as he looks back upon them—St. Augustine (354–430) tells us that when he was about twenty-six or twenty-seven years old he wrote a treatise (of two or three books, “I think”), On the Beautiful and the Fitting (De Pulchro et Apto), in which he tried to answer certain aesthetic questions:
Do we love anything but the beautiful? What, then, is beautiful [pulchrum]? And what is beauty [pulchritudo]? What is it that allures and unites us to the things we love; for unless there were a grace and beauty [decus et species] in them, they could by no means attract us to them? And I marked and perceived that in bodies themselves there was a beauty from their forming a kind of whole [et videbam in ipsis corporibus aliud esse quasi totum et ideo pulchrum], and another from mutual fitness [aliud autem, quod ideo deceret, quoniam apte accommodaretur alicui], as one part of the body with its whole, or a shoe with a foot, and so on [Confessions IV, xiii; trans. Pilkington, with one correction].
From Augustine’s sketchy description of its contents, we may guess that this early work would be of more interest to us than it was to him in his later years—for he reports its loss with little apparent regret (since the treatise reflected a greater interest in the mutable beauties of the visible world than in the immutable glory of God). His remarks are tantalizingly brief. He seems clearly to have distinguished, for example, between the question, What is beautiful?, and the question, What is beauty?, and between the question, What is beauty?, and the question, How does beauty attract us? The distinction between the fair (pulchrum) and the fitting (aptum), he says, was a distinction between that which is beautiful “in itself,” and that which is beautiful in virtue of being applied (adcommodatum) to something else (IV, xv). There are two grounds for the predication of beauty. First, a complex may be said to be beautiful in that it is a kind of whole (totum), and beauty is a property of the whole; or, second, a part—a patch of color or bit of sound—which is not by itself beautiful may be called beautiful if it is made a part of a complex that is beautiful in the first use of the term. Or perhaps there is a utilitarian notion involved in the aptum—the shoe must “fit” the foot. This is all that can be offered by way of explication, since unfortunately Augustine does not recall any of the “corporeal examples” that were supplied, he says, in the original treatise.
That Augustine thought of beauty as a property of heterogeneous wholes is further indicated by his statement that “the beauty of the course of this world is achieved by the opposition of contraries” (as is grace of style through antitheses), “arranged, as it were, by an eloquence not of words, but of things” (City of God XI, xviii; trans. Dods, Wilson, and Smith). Again, David’s love of music, because he used it to praise God, was proper and admirable: “the rational and well-ordered concord of diverse sounds in harmonious variety suggests the compact unity of the well-ordered city” and can even be a “mystical representation” of the divine (XVII, xiv). In one of his most succinct characterizations of beauty, Augustine echoes Cicero (Tusculanarum Disputationum IV, xiii) almost word for word: “All bodily (corporeal) beauty consists in the proportion of the parts (congruentia partium), together with a certain agreeableness (suavitas) of color” (XXII, xix; cf. XI, xxii). But the Ciceronian formula has a good deal more meaning in St. Augustine, who, at various places in his works, sketches a highly formalistic account of the “congruence of parts,” with ideas derived from Pythagoras, Plato, and Plotinus, as well as others, though combined in his own way. The main discussions are in Concerning Order (De Ordine), written in 386; in De Musica, a treatise on meter written about 388–91; and in some sections (especially xxix, 52, to xli, 77) of Concerning True Religion (De Vera Religione), written about 390.
The key concepts in Augustine’s theory of beauty are unity, number, equality, proportion, and order. They turn up frequently in relation to each other. From the scattered references, attesting to the great importance he attached to these concepts and to beauty itself, it is difficult to piece together a single doctrine. But the leading interconnections among them can perhaps be reported with some confidence. Unity is basic in all of reality, for in order to be at all, anything must be one (De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae et Manichaeorum II, vi). But unity is also a matter of degree, for some beings (and God most supremely) have more of it than others. A second very fundamental concept is that of equality or likeness (see De Musica VI, xiv, 44). The existence of individual things as units, the possibility of repeating them and comparing groups of them with respect to equality or inequality, gives rise to proportion, measure, and number (De Libero Arbitrio II, viii, 22; De Musica VI, xvii, 56).
Number exercised a great fascination for Augustine, who followed the suggestions he found in Plato’s Timaeus and regarded number as the fundamental principle in God’s creation of the world. Everything depends on number. Objects are what they are—participate in the Forms that exist in the mind of God—through their numerical properties. Number is fundamental both to being and to beauty:
Suppose there is no actual work in hand and no intention to make anything, but the motions of the limbs are done for pleasure, that will be dancing. Ask what delights you in dancing and number will reply: “Lo, here am I.” Examine the beauty of bodily form, and you will find that everything is in its place by number. Examine the beauty of bodily motion and you will find everything in its due time by number . . . [De Libero Arbitrio II, xvi, 42; trans. Burleigh].
Number is the underlying principle of order, which consists in the arrangement of equal and unequal parts into an integrated complex in accordance with an end (City of God XIX, xiii, 1; cf. De Musica VI, xiv, 46; xv, 47; De Ordine II, xv, 42). “Everything is beautiful that is in due order” (De Vera Religione xli, 77).
Besides the elementary unity that is presupposed by number and order, there is a higher unity that is the consequence or resultant of them. An elementary thing is unified because of its lack of internal diversity, but a complex and heterogeneous thing is unified in spite of its diversity, and this is the sort of emergent unity we experience in art and nature. Composites become wholes only when they are harmonized or given symmetry, and harmony or symmetry consists in the likeness of one part to another (De Vera Religione xxx, 55; xxxii, 59, De Genesi ad Litteram, Liber Imperfectus x, 32; xvi, 57–59). The more likeness or equality among the parts, the greater the unity (De Musica VI, xvii, 58; De Quantitate Animae). Augustine sums up the connections among several of his leading ideas in this Socratic passage:
If I ask a workman why, after constructing one arch, he builds another like it over against it, he will reply, I dare say, that in a building like parts must correspond to like. If I go further and ask why he thinks so, he will say that it is fitting, or beautiful, or that it gives pleasure to those who behold it. But he will venture no further . . . But if I have to do with a man with inward eyes who can see the invisible, I shall not cease to press the query why these things give pleasure . . . He transcends it and escapes from its control in judging pleasure and not according to pleasure. First I shall ask him whether things are beautiful because they give pleasure, or give pleasure because they are beautiful. Then I shall ask him why they are beautiful, and if he is perplexed, I shall add the question whether it is because its parts correspond and are so joined together as to form one harmonious whole [De Vera Religione xxxii, 59; trans. Burleigh].
Beauty, then, proceeds from unity, proportion, order (De Musica I, xiii, 28)—and shares their admirable immutability. Thus it exists in various degrees up to the beauty of the universe as a whole (De Ordine I, ii, 3; Confessions X, vi) and the beauty of God (see Confessions I, iv; III, vi; IV, xvi). Ugliness, on the other hand, is simply the inverse of beauty, “a privation of form” (De Immortalitate Animae viii, 13). And it is this Plotinian continuity between the lowest and highest beauty that enables Augustine to give beauty a role even in the soul’s religious journey. For aesthetic experience at its highest passes into religious wisdom (De Vera Religione xxix, 52; De Libero Arbitrio II, ix, 25–27). Beauty is not brought in adventitiously, because the unity that is basic to beauty is also basic to being, and things are therefore beautiful to the degree to which they really are (De Vera Religione vii, 13).
The judgment of beauty, then, involves a grasp of order. And from this thesis Augustine derives two further conclusions. Since order involves number and connection, it has a rational character; reason is involved in the cognition of order and in the pleasure it affords. This kind of pleasure is limited to those senses (“the ocular and the auricular”) that perceive order; pleasure in sheer quality, as in tastes and smells, is radically different, and of a lower sort. It makes sense, Augustine argues at some length, to say that “something formed with well-fitting parts . . . appears reasonably [fashioned],” or that a melody “sounds reasonably [harmonized]. But anyone would be laughed at if he should say that something smells reasonably or tastes reasonably” or if he should enter a garden, pluck a rose, and remark, “How reasonably sweet it smells!” (De Ordine, trans. Russell, pp. 133–35).
Augustine’s second theorem concerns the nature of judgment. The grasp of order is normative: the orderly object is perceived and understood as being what it ought to be, and the disordered object as falling short, in some way, of what it ought to be. This enables the painter to correct and improve as he goes along, to see what requires to be done at each stage. And it enables the critic to judge that the painting is flawed or flawless (De Vera Religione xxxii, 60). But this sort of perceptual rightness or wrongness cannot be given in sensation alone (De Musica VI, xii, 34); it presupposes that the spectator bring with him a concept of ideal order and unity which is never exhibited in the corporeal world. He possesses this concept by a “divine illumination,” by which God’s light enables the mind to grasp the Forms in the mind of God. It follows that when the spectator judges the beauty of a painting, he does it by unalterable objective—because a priori—standards; there is no relativity in beauty (De Trinitate IX, vi, 10; De Libero Arbitrio II, xvi, 41).
Another question on which Augustine throws new light is that old one concerning the cognitive status of literature. Augustine is thinking of Plato’s argument, and he says (City of God II, xiv) that, while Plato was not (as some claimed) divine, he was a good deal closer to the divine, in virtue of having banished the poets and playwrights, than those who would let them stay. Augustine is quite as severe as Plato on the likelihood that moral laxity will be promoted by the theater, but comes to a different conclusion when he turns to the question whether poetry is lies. This occurs in his Soliloquies, a dialogue between himself and Reason, written in 387—his first work after his conversion. Book II is concerned with the nature of the false or fallacious and the conditions under which it can be deceptive. The false, in the pejorative sense, must be different from the true, and yet it must be like the true in some way, also, or it could not mislead. There is nothing “that we may justly term false,” suggests Reason, “except that which feigns itself to be what it is not, or pretends to be when it does not exist” (II, ix, 16; trans. Burleigh).
The difference between the fallacious and the mendacious is that the former all wish to deceive while the latter do not all wish to do so. Mimes and comedies and many poems are full of lies, but the aim is to delight rather than to deceive. Nearly all who make jokes lie. But the fallacious person, strictly speaking, is he whose design is to deceive.
Now what of the class of things that “pretend” to be when they are not? For example, says Reason: the bent oar, the mirror-image, dreams, and delusions.
Don’t you think that your image in the mirror wants to be you but is false because it is not? . . . And every picture, statue, or similar work of art tries to be that on which it is modelled [II, ix, 17].
So the painter is a kind of liar, it would seem. What, then, is the distinction between perceptual illusions on the one hand and those “poems and jests and other fallacious things”?
It is one thing to will to be false and another not to be able to be true. We can classify comedies, tragedies, mimes and the like with the works of painters and sculptors. The picture of a man, though it tries to be like him, cannot be a true man any more than a character in the books of the comedians. These things are false not from any will or desire of their own, but from the necessity of following the will of their authors [II, x, 18; cf. 19].
The bent oar could be straight, and therefore is illusory; the painted representation of a man is necessarily nonhuman, and is not therefore strictly an illusion. Paradoxically, since the false is what is false to what it tends toward and ought to be, that which ought to be false, and is so, is not so. The actor is most true (to himself and to his art) when he is most deceptive, because playing a part: “On the stage Roscius wants to be a false Hecuba, but by nature he is a true man. By so wanting, he is also a true tragedian, so far as he fulfils the part” (II, x, 18).
It is for this reason that “the fables of the grammarians and poets” are much better than the doctrines of the Manicheans; for when Augustine was young, he recalls bitterly (Confessions III, vi), though he sang the “Medea Flying,” he did not believe a word of it, and was not injured; but when he lent credence to the Manichean heresies he was dragged down to the very edge of Hell. Augustine seems indeed to have worked out a fuller and more sophisticated concept of fiction than his predecessors, and he has taken a long step away from the classic doctrines of imitation. Art is not imitation, he says, since animals imitate, but have not art (De Musica I, iv, 5–7). When he refers to poems, stories, fables, he does not speak of them as imitations, but as inventions, as products of the imagination:
Therefore it is possible for the mind, by taking away, as has been said, some things from objects which the senses have brought within its knowledge, and by adding some things, to produce in the exercise of imagination that which, as a whole, was never within the observation of any of the senses; but the parts of it had all been within such observation, though found in a variety of different things: e.g., when we were boys, born and brought up in an inland district, we could already form some idea of the sea, after we had seen water even in a small cup; but the flavor of strawberries and of cherries could in no wise enter our conceptions before we tasted these fruits in Italy [Letter VII, iii, 6, to Nebridius, 389 A.D.; trans. Cunningham].
ST. THOMAS AQUINAS
Nine centuries lie between the greatest of the Church Fathers and the greatest of the Schoolmen. It is generally considered a mark of sophistication in a historian when he can see continuities where others find only gaps or breaks, and of course twentieth-century historiography has taught us to be wary of apparently abrupt transitions. Certainly medieval culture did not start off completely on its own, with no legacy from the classical world. St. Augustine and his contemporaries felt that classical culture was all about them, though crumbling, and they had firsthand acquaintance with Greek and Latin works. Platonism was a living force, still being taught at Athens and Alexandria and Rome. But a fundamental break occurred in the centuries that immediately followed; many remains of classical culture that were later to be of decisive influence disappeared for centuries, and found their way back only by a long and indirect route into the intellectual current of medieval and Renaissance thought.
One important step was taken in the middle of the third century when Latin replaced Greek as the official liturgical language. Practically all that Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and others had accomplished in aesthetics, as well as the greatest masterpieces of Greek literature, became inaccessible. Meanwhile, a great deal of Roman literature and poetics also passed from view. There was a violent and systematic suppression of paganism in the fifth century under Theodosius, and during the ensuing centuries of social and political upheavals much was lost sight of. It was not until the hitherto unknown dialogues of Plato, the metaphysical and physical works of Aristotle, and other important classical documents, were brought forth once again in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, that medieval thinkers could give stimulus and challenge to their own thinking by drawing on the Greeks.
In the meantime, the central ideas of St. Augustine’s aesthetics were taken up and kept alive by other thinkers, who continued to reflect on some of his key terms—unity, equality, number, order—and refine or enrich their meaning. Four especially deserve mention: John Scotus Eriugena, or Erigena (ninth century), in his commentary on the Hierarchie Celeste of Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite (he translated the latter’s four principal works into Latin); Hugh of St. Victor, (twelfth century), in his Didascalicon, and also his followers in the school of St. Victor; Alexander of Hales (early thirteenth century), in his Universae Theologiae Summa; and St. Bonaventure (thirteenth century), in various passages of his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. Though all of these thinkers may be placed in the Augustinian tradition, as far as their theories about beauty and its ontological and mystical significance are concerned, they also occasionally touched on interesting special problems: for example, John Scotus Eriugena’s description of the different responses to a beautiful vase by a good man and by a man who is a prey to his desires, suggesting that the proper response to beauty is disinterested (see De Divisione Naturae IV, 16; in Migne’s Patrologiae, vol. 122, col. 828B); or Hugh of St. Victor’s classification of types of beauty (species), and his opinion that all of man’s senses find appropriate aesthetic qualities to enjoy in the natural world—suggesting that there are beautiful tastes and smells (see Eruditionis Didascalicae VII, 1, 9–13; Migne, vol. 176, cols. 812C–813A, 819–22).
Considering the vast number of difficult and fundamental problems that are dealt with so extensively in the greatest system of scholastic philosophy, that of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), it is perhaps surprising that he is so short with aesthetics. But what he says is penetrating, and its significance is out of ordinary proportion to its length.
Fundamental to Thomistic metaphysics is the Aristotelian concept of being (ens), which has three modes; for every being is one (unum), true (verum), and good (bonum)—Thomas sometimes adds two others, res and aliquid. These terms are “transcendental”—because they transcend the Aristotelian categories, being predicable of everything real—and hence are “convertible” with being. But they are not predicable in the same way of every being—they are “analogical terms” (see Summa Theologica I, Q. 13, Art. 5). This concept derives from Aristotle (for example, his remark in the Metaphysics IV [Γ], ii, that things may be said to be, or exist, in many different ways). Objects, Thomas holds, may be named either univocally or equivocally. Thus, to use Aristotle’s examples (Categories i) an ox and a man are both called “animal”; here the signification of “animal” is the same in both cases, so they are named univocally. On the other hand, a man and a picture of a man are both called “animal,” but here the signification of “animal” is different in the two cases; they have not a common genus, are not animals in the same sense, and so are named equivocally. The Scholastics introduced a further distinction between two types of equivocation, that in which the two objects equivocally named have no common property that is signified by the name (as when a tree and a traveler are both said to possess a “trunk”), and that in which the two objects have an important property in common that is part of what the word signifies (as in Aristotle’s example of the man and his picture, which are similar in shape). Terms predicated in the latter way are analogical. One kind of analogical predication is that in which a term signifies different degrees of some property in different contexts (an “intelligent man,” an “intelligent ox”).
Unity is being that is considered as distinct from other things, for everything is either simple (hence undivided) or composite, but in the latter case it does not have being unless the parts compose a whole of some sort (I, Q. 11, Art. 1). In a homogeneous whole, “the whole is made up of parts having the form of the whole; as, for instance, every part of water is water,” but in a heterogeneous whole “every part is wanting in the form belonging to the whole; as, for instance, no part of a house is a house, nor is any part of man a man” (Art. 2). Truth is being that is considered in relation to thought. “Truth is the equation [adequatio] of thought and thing,” and belongs to beings as to thought (Q. 16, Art. 1; see also De Veritate, Q. 1, Art. 1), for “everything, in as far as it has being, so far is it knowable” (Art. 3). Goodness is being that is considered in relation to desire. The good is defined (in Aristotle’s terms) as “what all things desire.” Now
a thing is desirable only in so far as it is perfect; for all desire their own perfection. But everything is perfect so far as it is actual. Therefore it is clear that a thing is perfect so far as it exists. . . . Hence it is clear that goodness and being are the same really [Q. 5, Art. 1; see also De Veritate, Q. 21, Art. 1].
The good is further divided by Thomas, following the lead of St. Ambrose, into the “befitting,” the “useful,” and the “pleasant,” or delightful. Since “everything is good as far as it is desirable, and is a term of the movement of the appetite,” a distinction can be made between different manners in which the good terminates the movement of appetite (or desire). When the object desired terminates appetite as a means, in relation to something else, it is the useful; when “sought after as the last thing,” for its own sake, it is the “virtuous”; “but that which terminates the movement of appetite in the form of rest in the thing desired, is called the pleasant.” And it is this sort of goodness (not strictly a species, since “good” is not predicated univocally, but analogically, of the three sorts) that beauty has (Q. 5, Art. 6). (On the nature of delight, or enjoyment, see Part I–II, Q. 11, Arts. 1, 4.)
Beauty, says Thomas, in a discussion of the question whether goodness may be considered to be a final cause, is to be defined succinctly as “what pleases when seen,” or contemplated. “Beauty and goodness in a thing are identical fundamentally; for they are based upon the same thing, namely, the form . . . But they differ logically,” since
beauty relates to the cognitive faculty; for beautiful things are those which please when seen [pulchra enim dicuntur quae visa placent]. Hence beauty consists in due proportion; for the senses delight in things duly proportioned, as in what is after their own kind—because even sense is a sort of reason, just as is every cognitive faculty. Now, since knowledge is by assimilation, and similarity relates to form, beauty properly belongs to the nature of a formal cause [Q. 5, Art. 4].
This passage is condensed, and the reference to Aristotle’s formal cause is abrupt. First, we must bear in mind that “seeing” is to be taken over metaphorically from “the noblest and most trustworthy of the senses” to “knowledge obtained through the intellect,” as Thomas points out in the course of his argument that the word “light” is not used literally when applied to spiritual things (Q. 67, Art. 1). The proportion referred to is a feature of the object that lends itself to clear and ready grasp—in the case of a visible object, for example, that makes it accommodating to the sight. Sight responds to the eminently seeable as the intellect responds to what is intelligible in the world, for both seeing and understanding are cognitive acts. Cognition or knowing consists essentially in abstracting the form that makes a thing what it is, and so beauty (since it provides immediate contemplative pleasure) must be connected with the form of the object, that is, its formal cause (cf. the commentary on the Divine Names, iv, 5). Appetite or desire “tends to the beautiful inasmuch as it is proportioned and specified in itself” (De Veritate, Q. 22, Art. 1; trans. R. W. Schmidt).
We can now see the implications of another highly significant passage in which Thomas discusses beauty:
The beautiful is the same as the good, and they differ in aspect only. For since good is what all seek, the notion of good is that which calms the desire; while the notion of the beautiful is that which calms the desire, by being seen or known. Consequently those senses chiefly regard the beautiful, which are the most cognitive, viz., sight and hearing, as ministering to reason; for we speak of beautiful sights and beautiful sounds. But in reference to the other objects of the other senses, we do not use the expression beautiful, for we do not speak of beautiful tastes, and beautiful odors. Thus it is evident that beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty: so that good means that which simply pleases the appetite; while the beautiful is something pleasant to apprehend [id cujus ipsa apprehensio placet] [Part I–II, Q. 27, Art. 1].
Three points may be noted here. (1) The distinction, on cognitive grounds, between the higher and the lower senses is somewhat modified elsewhere (e.g., I, Q. 91, Art. 3: “man alone takes pleasure in the beauty of sensible objects for its own sake,” which seems to broaden the application of beauty). (2) It is difficult to read into this passage, as some have done, an anticipation of the notion that the experience of the beautiful is disinterested or desireless: the “calming of desire” referred to here is that which is given by any good when attained. (3) The experience of beauty is definitely given a cognitive status, but not, in the Platonic or Plotinian sense, a transcendental one; what we know in seeing the statue or painting is precisely its shapes and colors.
The most famous remark about beauty in the Summa Theologica appears in the course of a discussion of attempts by Augustine to identify the persons of the Trinity with some of his key concepts—for example, the Father with unity, the Son with equality, the Holy Ghost with “the concord of equality and unity.” In an effort to sort out these notions and decide how best to construe them, Thomas says,
Species or beauty has a likeness to the property of the Son. For beauty includes three conditions: integrity or perfection [integritas sive perfectio], since those things which are impaired are by that very fact ugly; due proportion or harmony [debita proportio sive consonantia]; and lastly, brightness, or clarity [claritas], whence things are called beautiful which have a bright color [I, Q. 39, Art. 8; clarity and proportion are also referred to in II–II, QQ. 145, Art. 2; 180, Art. 2].
The terms used by Thomas in this passage have a long history, and are rich in suggestiveness; this richness, combined with his terseness, have tempted numerous commentators to venture beyond the role of explicator and develop their own Thomistic (or neo-Thomistic) aesthetic out of them.3 But I shall be more cautious.
What Thomas means by his first condition (integrity or perfection) is plainly enough indicated by his example: an object that is broken is said to be lacking in this condition. Integrity is wholeness: being all there. “Due proportion or harmony” is a little less obvious. Thomas’s application of this concept to the theological problem before him helps to fix its meaning: the Son, he says, has harmony in that he is the “express image” of the Father. “Proportion,” says Thomas in another place (I, Q. 12, Art. 1), has a narrower and a broader sense. In the narrower sense “it means a certain relation of one quantity to another, according as double, treble and equal are species of proportion”; in the broader sense,
every relation of one thing to another is called proportion. And in this sense there can be a proportion of the creature to God, inasmuch as it is related to Him as the effect to its cause, and as potentiality to its act; and in this way the created intellect can be proportioned to know God.
Proportion, in this double sense, plays an important role in Thomas’s thinking about the relation between man’s knowledge and God; it is possible, in his terminology, to speak of proportions between the parts of the work of art, as we would now take it (cf. his commentary on the Divine Names, viii, 4, and ix, 2, 3), but it is the relation of the work to its model, of the statue to the human being, that Thomas seems to have primarily in mind.
It is easy to make much of Thomas’s third condition, clarity, or brilliance, though his casual reference to “bright color” does not perhaps invite a very fancy reading. “Claritas” has important associations. We can connect it with the medieval Neoplatonic tradition of light symbolism—the idea of light as the symbol of divine truth and beauty (as, for example, in Robert Grosseteste, his commentary on the Hexaëmeron and his book De Luce—and see also ch. 4 of the Divine Names of the pseudo-Areopagite). Clarity can be connected, too, with that “splendor of form [resplendentia formae] shining upon the proportioned parts of matter” in the opusculum De Pulchro et Bono (I, vi, 2), written either by the young Thomas or by his teacher Albertus Magnus. “The third [condition],” Thomas says, “agrees with the property of the Son as the Word, which is the light and splendor of the intellect,” and something like, or of, this splendor must be involved in beauty, or the analogy would not hold.
There remains a question, not decisively answerable from the texts, about the relation between beauty and its three “conditions.” “Tria requiruntur,” three things are required, says Thomas, introducing them. But elsewhere, “Beauty consists of due proportion,” etc. Does he mean to distinguish two things, or three? There is certainly the psychological response, pleasure taken in direct perception or intellectual grasp. There are, second, the necessary and sufficient conditions of beauty, the three properties of objects in which beauty is to be found. Is “beauty” another name for these conditions, collectively—are they what the pleasure is taken in? Or is beauty a third thing, distinct from its conditions, though dependent on them? It is clear (and important) that for Thomas beauty is everywhere different. Being a form of good, it is predicated analogously of beings; each object is said to be beautiful in its own way. “The beauty of one [body] differs from the beauty of another” (Commentary on the Psalms, Psalm xliv, 2; cf. the Divine Names, iv, 5). There is not a single beauty common to all beautiful things, but a whole family of qualities, each to be prized wherever it is found. If integrity, proportion, and clarity are univocal, universally the same, then beauty cannot be identical with them; but it may be that these properties are also analogical, and constitute beauty in each of its endlessly varied forms.
THE THEORY OF INTERPRETATION
As we have seen, medieval philosophers had important and interesting things to say as a result of their reflections on the nature of beauty, and some of their ideas were to bear further fruit in modern aesthetics. They did not much concern themselves with working out a theory of art, in our modern sense, however. “Art” in the middle ages meant either (1) the “mechanical” or “servile” arts, that is, practical technology; or (2) the “liberal arts” (the trivium: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic; the quadrivium: music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy); or (3) the “theological arts.” Painting and architecture belonged among the mechanical arts, poetry with rhetoric in the trivium, music in the quadrivium, and the problem of beauty was part of theology. There was no special concept to group together the fine arts, and no sense that they constitute, as such, a distinctive philosophical problem.
Nevertheless, a theory of beauty has, of course, a direct bearing upon the nature of art, and it was not only beauty in nature or in man that aroused the interest and intellectual curiosity of those philosophers. And in another direction, the Christian experience, and the peculiar nature of the Christian message, opened up a line of thought that was of great moment for the later history of aesthetics. Three of the radically new ideas that Christianity brought into view were of special importance in this development.
First, there was the Christian theory of creation, the theory that God created the natural universe out of nothing—not giving birth to it in some way, or molding or carving, or fashioning prime matter after the Forms, but simply making something where before there was nothing. This theory raised difficult theological and metaphysical problems, of course, and especially it called for a new conception of the relation between the visible world and its invisible cause. The universe became the work of God in a more fundamental sense than hitherto, and might be expected to show in its nature the marks of its origin, to reflect, however dimly or remotely, the goodness and beauty of its maker. It would be possible for some Christian thinkers, of course, to think of matter as opposed to spirit; but since matter itself, in the creation theory, is not eternal or inherently resistant to divine workmanship, nature might more naturally be interpreted as in some sense a living symbol of divinity.
Second, the central notion of Christianity was the Incarnation: the Word becoming flesh, giving a meaning to history. In this profound mystery, requiring the subtlest thinking of the Fathers to be made intelligible to reason, there is already another concept of the symbol: the bodily vehicle, or vessel, that takes and carries the divine Truth, the Logos, but is yet somehow distinct from it. Some of the early Fathers tried to assimilate this relationship to the Platonic form-matter relationship, but new concepts were going to be needed.
Third, Christianity acknowledged a double set of divine texts, posing complex problems of their own. As sacred writings, the books of the Bible required the development of a method and system of interpretation to be made understandable and acceptable. Moreover, after the early Christians evolved their theory that the events of the New Testament were prefigured in the Old, the problem was how to read the Old Testament so as to make this anticipation clear. And because the sacred writings were fundamentally different from secular writings (the pagan poems and plays and histories), this difference had to be explained and defended.
The earliest Fathers, and notably Clement and Origen, were taken up with this third problem, of interpreting the Biblical texts and forging from them a theological doctrine that could answer doubts and refute heresies. Much work was required to carry out this exegetical purpose: obscure Biblical texts must be clarified and illuminated; apparently contradictory passages must be reconciled and harmonized; bare and sketchy remarks on important points of doctrine must be elaborated into fuller theories. Historical scholarship, textual criticism, philological speculation, might go some way toward solving these problems, but a more flexible and fruitful method was also needed, and this was found in the allegorical method of Philo Judaeus of Alexandria (first century A.D.).
It was remarked in Chapter 1 that the allegorizing of Homer and Hesiod was practised at least as early as the sixth century B.C., and, despite the objections of Plato and others, it was carried further by the late Stoics. The Jewish rabbis also used this method to expound their Scriptures, and the Jewish and Greek traditions came together in Philo. His aim was partly to construe the Old Testament books in harmony with his elements of Platonism, and partly to universalize their spiritual truths by abstracting them from their specific historical situation. Allegorizing was also a way of purifying sacred truth, by transmuting what was barbarous or scandalous into something higher. Origen gratefully adopted Philo’s allegorical method, and from Alexandria it was introduced to the West by Ambrose and by Hilary of Poitiers. Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory used it in their own ways, and it was finally accepted by the Middle Ages as the standard method of Biblical exegesis. Meanwhile, it was also applied to secular writings, and in fact made it possible for Vergil and others to be accepted as suitable reading for Christians—already by Augustine’s time, for example, Vergil’s Fourth Eclogue (lines 6–7) was interpreted as a prophecy of the coming Messiah, and the Aeneid was given a detailed Christian construction.
The allegorical method was reasonable to accept. Divine truth could not be expected to transmit itself perfectly, without losses or distortions, through human language, and some way had to be found to go behind the text. There was, however, a methodological problem. Once it was understood that any Biblical character, object, or event might be taken as standing for some abstract quality or Christian truth, how could correct interpretations be distinguished from incorrect ones? Philo’s allegories were sometimes very free-wheeling, and there was some fear among the early Christian Fathers that this procedure might be carried too far. It was not clear how one is to decide which passages are to be taken literally, and which allegorically; and, of the allegorical ones, how remote and abstract the meaning is allowed to be.
Origen followed Philo and Clement in holding that all Scriptural passages have a deeper meaning than that which first appears. It is not merely that the Biblical interpreter is to look in the Old Testament for things that can usefully be allegorized—for example, the Red Sea signifying baptism. The task is to bring out into the open the higher sense of every event. For the Biblical language is like a cloak that conceals from the casual eye—but not from the Christian initiate—the inner and better truth. In some Biblical passages, Origen said, there are three kinds of meaning, literal, moral, and spiritual (or mystical). Thus, for example, the little foxes in the Song of Songs (he says in his commentary) can be understood literally as foxes, or morally as sins besetting the individual, or spiritually as heresies attacking the Church. In some passages there is no moral meaning, and in some not even a literal meaning—as when the words are too absurd when taken literally: “If thine eye offend thee pluck it out” (De Principiis IV, i, 16, 18, 20). But there is always a spiritual meaning, for any object (since it comes from God) can stand for a spiritual quality or truth, and Scripture, being divinely inspired, would not miss the highest possible meaning. Or, to put it another way, just as Jesus spoke in parables, and gave the fig tree and the talents a spiritual signification, so everything in the Old Testament as well is a sort of divine parable, whether or not it can be taken as history or as ethical example.
St. Augustine took up this problem in De Doctrina Christiana (written about 397). It is crucial for the Biblical interpreter, he says, to be clear about the difference between the letter and the meaning (sententia), which is far more important, just as the soul is more important than the body. The words are the “fleshly robes” in which the meaning is concealed, waiting to be “unwrapped,” as he says in De Catechizandis Rudibus ix, 13 (trans. Huppé, Doctrine and Poetry, p. 8). The process of interpretation, of laying open what is concealed, is for Augustine the source of a kind of special aesthetic pleasure in reading Christian literature; there is a difficult beauty in revealed truth that comes because the mind must penetrate a certain obscurity of language: “The more they [i.e., the Prophets] seem to be obscure by the use of figurative expressions, the more pleasing they are when their meaning has been made clear” (De Doctrina Christiana IV, vii, 15; trans. Sister Thérèse Sullivan).
The problem is to ascertain whether a given text is “literal” or “figurative,” and Augustine proposes an interesting solution to this problem. The function of scripture is to promote Christian charity—the movement of the spirit toward love of God for his own sake and of one’s neighbor for the sake of God. It follows that the correct meaning of Scripture is always what will fulfill this function.
In all cases this is the method: whatever in Scripture cannot literally be related to purity of life or to the truth of faith, may be taken as figurative. . . . In regard to figurative passages, a rule like the following shall be observed: what is read must be diligently turned over in the mind until an interpretation is found that promotes the reign of charity [De Doctrina Christiana III, x, 14; xv, 23; trans. Huppé, p. 19].
The true underlying meaning of the text (sententia veritatis; III, xxiv, 34) will always emerge for the properly prepared reader: he must come in the right spirit, and he may find that the knowledge of the rhetorical tropes and figures, as well as scientific knowledge of nature, are indispensable.
It was apparently John Cassian (360–435) who first formulated the fourfold distinction between levels of Scriptural meaning that was to become more or less standard in the Middle Ages—and gave the classic example. In his Collationes (xiv, 8; Migne, vol. 49, cols. 963–64) he says that Jerusalem, in the Old Testament, makes a “historical” reference to a city of the Jews; on the “allegorical” level (or what was also called the “typical” level, the level on which the Old Testament refers prophetically to the New) it refers to the Church of Christ; on the “tropological” or moral level, to the individual soul; and on the “anagogical” level to the heavenly city of God. The distinctions (along with the example) are repeated in the De Schematibus et Tropis of the Venerable Bede.
Two points about this scheme were further clarified by Hugh of St. Victor. First, there is the relation between the literal and the other levels. Hugh criticizes those who have exalted the three allegorical levels at the expense of the literal level. All other levels are a function of the literal level, he insists—if you don’t know what “lion” literally means, you can’t know that it can allegorically mean Christ (De Scripturis et Scriptoribus Sacris v, cols. 13–15A; cf. Eruditionis Didascalicae VI, 4, cols. 804–5; 8–11, cols. 806D–809A). Second, there is the scope of the literal meaning. “Literal” is not here opposed to “metaphorical” or “figurative,” but simply means going by the words, rather than seeking symbolic intimations in the object denoted. The literal reading includes what can be derived from the language, diction, syntax, metaphors, and similes. Hugh distinguishes “letter,” “sense,” and “sentence”—the “sense” is the intention of the writer, and the “sentence” is the deeper meaning extracted from letter and sense.
St. Thomas argued for the appropriateness, and even the necessity, of metaphors in Holy Scripture, because all knowledge originates from sense, and it is natural for man to attain to concepts of spiritual things via material things (Summa Theologica I, Q. 1, Art. 9), though he makes clear that the essence of God cannot be seen through a material likeness (see Q. 12, Art. 2; Q. 13, Art. 5). He introduces the convenient term “spiritual senses” for the three nonliteral senses, and, following Hugh of St. Victor, emphasizes the point that the literal sense includes “parabolical” (i.e., figurative) meaning: “Nor is the figure itself, but that which is figured, the literal sense. When Scripture speaks of God’s arm, the literal sense is not that God has such a member, but only what is signified by this member, namely, operative power” (I, Q. 1, Art. 10; trans. Dominican Fathers).
The most famous allusion to the four levels of meaning is in the letter to Can Grande (1319) that Dante put as a preface to the Paradiso (assuming that Dante wrote it, which has been questioned). Though Dante makes the distinctions and illustrates them by the interpretation of a Biblical passage (sec. 7), he proceeds to treat the allegorical, moral, and anagogical meanings together under the general heading of “allegorical,” and he does not distinguish all four levels when he refers to the allegorical meaning of the Divine Comedy (secs. 8, 11: the allegorical subject is man as meriting reward and punishment). Indeed, the application of the scheme to poetry, even religious poetry, would require some modifications, since the “typical” meaning would drop out. St. Thomas had in fact said explicitly (Quaestiones Quodlibetales VII, Q. 6, Art. 16) that poetry could have only literal, not spiritual, meaning.
As a method of Scriptural interpretation, the fourfold scheme could of course come to be applied mechanically—in the schools of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, dictionaries were drawn up for object-names, “bed,” “rock,” “lamb,” etc., in which each of the four levels was described and illustrated from Scripture, and sometimes several variant examples were given of each level. For our purposes here, we need not trace this decline in the theory of Biblical exegesis; nor can we follow another trail, the development of allegory as a conscious and deliberate poetic method, as in the Divine Comedy, The Faerie Queene, and Pilgrim’s Progress. We can only consider in a general way the ground that was laid for a general conception of literature and art: the suggestions in the direction of a theory of symbolic forms, a view that every literary work of art, and perhaps every nonverbal work as well, is a kind of symbol. To fill out this picture, we must consider, at least briefly, a medieval development that was parallel with, and closely related to, the one already considered—the growth of a conception that not only the sacred written word, and the objects referred to in Scripture, but all of the material world, is to be construed as a symbol waiting to be interpreted.
The chief source of medieval inspiration on this matter was the work of the late-fifth-century (or early-sixth-century) writer mistakenly believed by the Middle Ages to be Dionysius the Areopagite, and now called the pseudo-Areopagite or the pseudo-Dionysius. In his writings—and chiefly the Celestial Hierarchy, the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, and the Divine Names—Christian, Greek, Jewish, and oriental materials are brought together in a solution saturated with the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Proclus, and a remarkable mystical system emerges. The various orders of mundane and supramundane beings are described in picturesque detail, and sometimes with exalted ardor. The structure of relationships within society and the Church is paralleled by the echelons of angelic beings.
The pseudo-Areopagite was preoccupied with the problem of religious language, and he put this problem in its classic form for Western theology. What can meaningfully be said, affirmatively or negatively, of God and the divine nature? If all words we use must be learned in earthly contexts, and must therefore have empirical referents, how can our language reach so far as to apply truly to transcendent being? In the Celestial Hierarchy (ch. 2), the pseudo-Areopagite explains how humble objects, animals for example, can stand for divine things; he argues that the very incongruity, on the surface, of calling Christ a lamb or a shepherd, for example, shocks us into seeking, and finding, a deeper meaning. In the Divine Names, he analyzes the various Scriptural predicates applied to God, and argues for their legitimacy if taken in metaphorical or analogical senses. He speaks of
that loving kindness which in the Scriptures and the Hierarchical Traditions, enwrappeth spiritual truths in terms drawn from the world of sense, and super-essential truths in terms drawn from Being, clothing with shapes and forms things which are shapeless and formless, and by a variety of separate symbols, fashioning manifold attributes of the imageless and supernatural Simplicity [ch. 1; trans. Rolt, p. 58].
The idea that everything in the visible universe is in some way a counterpart of something invisible is, of course, a derivation from the Platonic doctrine of Forms, by way of the Plotinian doctrine of emanation. Visible things are, says John Scotus Eriugena in De Divisione Naturae (I, iii, col. 443), signs of the invisible. The investment of the corporeal world with an incorporeal symbolic meaning took on sacramental depth in the Christian context. It dominated medieval thinking in almost every area, and though in eclipse during the Enlightenment, it remained alive to blossom again in the Idealism and Romanticism of the nineteenth century.4
Something of this spirit can be seen in St. Francis’s mystical empathy with nature, and it is worked out even more fully by that later Franciscan, St. Bonaventure. The order that interpenetrates his universe is constituted by the endless analogies between its parts, great and small; everything has, directly or indirectly, this kind of connection with everything else—it might almost be called an aesthetic connection, though he thinks of it as a special sort of logical one. The relationship between God and his creation is to be understood in these terms, for “It is clear,” he says (Collationes in Hexaëmeron II, 27; Opera Omnia, 1882–1902, V, 340), “that the whole world is like a mirror, bright with reflected light of the divine wisdom; it is like a great coal radiant with light” (trans. Wimsatt, Literary Criticism, p. 147). Although the degrees of distance between created things and God are infinite and continuous, St. Bonaventure thinks it reasonable and helpful to distinguish three degrees in which objects reflect and represent their creator. A “shadow” is a distant and confused representation of God, by means of certain properties but without specifying the type of causal relationship God has to it. A “vestige” is a distant but distinct representation of God; the vestige is a property of the created being that is related to God as its efficient, exemplary, or final cause. An “image” is a representation that is both distant and close; it is a property that acknowledges God not only as its cause but also as its object (see his Commentary on the Sentences III, i, 1, Q. 2; III, 72).
The essence of every material object shows that God created all things according to order, measure, and weight (Commentary on the Book of Wisdom xi, 21), which are primary vestiges of God. Creation, viewed as a whole, is like a picture or a statue representing divine wisdom (quoddam simulacrum sapientiae Dei et quoddam sculptile; In Hexaëmeron xii, 14; V, 386). Or, the visible universe is a holy book, of which individual creatures are words; and like a sacred book written in a difficult language, it lies there to be made understandable, so its Author will be revealed (ibid. II, 20; V, 340). Natural objects can be considered either as things (res) or as signs (signa)—and the methods used to interpret Scripture can be applied to nature as well: above all, we must not miss its spiritual significations (Sentences I, iii, 3, Q. 2; I, 75). Farther toward a universal semiotic, the application of the category of symbol to all existence, it would not be possible to go.
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1 See Williston Walker, A History of the Christian Church (New York, 1918), p. 163.
2 See S. R. Maitland, The Dark Ages (London, 1845), pp. 171–87; Henry Osborn Taylor, The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages (New York, 1903), pp. 107–35.
3 The speculations of Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are best known; see William T. Noon, S.J., Joyce and Aquinas (Yale, 1957), pp. 11–12 and ch. 2.
4 See Erwin Panofsky, “Abbot Suger of St.-Denis,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, 1957), for a most interesting account of the way in which Abbot Suger drew upon the ideas of Scotus and the pseudo-Areopagite for justification of the lavish sensuous beauties with which he furnished St.-Denis.