“Ex divina pulchritudine esse omnium derivatur.”
St. Thomas Aquinas, De Pulchro
It is affirmed that “beauty relates to the cognitive faculty” (St. Thomas Aquinas, Sum. Theol., I, 5, 4 ad 1) being the cause of knowledge, for, “since knowledge is by assimilation, and similitude is with respect to form, beauty properly belongs to the nature of a formal cause” (ibid.). Again, St. Thomas endorses the definition of beauty as a cause, in Sum. Theol., III, 88, 3, he says that “God is the cause of all things by his knowledge” and this again emphasizes the connection of beauty with wisdom. “It is knowledge that makes the work beautiful” (St. Bonaventura, De reductione artium ad theologiam, 13). It is of course, by its quality of lucidity or illumination (claritas), which Ulrich of Strassburg explains as the “shining of the formal light upon what is formed or proportioned,” that beauty is identified with intelligibility: brilliance of expression being unthinkable apart from perspicacity. Vagueness of any sort, as being a privation of due form is necessarily a defect of beauty. Hence it is that in medieval rhetoric so much stress is laid on the communicative nature of art, which must be always explicit.
It is precisely this communicative character that distinguished Christian from late classical art, in which style is pursued for its own sake, and content valued only as a point of departure; and in the same way, from the greater part of modern art, which endeavors to eliminate subject (gravitas). Augustine made a clean break with sophism, which he defines as follows: “Even though not quibbling, a speech seeking verbal ornament (Skr. alamkâra) beyond the bounds of responsibility to its burden (gravitas) is called sophistic” (De doctrina christiana, II, 31). Augustine’s own rhetoric “goes back over centuries of the lore of personal triumph to the ancient idea of moving men to truth” (Baldwin, Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic, p. 51), to Plato’s position when he asks: “About what does the sophist make a man more eloquent?” (Protagoras, 312), and Aristotle’s, whose theory of rhetoric was one of the “energizing of knowledge, the bringing of truth to bear upon men ... Rhetoric is conceived by Aristotle as the art of giving effectiveness to truth; it is conceived by the earlier and the later sophists as the art of giving effectiveness as to the speaker” (Baldwin, loc. cit., p. 3). We must not think of this as having an application only to oratory or literature; what is said applies to any art, as Plato makes explicit in the Gorgias, 503, where again he deals with the problem of what is to be said—“the good man, who is intent on the best when he speaks ... is just like any other craftsman ...You have only to look, for example, at the painters, the builders ...” The scholastic position is, then, as remote from the modern as it is from the late classic: for just as in sophism, so in the greater part of modern art, the intention is either to please others or to express oneself. Whereas the art of pleasing, or as Plato calls it, “flattery” (Gorgias), is not for the Middle Ages the purpose of art, but an accessory (and for great minds not even an indispensable) means, so that as Augustine says, “I am not now treating of how to please; I am speaking of how they are to be taught who desire instruction” (ibid., IV, 10). And whereas in the greater part of modern art one cannot fail to recognize an exhibitionism in which the artist rather exploits himself than demonstrates a truth, and modern individualism frankly justifies this self-expressionism, the medieval artist is characteristically anonymous and of “unobtrusive demeanor,” and it is not who speaks, but what is said that matters.
No distinction can be drawn between the principles of medieval plastic and figurative art and symbolic “ornament” and those of contemporary “sermons” and “tracts,” of which an indication may be cited in the designation “Biblia pauperum” as applied to a pictorial relation of scriptural themes. As Professor Morey remarks, “The cathedral ... is as much an exposition of medieval Christianity as the Summa of Thomas Aquinas” (Christian Art, 1935, p. 49); and Baldwin, “The cathedrals still exhibit in sculpture and glass what came in words from their pulpits ... Such preaching shows the same preoccupations as the symbolic windows of the cathedrals, their carved capitals, above all the thronged but harmonized groups of their great porches” (Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic, pp. 239, 244). It is therefore entirely pertinent to note that according to Augustine, who may be said to have defined once for all the principles of Christian art (De doctrina christiana, book IV, a treatise that “has historical significance out of all proportion to its size,” Baldwin, op. cit., p. 51), the business of Christian eloquence is “to teach, in order to instruct; to please, in order to hold; and also, assuredly, to move, in order to convince” (IV, 12-13); the formula docere, delectare, flectere, or alternatively probare, delectare, movere, deriving from Cicero; probare means the demonstration of quod est probandum, the theme or burden of the work.1 The meaning of “pleasure” (delectatio) is explained by St. Augustine when he says “one is pleasing (gratus) when he clears up matters that need to be made understood” (IV, 25). But in the present context Augustine is thinking rather of pleasure given by “charm of diction” (suavitas dictionis) by means of which the truth to be communicated is at it were made palatable by the addition of a “seasoning” which, for the sake of weak minds, ought not to be neglected but is not essential if we are considering only those who are so eager for the truth that they care not how inelegantly (inculte) it may have been expressed, since “it is the fine characteristic of great minds (bonorum ingeniorum) that they love the truth that is in the words, rather than the words themselves” (IV, 11). And with reference to what we should call, perhaps, the severity of “primitive” art, Augustine’s words are very pertinent: “O eloquence, so much the more terrible as it is so unadorned; and as it is so genuine, so much the more powerful: O truly, an axe hewing the rock!” (IV, 14).
Perspicacity is the first consideration; such language must therefore be used as will be intelligible to those who are addressed. If necessary, even “correctness” (integritas)2 of expression may be sacrificed, if the matter itself can be taught and understood “correctly” (integre) thereby (IV, 10). In other words, the syntax and vocabulary are for the sake of the demonstration (evidentia: quod ostendere intendit), and not the theme for the sake of the style (as modern aestheticians appear to believe). The argument is directed against a mechanical adhesion to a pedantic or academic “accuracy,” and arises in connection with the problem of addressing a somewhat uncultivated audience. It amounts to this, that in actual teaching, one should employ the vernacular of those who are taught, provided that this is for the good of the thing to be taught, or as the Lankâvatâra Sûtra, II, 114, expresses it, “the doctrine is communicated only indirectly by means of the picture: and whatever is not adapted to such and such persons as are to be taught, cannot be called teaching.” The end is not to be confused with the means, nor are those good means which may seem to be good in themselves, but those which are good in the given application. It is of the greatest interest to observe that these principles amount to a recognition and sanction of such “distortions” or “departures from academic perfection” as are represented by what are called “architectural refinements.” In the case of entasis, for example, the end in view is probably that the column may be understood to be perpendicular and straight-sided, the desired result being obtained by an actual divergence from straight-sidedness. At the same time, the accommodation is not made for aesthetic but for intellectual reasons; it is in this way that the “idea” of perpendicularity is best communicated, and if the resulting “effect” is also visually satisfying, this is rather a matter of grace than the immediate purpose of the modification. In the same way with the composition of any work, this composition is determined by the logic of the theme to be communicated, and not for the comfort of the eye, and if the eye is satisfied, it is because a physical order in the organ of perception corresponds to the rational order present in whatever is intelligible, and not because the work of art was for the sake of the eye or ear alone. Another way in which “correctness,” in this case “archeological accuracy,” can properly be sacrificed to the higher end of intelligibility can be cited in the customary medieval treatment of Biblical themes as if they had been enacted in the actual environment of those who depicted them, and with consequent anachronism. It hardly needs to be pointed out that a treatment which represents a mystical event as if a current event communicates its theme not less but more vividly, and in this sense more “correctly,” than one which by a pedantic regard for archeological precision rather separates the event from the spectator’s “now” and makes it a thing of the past.
Augustine’s principles are nowhere better exemplified than in the case of the Divina Commedia, which we now persist in regarding as an example of “poetry” or belles-lettres, notwithstanding that Dante says of it himself that “the whole work was undertaken not for a speculative but a practical end ... the purpose of the whole is to remove those who are living in this life from the state of wretchedness, and to lead them to the state of blessedness” (Ep. ad Can. Grand., §§ 16 and 15). Current criticism similarly misinterprets the Rig Veda, insisting on its “lyrical” qualities, although those who are in and of, and not merely students of, the Vedic tradition are well assured of the primarily injunctive function of its verses, and have regard not so much to their artistry as to their truth, which is the source of their moving power. The same confusions are repeated in our conceptions of “decorative art” and the “history of ornament.” It is tacitly ignored that all that we call ornament or decoration in ancient and medieval and, it may be added, in folk art, had originally, and for the most part still has there, an altogether other value than that which we impute to it when we nowadays plagiarize its forms in what is really “interior decoration” and nothing more; and this we call a scientific approach!
In Europe, the now despised doctrine of a necessary intelligibility reappears at a comparatively late date in a musical connection. Not only had Josquin des Prés in the fifteenth century argued that music must not only sound well but mean something, but it is about this very point that the struggle between plainsong and counterpoint centered in the sixteenth century. The Church demanded that the words of the Mass should be “clearly distinguishable through the web of counterpoint which embroidered the plainsong.” Record is preserved of a bishop of Ruremonde “who states that after giving the closest attention he had been unable to distinguish one word sung by the choir” (Z. K. Pyne, Palestrina, his Life and Times, London, 1922, pp. 31 and 48). It was only when the popes and the Council of Trent had been convinced by the work of Palestrina that the new and more intricate musical forms were not actually incompatible with lucidity, that the position of the figured music was made secure.
Bearing in mind what has already been said on the invariably occasional character of art, together with what has been cited as to intelligibility, it is sufficiently evident that from a Christian point of view, the work of art is always a means, and never an end in itself. Being a means, it is ordered to a given end, without which it has no raison d’être, and can only be treated as bric-à-brac. The current approach may be compared to that of a traveler who, when he finds a signpost, proceeds to admire its elegance, to ask who made it, and finally cuts it down and decides to use it as a mantelpiece ornament. That may be all very well, but can hardly be called an understanding of the work; for unless the end be apparent to ourselves, as it was to the artist, how can we pretend to have understood, or how can we judge his operation?
If indeed we divert the work of art to some other than its original use, then, in the first place, its beauty will be correspondingly diminished, for, as St. Thomas says above, “if they are applied to another use or end, their harmony and therefore their beauty is no longer maintained,” and, in the second place, even though we may derive a certain pleasure from the work that has been torn out of its context, to rest in this pleasure will be a sin in terms of Augustine’s definitions “to enjoy what we should use” (De Trinitate, X, 10), or a “madness,” as he elsewhere calls the view that art has no other function than to please (De doc. christ., IV, 14). The sin, insofar as it has to do with conduct and ignores the ultimate function of the work, which is to convince and instigate (movere), is one of luxury; but since we are here concerned rather with aesthetic than with moral default, let us say in order to avoid the exclusively moralistic implications now almost inseparable from the idea of sin, that to be content only with the pleasure that can be derived from a work of art without respect to its context or significance will be an aesthetic solecism, and that it is thus that the aesthete and the art “depart from the order to the end.” Whereas, “if the spectator could enter into these images, approaching them on the fiery chariot (Skr. jyotiratha) of contemplative thought (Skr. dhyâna, dhî) ... then would he arise from the grave, then would he meet the Lord in the air, and then he would be happy “(Blake), which is more than to be merely pleased.