I. The Medieval Aesthetic Sensibility 1. Most of the aesthetic issues that were discussed in the Middle Ages were inherited from Classical Antiquity. Christianity, however, conferred upon these issues a quite distinctive character. Some medieval ideas derived also from the Bible and from the Fathers; but again, these were absorbed into a new and systematic philosophical world. Medieval thinking on aesthetic matters was therefore original. But all the same, there is a sense in which its thinking might be said to involve no more than the manipulation of an inherited terminology, one sanctified by tradition and by a love of system but devoid of any real significance. It has been said that, where aesthetics and artistic production are concerned, the Classical world turned its gaze on nature but the Medievals turned their gaze on the Classical world; that medieval culture was based, not on a phenomenology of reality, but on a phenomenology of a cultural tradition. This, however, is not an adequate picture of the medieval critical viewpoint. To be sure, the Medievals respected the concepts which they had inherited and which appeared to them a deposit of truth and wisdom. To be sure, they tended to look upon nature as a reflection of the transcendent world, even as a barrier in front of it. But along with this they possessed a sensibility capable of fresh and vivid responses to the natural world, including its aesthetic qualities. Once we acknowledge this spontaneity in the face of both natural and artistic beauty - a response which was also elicited by doctrine and theory, but which expanded far beyond the intellectual and the bookish - we begin to see that beauty for the Medievals did not refer first to something abstract and conceptual. It referred also to everyday feelings, to lived experience. The Medievals did in fact conceive of a beauty that was purely intelligible, the beauty of moral harmony and of metaphysical splendour. This is something which only the most profound and sympathetic understanding of their mentality and sensibility can restore to us nowadays. When the Scholastics spoke about beauty they meant by this an attribute of God. The metaphysics of beauty (in Plotinus, for instance) and the theory of art were in no way related. Contemporary man places an exaggerated value on art because he has lost the feeling for intelligible beauty which the neo-Platonists and the Medievals possessed.... Here we are dealing with a type of beauty of which Aesthetics knows nothing. Still, we do not have to limit ourselves to this type of beauty in medieval thought. In the first place, intelligible beauty was in medieval experience a moral and psychological reality; if it is not treated in this light we fail to do justice to their culture. Secondly, medieval discussions of non-sensible beauty gave rise to theories of sensible beauty as well. They established analogies and parallels between them or made deductions about one from premisses supplied by the other. And finally, the realm of the aesthetic was much larger than it is nowadays, so that beauty in a purely metaphysical sense often stimulated an interest in the beauty of objects. In any case, alongside all the theories there existed also the everyday sensuous tastes of the ordinary man, of artists, and of lovers of art. There is overwhelming evidence of this love of the sensible world. In fact, the doctrinal systems were concerned to become its justification and guide, fearful lest such a love might lead to a neglect of the spiritual realm. The view that the Middle Ages were puritanical, in the sense of rejecting the sensuous world, ignores the documentation of the period and shows a basic misunderstanding of the medieval mentality. This mentality is well illustrated in the attitude which the mystics and ascetics adopted towards beauty. Ascetics, in all ages, are not unaware of the seductiveness of worldly pleasures; if anything, they feel it more keenly than most. The drama of the ascetic discipline lies precisely in a tension between the call of earthbound pleasure and a striving after the supernatural. But when the discipline proves victorious, and brings the peace which accompanies control of the senses, then it becomes possible to gaze serenely upon the things of this earth, and to see their value, something that the hectic struggle of asceticism had hitherto prevented. Medieval asceticism and mysticism provide us with many examples of these two psychological states, and also with some extremely interesting documentation concerning the aesthetic sensibility of the time. [. . .] 3. If we turn from the mystics to other spheres of medieval culture, lay or ecclesiastical, we can no longer question the existence of sensitive responses to natural and artistic beauty. Some authorities claim that the Medievals never discovered how to connect their metaphysical concepts of beauty with their knowledge of artistic techniques, that these were two distinct and unrelated worlds. I hope to cast doubt on this view. To begin with, there was at least one area of language and sensibility where art and beauty were connected, with no apparent difficulty. It is an area well documented in Victor Mortets Recueil de textes relatifs à lhistoire de larchitecture. In these records of cathedral construction, correspondence on questions of art, and commissions to artists, metaphysical aesthetic concepts mingle constantly with artistic judgments. It is quite clear that this intermingling was an everyday affair. Whether it was recognised also on the philosophical level I shall discuss below. Another question is this. The Medievals habitually employed their art for didactic purposes. Did they, then, ever advert to the possibility of a disinterested aesthetic experience? The issue here, about the autonomy of beauty in art, is ultimately about the nature and the limits of medieval critical taste. There are many texts which could be used to answer these questions, but a few that are especially representative and significant ought to suffice. J. Huizinga, in The Waning of the Middle Ages, observes that the consciousness of aesthetic pleasure and its expression are of tardy growth. A fifteenth-century scholar like Fazio, trying to vent his artistic admiration does not get beyond the language of commonplace wonder. Now this observation is in part correct. But none the less, one must be careful not to equate an imprecision of language with the absence of a state of aesthetic contemplation. What must be noted is how feelings of artistic beauty were converted at the moment of their occurrence into a sense of communion with God and a kind of joie de vivre. In fact Huizinga himself takes note of this. Was not this manner of apprehending beauty appropriate to an age marked by an extraordinary integration of values? The twelfth century provides a prototype of the medieval man of taste and the art lover, in the person of Suger, Abbot of St. Denis. A statesman and a humanist, Suger was responsible for the principal artistic and architectural enterprises on the lie de France. He was a complete contrast, both psychologically and morally, to an ascetic like St. Bernard. For the Abbot of St. Denis, the House of God should be a repository of everything beautiful. King Solomon was his model, and his guiding rule dilectio decoris domus Dei. The Treasury at St. Denis was crammed with jewellery and objets dart which Suger described with loving exactitude. Thus, he writes of a big golden chalice of 140 ounces of gold adorned with precious gems, viz., hyacinths and topazes, as a substitute for another one which had been lost as a pawn in the time of our predecessor . . . [and]... a porphyry vase, made admirable by the hand of the sculptor and polisher, after it had lain idly in a chest for many years, converting it from a flagon into the shape of an eagle. And in the course of enumerating these riches he expresses his pleasure and enthusiasm at ornamenting the church in such a wondrous manner. Often we contemplate, out of sheer affection for the church our mother, these different ornaments both old and new; and when we behold how that wonderful cross of St. Eloy - together with the smaller ones - and that incomparable ornament commonly called the Crest are placed upon the golden altar, then I say, sighing deeply in my heart: Every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, the topaz, and the jasper, the chrysolite, and the onyx, and the beryl, the sapphire, and the carbuncle, and the emerald. One is inclined to agree with Huizingas evaluation of passages like these - that Suger is impressed chiefly by the precious metals, the gems and the gold. The predominant sentiment is one of amazement, a sense of the colossal, rather than of beauty. Suger is thus like the other collectors of the Middle Ages, who filled their storehouses not just with artworks, but also with absurd oddities. The duc de Berrys collection included the horn of a unicorn, St. Josephs engagement ring, coconuts, whales teeth, and shells from the Seven Seas. It comprised around three thousand items. Seven hundred were paintings, but it also contained an embalmed elephant, a hydra, a basilisk, an egg which an Abbot had found inside another egg, and manna which had fallen during a famine. So we are justified in doubting the purity of medieval taste, their ability to distinguish between art and teratology, the beautiful and the curious. [. . .] 4. All of these texts have the effect, not of denying to the Medievals an aesthetic sensibility, but of defining the peculiarities of the aesthetic sensibility which they actually possessed. The concept of integration comes to suggest itself in a central explanatory role, where an integrated culture is taken to mean a culture whose value systems are related to one another, within the cultures necessary limitations, by mutual implication. This integration of values makes it difficult for us to understand nowadays the absence in medieval times of a distinction between beauty (pulchrum, decorum) and utility or goodness (aptum, honestum). These terms are sprinkled throughout Scholastic literature and medieval treatises on poetic technique. Often enough the two categories were distinguished on the theoretical level. Isidore of Seville, for instance, said that pulchrum refers to what is beautiful in itself, and aptum to what is beautiful relative to something else - a formulation inherited from Classical Antiquity, passing from Cicero through St. Augustine to Scholasticism in general. But the medieval view of art in practice, as opposed to theory, tended to mingle rather than to distinguish the two values. The very author who celebrated the beauty of art insisted also upon its didactic function. Suger himself adopted the positions sanctioned at the Synod of Arras in 1025, that whatever the common people could not grasp from the Scriptures should be taught to them through the medium of pictures. Honorius of Autun wrote that the end of painting was threefold: one was that the House of God should be thus beautified; a second was that it should recall to mind the lives of the Saints; and finally, Painting . . . is the literature of the laity [pictura est laicorum litteratura]. The accepted opinion as far as literature was concerned was that it should instruct and delight, that it should exhibit both the nobility of intellect and the beauty of eloquence. This was a basic principle in the aesthetics of the Carolingian literati. These views were often abused by being too strenuously pressed. But we should note that they do not represent a myopic and primitive didacticism. The fact was, that the Medievals found it extremely difficult to separate the two realms of value, not because of some defect in their critical sense, but because of the unity of their moral and aesthetic responses to things. Life appeared to them as something wholly integrated. Nowadays, perhaps, it may even be possible to recover the positive aspects of their vision, especially as the need for integration in human life is a central preoccupation in contemporary philosophy. The way of the Medievals is no longer open to us, but at least the paradigm they offer us can be a source of valuable insights, and their aesthetic doctrines are here of great importance. II. Transcendental Beauty A constantly recurring theme in medieval times was the beauty of being in general. It was a period in whose history darkness and contradiction may be found, but its philosophers and theologians had an image of the universe that was filled with light and optimism. As Genesis taught, God saw all that he had made, and found it very good. . . . Thus heaven and earth and all the furniture of them were completed. And the Book of Wisdom taught also that God created the world according to number, weight, and measure. As we shall see, these concepts were taken to be aesthetic as well as cosmological, and also as expressions of the Good, the metaphysical Bonum. It was the Scriptures, then, extended and amplified by the Fathers, which produced this pancalistic vision of the cosmos. But it was confirmed also by the Classical heritage. The theory that the beauty of the world is an image and reflection of Ideal Beauty is Platonic in origin. When Chalcidius, in his Commentary on the Timaeus, wrote of the worlds incomparable beauty, he was echoing the conclusion of a work fundamental in the formation of medieval thought. For with this our world has received its full complement of living creatures, mortal and immortal, and come to be in all its grandeur, goodness, beauty and perfection - this visible living creature made in the likeness of the intelligible and embracing all the visible, this god displayed to sense, this our heaven, one and only-begotten. And Cicero adds his voice in his De Natura Deorum : Nothing is better than this earth, nor more excellent and beautiful. These confident statements of Classical pancalism were translated in medieval times into even more emphatic terms - a consequence in part of the Christian sentiment of love for Gods handiwork, and in part also of neo-Platonism. These two influences came together most fruitfully in the De Divinis Nominihus of Dionysius the Areopagite. It is a work which describes the universe as an inexhaustible irradiation of beauty, a grandiose expression of the ubiquity of the First Beauty, a dazzling cascade of splendours. But the Superessential Beautiful is called Beauty because of that quality which It imparts to all things severally according to their nature, and because It is the Cause of the harmony and splendour in all things, flashing forth upon them all, like light, the beautifying communications of Its originating ray; and because It summons all things to fare unto Itself (from whence It hath the name of Fairness), and because It draws all things together in a state of mutual interpenetration. None of the commentators on Dionysius could resist this fascinating vision, which already conferred some kind of philosophical status, however limited and vague, upon a natural and spontaneous sentiment of the medieval soul. John Scot us Eriugena conceived of the universe as a revelation of God in His ineffable beauty, God reflected both in material and in ideal beauty, and diffused in the loveliness of all creation. All things, like and unlike, forms and genera, the different orders of substantial and accidental causes, combined together in a marvellous unity. There was not a single medieval writer who did not turn to this theme of the polyphony of the universe; and we find often enough that along with the calm and control of philosophical language there sounded a cry of ecstatic joy: When you consider the order and magnificence of the universe . . . you will find it to be like a most beautiful canticle. . . and the wondrous variety of its creatures to be a symphony of joy and harmony to very excess. Quite a number of concepts were constructed in order to give philosophical expression to this aesthetic vision of the universe. But they all derived ultimately from the triad of terms given in the Book of Wisdom: number (numerus), weight (pondus), and measure (mensura). Thus we find triads such as dimension, form, and order (modus, forma, ordo); substance, nature, and power (substantia, species, virtus) that which determines, that which proportions, and that which distinguishes (quodconstat, quod congruit, quoddiscernit); and so on and so forth. However, terms such as these were not always co-ordinated systematically. Also, they had to serve another purpose - to define the good as well as the beautiful. Here for instance is William of Auxerre: The goodness of a substance, and its beauty, are the same thing. . . . The beauty of a thing consists in these three attributes (species, number and order) -- the very same in which Augustine says its goodness consists. But at a certain point in its development, Scholasticism felt the need to systematise these triads of terms - to define once and for all, and with philosophical rigour, this pancalistic sensibility which was so widespread yet so vague and lyrical, lending itself to metaphorical rather than to scientific language. [. . .] The two theses which we have looked at already - that beauty is grounded in the form of the object, and that beauty is defined in relation to the knowing subject - were subsequently developed, the first by Albertus Magnus. In his Commentary on the fourth chapter of the De Divinis Nominibus (long attributed to Aquinas under the title De Pulchro et Bono), Albertus wrote, everything that actually exists participates in the beautiful and the good . This is to say that beauty is transcendental. But he then proceeded to give to the notion of beauty an Aristotelian foundation. After a restatement of the doctrine of the Summa of Alexander, that the beautiful and the good are the same in the subject . . . but differ logically [ratione] . . . The good is distinguished from the beautiful by intention [intentione], he then gives his famous definition of beauty: The nature of the beautiful consists in general in a resplendance of form, whether in the duly-ordered parts of material objects, or in men, or in actions. It is clear that beauty is attributed here to all things. But more than this, beauty is guaranteed by metaphysics, not by mere lyrical excitement. Beauty exists in a thing as the splendour of its form, the form which orders the matter according to canons of proportion, and which in shining forth reveals the ordering activity. Beauty, he writes, does not subsist in material parts, but in resplendence of form. And in consequence: Just as corporeal beauty requires a due proportion of its members and splendid colours... so it is the nature of universal beauty to demand that there be mutual proportions among all things and their elements and principles, and that they should be resplendent with the clarity of form. What we find here is that empirical conceptions of beauty handed down in cultural tradition are synthesised in an exact and rigorous philosophical definition of beauty. This kind of hylomorphic doctrine also encompasses the various triads that originated in the Book of Wisdom: terms like dimension, species and order, or number, weight and measure, can now be predicated of form. For, if perfection, beauty, and goodness are grounded in form, any object possessing these attributes must possess all of the properties that pertain to form. Form is determined by its dimension or quantity (modus) and thus by proportion and measure. Form assigns a thing to its species, in accordance with its number, that is, its constituent elements in their concretion. Form directs a thing to its proper end, the one appropriate to its order, and to which it inclines by its weight. It was a sophisticated and articulate theory. But what Albertus did not concede was that the relation of an object to the knowing subject might be a constitutive element in its beauty. His aesthetics, unlike that of the Summa of Alexander, was rigorously objectivist. In one place he rebutted Ciceros view that beauty should be defined with reference to peoples conception of it. Virtue, he said, possessed a clarity (claritas) which made it beautiful even if it was not known to anyone. Form was determined by clarity - not by how it is thought of, but by the splendour which inheres in it. Of course, beauty is an object of knowledge because of this clarity or splendour; but the knowledge is a derivative possibility, not an essential constituent. The distinction involved here is far from trivial. Yet behind this kind of objectivism there is another kind. For Albertus, beauty is objectively present in things without the help or hindrance of men. The other kind of objectivism considers beauty to be a transcendental property also, but a property which is disclosed in relation to a knowing subject. This is St. Thomas Aquinass kind of objectivism. It represents a substantial move in the direction of humanism. Aquinas did not set out, deliberately and with full critical consciousness, to develop an original theory of beauty. But the way in which he gathered and absorbed all the traditional doctrines into his own system certainly gives this impression. It is instructive to compare the Scholastic systems - and Aquinass system is without doubt the most comprehensive and mature - to computers; for when all the data have been fed in, every question necessarily receives a complete answer. The answer is complete only within the limits of a specific logic and a specific mode of understanding things - a medieval Summa is, so to speak, a medieval computer. But the point is that the system produces concepts and answers questions even in cases where its author was unaware of all of the implications of his ideas. The medieval aesthetic tradition produced a number of theories, such as the mathematical conception of beauty, the aesthetic metaphysics of light, a certain psychology of vision, and a conception of form as the cause and the effulgence of pleasure. By following through these theories as they were developed, discussed, and reappraised, we will come to understand better the degree of maturity which they achieved in the thirteenth century, and to see how all the diverse problems and solutions possessed a type of systematic unity. III. The Aesthetics of Proportion [. . .] It was from these sources, then, that the theory of proportion descended to the Middle Ages. At the borders between the classical and the medieval worlds we find St. Augustine and Boethius. Both of these transmitted onwards the more Pythagorean aspects of the philosophy of proportion, for they dealt with it chiefly in the context of musical theory. In Boethius we find also a very typical feature of the medieval mentality: when he speaks of music he means the mathematical science of musical laws. He considered that a true musician was a theorist, a student of the mathematical laws of sound. Instrumentalists were unwitting servants. The composer dwelt in the sphere of instinct, ignorant of the ineffable beauty which theory alone can reveal: He is borne to song, not by speculation and reason, but by a kind of natural instinct. The name of musician belonged primarily to people who judged music in the light of reason. Boethius seemed almost to congratulate Pythagoras for undertaking to study music setting aside the judgement of the ears. His approach to musical experience, and likewise the general approach of the early Middle Ages, was that of a scientist. Still, this very abstract concept of proportion subsequently led to inquiries into the actual structures of sense experience, and a familiarity with the creative act led to a more concrete idea of proportion. It must also be remembered that the concept of proportion came to Boethius from the classical tradition, so that his theories were not just invented abstractions. The outlook of Boethius was that of a sensitive intellectual in an age of profound crisis, an age occupied with the destruction of seemingly irreplaceable values. The classical world was vanishing before his eyes, the eyes of the last humanist. It was a barbaric time, in which the cultivation of letters was dying out. The break-up of Europe had reached one of its most tragic moments. Boethius sought refuge by subscribing to values which could not be destroyed: the laws of number, which would govern art and nature no matter what came to pass. Even in moments of greatest optimism about the beauty of the world, his outlook was that of a sage concealing a distrust of the phenomenal world behind an admiration for the beauty of mathematical noumena. The aesthetics of proportion, therefore, entered the Middle Ages as a dogma for which, it seemed, no verification was needed. But in the event, it stimulated a number of active and fruitful attempts to verify it. The Boethius theory of music is a familiar one. Pythagoras had observed that a blacksmiths hammers struck his anvil with different notes, and that this difference was proportional to the weight of the hammers. Sound was thus governed by number, and this was so irrespective of whether sound was taken as a physical or as an artistic phenomenon. Consonance, Boethius wrote, regulates all musical modulations, and cannot exist without sound. Again, he defined consonance as a unified concordance of sounds dissimilar in themselves. And it pleases the listener because consonance is a mixture of high and low sounds striking the ear sweetly and uniformly. As for the aesthetic experience of music, this also was grounded in the principle of proportion. For human nature turns away from discordant modes but surrenders itself to those which are congenial. Extra support for this view came from educational theory, which held that different musical modes had differing effects upon people Some rhythms were harsh and some were temperate; some were suitable for children; some were soft and lascivious. The Spartans, Boethius reminds us, believed that they could influence their souls by music, and Pythagoras once calmed and sobered a drunken youth by making him listen to a melody in the Hypophrygian mode in spondaic rhythm; the Phrygian mode would have overexcited him. The Pythagoreans made use of certain lullabies to help them to get to sleep, and when they awoke they shook the sleep from their eyes with the help of music. Boethius explained all of this in terms of the theory of proportion. The soul and the body, he said, are subject to the same laws that govern music, and these same proportions are to be found in the cosmos itself. Microcosm and macrocosm are tied by the same knot, simultaneously mathematical and aesthetic. Man conforms to the measure of the world, and takes pleasure in every manifestation of this conformity: we love similarity, but hate and resent dissimilarity. The theory of proportion in the human psyche underwent some interesting developments in medieval aesthetics, but it was the Boethian conception of proportion in the universe that caught their imagination most. One of its chief elements was the belief that there was a musica mundana - that is, the Pythagorean theory of a music of the spheres, a harmony produced by the seven planets orbiting around a motionless earth. According to Pythagoras, each planet generated a note of the scale, the pitch heightening according to the distance from the earth - according, that is, to the planets velocity. Together they produced a most exquisite music, which human beings, due to the inadequacy of their senses, were unable to hear. (Jerome of Moravia drew a rather unhappy analogy with our inability to perceive the same range of smells as dogs.) [. . .] 2. In the twelfth century, not all speculation of this kind derived from the theory of music. The School of Chartres remained faithful to the Platonic heritage of the Timaeus, and developed a kind of Timaeic cosmology. However, it had roots also in a partly aesthetical, partly mathematical, Weltanschauung. As Tullio Gregory writes: Their picture of the cosmos was a development, in terms of Boe-thiuss writings on arithmetic, of the Augustinian principle that God disposes the world according to ordo et mensura - a principle that combines the classical concept of the cosmos as consentiens continuata cognatio with the principle of a Divinity who is life, providence and destiny. This vision of things had first appeared in the Timaeus: God, purposing to make it [the universe] most nearly like the every way perfect and fairest of intelligible things, fashioned one visible living creature, containing within itself all living things which are by nature of its own kind [i.e. are visible]. . . . The fairest of all bonds is that which makes itself and the terms it binds together most utterly one, and this is most perfectly effected by a progression. For the School of Chartres, the work of God was the koojlco.C - the all-encompassing order, opposite of primeval chaos. Nature was the mediator of His operations; there was, as William of Conches put it, a certain force inherent in things, making similars out of similar things.20 Nature, in the Chartrian metaphysics, was not merely an allegorical personification but an active force which presided at the birth and the becoming of things. And then there was the embellishing of the world (exornatio mundi) - the process of completing and perfecting which Nature, in all its organic complexity, actuates in the world after its creation. The beauty of the world, wrote William of Conches, lies in things being in their own element, such as stars in the sky, birds in the air, fish in water, men on earth . That is, the furnishing or fitting out of the world (ornatus mundi) consists in the ordering of creation; it flourishes whenever the matter of creation begins to differentiate itself according to weight and number, and to take on shape and colour in its proper milieu within the universe. So, even in a cosmological theory like this, the term ornatus seems to connote an individuating structure in things. Later on, in the thirteenth century, this concept became the foundation for a theory of beauty centred on the notion of form. In fact, the harmony of the cosmos looks very like an expanded metaphor for the organic perfection of individual forms, both natural and artistic. In this theory, the rigid logic of mathematics is tempered by a sensitivity to the organic qualities of nature. William of Conches, Thierry of Chartres, Bernard of Tours, and Alan of Lille, preferred not to speak of an immutable mathematical order, but rather of an organic process whose nature was best explained by reference to its Author. The Second Person of the Trinity was the formal cause or organising principle of this aesthetic harmony, while the Father was its efficient cause and the Spirit its final cause, the amor et connexio, anima mundi. It was Nature, not number, which governed the earth, Nature of which Alan of Lille wrote: Oh child of God, mother of creation, bond of the universe and its stable link, bright gem of those on earth, mirror for mortals, light-bearer for the world: peace, love, virtue, guide, power, order, law, end, way, leader, source, life, light, splendour, beauty, form, rule of the world. In these and similar visions of cosmic harmony, many of the problems connected with negative features of the world found a solution. Even ugliness found its place, through proportion and contrast, in the harmony of things. It was a view common to all the Scholastics that beauty was born out of contrasts. Even monsters acquired a certain justification and dignity from their participation in the music of creation. Evil itself became good and beautiful, for good was born from it and shone out more brightly by contrast. IV. The Aesthetics of Light In his early works, Grosseteste had developed an aesthetics of proportion. In fact we are indebted to him for one of the best formulations of this conception of beauty: For beauty is a concordance and fittingness of a thing to itself and of all its individual parts to themselves and to each other and to the whole, and of that whole to all things. But in his later works he took up the notion of light, and in his Hexaemeron he tried to resolve the conflict between the qualitative and the quantitative conceptions of beauty. He defined light as the greatest and best of all proportions, as proportionate with itself so to speak: Light is beautiful in itself, for its nature is simple and all things are like to it. Wherefore it is integrated in the highest degree and most harmoniously proportioned and equal to itself: for beauty is a harmony of proportions. Thus identity was the proportion par excellence, and was the ground of the indivisible beauty of God, fount of light; for God is supremely simple, supremely concordant and appropriate to Himself. Grosseteste here led the way, to a greater or lesser degree, for all of the Scholastics of the time, from St. Bonaventure to St. Thomas. But his own particular theory was especially personal and complex. As a neo-Platonist he insisted on the fundamental nature of light: he made it the image for a universe shaped by a unique flux of light-giving energy, at once the source of beauty and of being. It was next door to Emanationism. Out of the unique Light, progressively condensing and diminishing, came the astral spheres and the elements of nature, and thence the infinite gradations of hue and the volumes and activities of things. Thus proportion was just the mathematical order of light - diffusing itself creatively, becoming material in all the diversity imposed upon it by the resistance of matter. Corporeity, therefore, is either light itself or the agent which performs the aforementioned operation and introduces dimensions into matter in virtue of its participation in light, and acts through the power of this same light. Thus, at the origins of a cosmic order of the type described in the Timaeus there was an almost Bergsonian flux of creative energy. Light of its very nature diffuses itself in every direction in such a way that a point of light will produce instantaneously a sphere of light of any size whatsoever, unless some opaque object stands in the way. And to perceive the created world was to perceive its beauty also, whether in its proportions as known to analysis, or in the immediacy of light. V. Symbol and Allegory Huizinga gives an excellent analysis of [the medieval tendency to understand the world in terms of symbol and allegory], and adds that it is a tendency which we continue to share even nowadays: Of no great truth was the medieval mind more conscious than of Saint Pauls phrase: Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate, tunc autem facie adfaciem. [Now all we can see of God is like a cloudy picture in a mirror. Later we will see him face to face.] The Middle Ages never forgot that all things would be absurd, if their meaning were exhausted in their function and their place in the phenomenal world, if by their essence they did not reach into a world beyond this. This idea of a deeper significance in ordinary things is familiar to us as well, independently of religious convictions: as an indefinite feeling which may be called up at any moment, by the sound of raindrops on the leaves or by the lamplight on a table. Such sensations may take the form of a morbid oppression, so that all things seem to be charged with a menace or a riddle which we must solve at any cost. Or they may be experienced as a source of tranquillity and assurance, by filling us with the sense that our own life, too, is involved in this hidden meaning of the world. The Medievals inhabited a world filled with references, reminders and overtones of Divinity, manifestations of God in things. Nature spoke to them heraldically: lions or nut-trees were more than they seemed; griffins were just as real as lions because, like them, they were signs of a higher truth. Lewis Mumford has described this as a kind of neurosis -- a description which is certainly apposite in a metaphorical sense, for it pinpoints the element of strain and deformation in the medieval way of looking at things. More precisely, one could describe the mentality as primitive: there was a certain weakness in their capacity to differentiate among things, a tendency in their concepts to include not just the things of which they were concepts, but also things similar or related to them. Yet it was not primitism either. Rather, it was a prolongation of the mythopoeic dimension of the Classical period, though elaborated in terms of the new images and values of the Christian ethos. And again, it was a revival, caused by a new sense of the supernatural, of the sense of wonder which had faltered in late Antiquity when the gods of Lucian replaced the gods of Homer. We could also think of the medieval propensity for myth and symbol as a flight from reality comparable to that of Boethius, but on the populist level of fable rather than on the level of theory. The dark ages of the early medieval period were years of depression in city and country alike: years of war, of famine and pestilence, of early death. The neurotic terrors of the year 1000 were not as dramatic and excessive as legend would indicate, but the legend was itself born and nourished in a milieu of endemic anxiety and radical insecurity. One of the solutions devised by society to meet these problems was Monasticism, which gave birth to communities which were stable, orderly, and tranquil. The imagination, however, responded to the crisis in a different way, by developing bodies of symbols. Even at its most dreadful, nature appeared to the symbolical imagination to be a kind of alphabet through which God spoke to men and revealed the order in things, the blessings of the supernatural, how to conduct oneself in the midst of this divine order and how to win heaven. In themselves, things might inspire distrust because of their disorder, their frailty, their seeming hostility. But things were more than they seemed. Things were signs. Hope was restored to the world because the world was Gods discourse to man. Christian thinkers were simultaneously looking for positive justification of earthly things, at the very least as an instrument of salvation. But fables and symbols were able to articulate qualities that theory could not. And again, they could make intelligible those doctrines which proved irksome in their more abstract form. Primitive Christianity had already given symbolical expression to the principles of faith; it did this out of prudence, to avoid persecution. Jesus Christ, for example, was represented as a fish. But this opened the way for various imaginative and didactic possibilities that proved to be congenial to medieval man. On the one hand, unsophisticated persons found it easy to convert their beliefs into images; and on the other, theologians and teachers themselves constructed images for those ideas which ordinary people could not grasp in their theoretical form. There was a great campaign to educate the people by appealing to their delight in image and allegory. Suger was one of its leading advocates. And as Honorius of Autun put it, following the Synod of Arras in 1025, pictures were the literature of the laity (laicorum litteratura). In this way a theory of education attached itself to the sensibility of the time, a kind of cultural politics which sought to exploit the mental processes that typified the age. This love of symbol had a curious effect upon the medieval way of thinking. In the normal course of events they would interpret things genetically, in terms of cause and effect. But there could also be a kind of short circuit of the mind, a mode of understanding which looked upon the relations among things not as causal connections, but as a web of meanings and ends. For instance, with a sudden mental leap they would decide that white, red, and green were benevolent, while black and yellow signified penitence and sorrow. White was a symbol of light, of eternity, of purity and virginity: there was a sensitivity to quality here with which we are still in sympathy. The ostrich became a symbol of justice, because the perfect equality of its feathers suggested the notion of unity. The pelican, which was believed to nourish its young with its own flesh, became a symbol of Christ who had given His blood for humanity and His flesh in the Eucharist. The unicorn could be captured by a virgin if it rested its head in her lap, so it was doubly a symbol of Christ-as the Son only-begotten of God, and begotten again in the womb of Mary. Once the symbolism had been accepted, the unicorn became even more real than the ostrich or the pelican. Symbolical interpretation basically involves a certain concordance and analogy of essences. [. . .] According to the Pseudo-Dionysius, it was appropriate that the things of God should be symbolised by very dissimilar entities - lions, bears, panthers - because it was precisely the incongruity of a symbol that made it palpable and stimulating. Aliud dicitur, aliud demonstratur: the Medievals were responsive to this principle even more than we are nowadays to lyricism in poetry. Allegory, according to Bede, excites the spirit, animates the expression, and ornaments the style. We are quite justified in not sharing this taste, but we should not forget that it was to the taste of the Medievals, and that it was one of the fundamental modes in which their aesthetic requirements were satisfied. In fact, it was a kind of unconscious striving after proportion which led to this constant effort to unite the natural and the supernatural. In a symbolical universe, everything is in its proper place because everything answers to everything else. In such a harmonious system, the serpent is homogeneous with the virtue of prudence; and yet the same serpent can symbolise Satan. It was a kind of polyphony of signs and references. Christ and His divinity were symbolised by a vast number and variety of creatures, each signifying His presence in a different place-in heaven, on mountain-tops, in the fields, the forests, and the seas. The symbols used included the lamb, the dove, the peacock, the ram, the gryphon, the rooster, the lynx, the palm-tree, even a bunch of grapes: a polyphony of images. About each idea other ideas group themselves, forming symmetrical figures, as in a kaleidoscope (Huizinga). VI. Aesthetic Perception [. . .] 4. The aesthetic theories of Albertus Magnus encouraged Aquinas to take an interest in the subjective aspect of aesthetic experience. Albertus, it may be recalled, described beauty as the resplendence of substantial form, in an object whose parts are well-proportioned. Resplendence referred to an entirely objective quality, an ontolog-ical splendour, which existed whether or not it was an object of knowledge. And it was a quality found in that principle of organisation which transforms multiplicity into unity. Aquinas accepted, implicitly at any rate, the view that beauty was a transcendental, but his definition of beauty surpassed that of Albertus. In a passage in the Summa, where he has just been asserting the identity and difference of the good and the beautiful, he continues as follows: For good (being what all things desire) has to do properly with desire and so involves the idea of end (since desire is a kind of movement towards something). Beauty, on the other hand, has to do with knowledge, and we call a thing beautiful when it pleases the eye of the beholder. This is why beauty is a matter of right proportion, for the senses delight in rightly proportioned things as similar to themselves, the sense-faculty being a sort of proportion itself like all other knowing faculties. Now since knowing proceeds by imaging, and images have to do with form, beauty properly involves the notion of form. This is an important passage, which clarifies a number of fundamental points. The beauty and the goodness of a thing are the same, because they are both grounded in form; this was in fact a fairly common view. But a form possesses goodness in so far as it is the object of an appetite, that is, the object of a desire for the realisation or the possession of the form, in so far as the form is positive. Whereas beauty subsists in the relation of a form to knowledge alone. Things are beautiful which please when they are seen (visa placent). The word visa means, in fact, not just seen but perceived in the sense of being known. For Aquinas visio meant apprehensio, a cognition; so that the beautiful was idcujus apprehensio placet - something the apprehension of which is pleasing. Visio is knowledge. It has to do with formal causes. It is not just that the sensuous properties of the things are seen; rather, there is a perception of properties and qualities which are organised according to the immanent structure of a substantial form. It is an intellectual, conceptual act of comprehension. This interpretation of the Thomistic term visio, as a type of knowledge, is justified by several passages in the Summa. Beauty is actualised in the relation of an object to the mind which knows it and its beauty; and it is the objective properties of things which guarantee the validity and pleasure of the experience: There are three requirements for beauty. Firstly, integrity or perfection - for if something is impaired it is ugly. Then there is due proportion or consonance. And also clarity: whence things that are brightly coloured are called beautiful. These three well-known properties, taken from a long tradition, are what beauty consists in. But the rationality of beauty has to do with cognition, with visio. And pleasure is another factor which is essential to beauty. It is clear that, in the Thomistic view, pleasure is caused by a potentiality in things which is fully objective. It is not the case that pleasure defines or determines beauty. The problem here is a very real one, which had already cropped up in St. Augustine. He had asked whether things are beautiful because they give delight, or give delight because they are beautiful; and it was the latter view which he adopted. But any theory which gives primacy to the will tends to regard the pleasure as a feeling deliberately and freely attached to the object, not determined by it. We find this view in Duns Scotus. Scotus held the theory that the will controls its act just as the intellect controls its act. Aesthetic perception, then, is a free potency for participating, so long as its act is subordinate to the rule of the will; and this for the more and the less beautiful alike. By contrast, in a theory that gives primacy to the intellect, as is the case with Aquinas, it is clearly the objective properties of a beautiful thing which determine the aesthetic experience of it. Still, these properties are actualised in visio, they are properties that are known to someone. And this alters somewhat the view that we take of the objectivity of beauty. The term visio signifies a disinterested knowledge. It has nothing to do with the ecstasies of mystical love, nor with sensuous responses to sense stimuli. It has nothing to do either with the empathetic relation to objects which is the mark of Victorine psychology. It signifies an intellectual type of cognition, which produces a disinterested type of pleasure: It pertains to the notion of the beautiful that in seeing or knowing it the appetite comes to rest. Aesthetic experience does not mean possessing its object, but contemplating it, observing its proportions, its integrity, its clarity. So that the senses which are concerned most with perceiving beauty are those which are maxime cognoscitivi. We speak of beautiful sights and of beautiful sounds.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 05:40:30 +0000
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