Beauty: The One within the Many

Medieval culture offers uniquely profound answers to a controversial modern question: What is beauty?

“Love—clearly the love of beauty—set in order the empire of the gods…. The love of beautiful things has brought forth every good in heaven and earth.”

My previous essay on balance in medieval culture leads naturally to a discussion of medieval aesthetics, since balance—that is, symmetry and just proportion in created things—was essential to beauty, which medieval thought defined quite simply as “that which gives pleasure when one beholds it.”

The branch of philosophy known as aesthetics explores the nature of beauty, fine art, and artistic taste. Humans have been pondering such things for a long time, as the quote above—from Plato’s Symposium—suggests. However, aesthetics emerged as a distinct field of philosophical inquiry only in the eighteenth century. It did not exist in the Middle Ages; no surviving medieval text can properly be called a treatise on aesthetics.

Why would this be the case? Why would an era that produced some of history’s most charming, captivating, and immortal works of art lack formal theories of art and beauty? We’ll find a better answer if we ask a different question: Why does modernity have formal theories of art and beauty? This is the more important question! And I’ll tell you why: From the medieval perspective, modern culture writes philosophical texts specifically about art and beauty because modern culture is fragmented.

For, he being dead, with him is beauty slain,
And, beauty dead, black chaos comes again.
—Shakespeare, “Venus and Adonis”

Scholars and artists of the Middle Ages had many ideas about aesthetics. In fact, their ideas about aesthetics are the most profound and compelling that I have ever encountered. But medieval life, as regular readers of Via Mediaevalis will know by now, was a monumental and multifaceted quest for wholeness—for synthesis, integration, harmony, completion.