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.
Thus, in medieval culture, to think about art was to think about a vast and diverse array of endeavors in which human beings fulfill a purpose by imposing form on matter. To ponder beauty was to ponder human imitations and reproductions of the divine beauty found in Creation. To theorize aesthetic taste was to remind one’s readers or listeners that the practice of virtue will help them find pleasure in beholding that which is truly good.
What a contrast all this is to the philosophical works of modern aesthetics, which are certainly not without value, but which do tend to isolate aesthetic experience within a theoretical framework that I find unsatisfying and needlessly complex. Though medieval culture was perfectly capable of producing philosophical complexity and intricate theories, it could also look at a sunset, or a rose, or a sinuous river, or a healthy human body, and say, “This is beautiful—it is well-ordered and balanced and harmonious, and it comes from God.” And from beauty the mind moves naturally to art: “If I employ my knowledge and skill to create something that fulfills a purpose, just as God made all things for a purpose, and if my creation reflects the order and harmony of His Creation, it will be beautiful—and the good God will be pleased with the work of my hands.”
That is true beauty: that doth argue you
to be divine and born of heavenly seed:
deriv’d from that fair Spirit, from whom all true
and perfect beauty did at first proceed.
—Edmund Spenser, “Amoretti”
The topic of medieval aesthetics is exceedingly rich; this essay cannot be more than a prologue to a discussion that we’ll revisit in future posts. One thing I want to highlight at this point is a thought-provoking divergence between medieval aesthetics and modern aesthetics.
If you study foundational treatises of modern aesthetics—notable names here include Lord Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, Edmund Burke, and Immanuel Kant—you’ll find an emphasis on the notion of “disinterest.” A beholder must be “disinterested” when making an aesthetic judgment or experiencing aesthetic pleasure; in other words, we must contemplate and appreciate a beautiful object for its own sake, without desiring to possess it, without projecting our interior life upon it, and with all our attention focused on the object’s outward form and composition.
The prevailing medieval passion for balanced structures and harmonious interrelations could not have endured this sort of rupture between beauty and beholder. Rather, the aesthetic experience derived power and transcendence from a contemplative gaze that united beauty and beholder. In the medieval model, human beings enjoy seeing or hearing orderly, harmonious things because human nature is orderly and harmonious, and when the world outside of us resonates with essential qualities inside of us, we feel pleasure.
Modern science teaches that human eyes are passive, only receiving light emitted or reflected by an object, but in medieval thought, full perception involved light from the object and light from the soul of the beholder. The beauty of the object irradiates our eyes, the beauty of our soul irradiates the object, and both receive their beauty from the supreme and ultimate source: God. This is not disinterest, which etymologically means, from Latin inter-esse, that we “are not in the midst of.” Rather, it’s a deep aesthetic correspondence that draws the beholder into the beauty of the object and thence into the transcendent beauty of the Creator.
This brings us back to the title of this essay: “the one within the many,” which articulates the essence of medieval aesthetics and supplies a wonderfully elegant and mind-opening definition of beauty—well worth committing to memory, I’d say. When the arrangement, proportionality, and radiance of distinct elements are such that the elements form a harmonious and unified whole, the many have become one, and the one is beautiful. And when we ourselves become part of the one within the many—that is, when an encounter with true beauty brings the beholder into the midst of this harmonious oneness—we naturally look beyond aesthetic pleasure to the infinite love of its divine Source.
Pleasure follows from desire, and desire can be shaped. Rightly ordered desires when attained bring rightly ordered pleasure. This is why in the collects of the Mass the Church is constantly asking Our Lord to grow in our souls right desire. With right desire we find pleasure in the good, pleasure in the things of God. Pleasure and disgust can be our servants in helping us go to God if our desires are rightly ordered. When not rightly ordered, when perverse, we find pleasure in corrupt things and are ultimately lead to death. For example, porn ought to evoke disgust and shame, not pleasure. It only evokes pleasure to those whose desires are in some way, perverse, which most of us are on account of sin and the horrors of our modern times. Our Lord's grace can work in the soul to repair that corruption and produce right desires which lead to pleasure at the good and disgust at the perverse.
Lovely.