Explicit and developed medieval discussions of beauty are not found until the early thirteenth century. In the background lie two different types of theory, which they could read in the ancient sources. On the one hand, there was the conception of beauty as a special sort of composite quality, which they read in Cicero and Augustine. For these authors, an object is beautiful in virtue of the arrangement of its parts in a congruent way, and the delightfulness of its color (a formula that would leave it open for a thing’s beauty not to be a quality it has in itself, but in virtue of its effect on human observers). Some things, therefore, are (more or less) beautiful, and many things not at all beautiful. On the other hand, medieval authors read about beauty in chap. 4 of On the Divine Names, written in the fifth century by Pseudo-Dionysius and available in Latin from the ninth century. He presents beauty as a transcendental attribute, along with goodness (with which, he says, it is identical): all things have it by virtue of existing, since God is beautiful and he transmits beauty to all things.
It was in the early thirteenth century that the theory of the transcendentals was first carefully developed, and there are discussions of beauty in this context by writers such as William of Auvergne and the followers of Alexander of Hales who compiled the Summa Alexandri (cf. Pouillon 1946). At the same period, Robert Grosseteste was able, as a result of his general cosmological theory, to reconcile the idea that everything is beautiful with the Ciceronian-Augustinian definition in terms of color and proportion. Grosseteste conceived the entire universe as an irradiation of light from its ultimate source, God, and, on the medieval view, color is an effect of light. He also thought that the universe is constructed in accord with the laws of geometry, and so everything is proportioned as well as colored.
The three most important discussions of beauty by medieval theologians are those by Albert the Great and two of his pupils, Ulrich of Strasbourg and Thomas Aquinas. The theories are, on examination, very different from one another, but they are alike in attempting to bring together the Ciceronian-Augustinian view of beauty as a composite quality with Pseudo-Dionysius’ transcendental conception of it. Albert treats the subject most fully in his commentary on On the Divine Names (Aquinas 1927:417-443 - it is wrongly attributed to Aquinas in this edition), and so it is not surprising that he identifies beauty with goodness, though he allows that it differs from it ‘‘by reason’’ in certain ways. The identification is deeper than extensional equivalence ((x) (x is good) <-> (x is beautiful)), since all the transcendental attributes have by definition a universal extension and so are extensionally equivalent, and yet neither Albert nor anyone thinks that, for instance, truth (another transcendental) is identical to goodness. It is a moot point, therefore, whether Albert is thinking of beauty as anything more than a way of being good. He helps us to understand what is involved in being beautiful through an analogy with more tangible beauty of the Ciceronian-Augustinian sort. Just as a body is said to be beautiful ‘‘from the resplendence of color over proportioned limbs,’’ so all things are beautiful by the ‘‘resplendence of the substantial or accidental form over proportioned and bounded parts of matter.’’ What does Albert mean by this comparison? According to the
Aristotelian metaphysics that Albert and his contemporaries accepted, all natural things (except, in the view of some, angels and separated souls) besides God are composites of matter and their substantial form, which makes them the sort of thing they are - a human, or a dog, or a flower. They also are the subjects for accidental forms, such as having certain quantities and qualities and relations. For most thinkers of this period, it is matter which individuates forms, and so it makes sense to think of it as being “proportioned and bounded.’’ And so Albert’s comparison is not far-fetched. But there is the important difference that, whereas a person’s limbs may fail to be proportioned and, in the dark, may not have color resplendent over them, any matter-form composite will, on Albert’s theory, have the beauty of form resplendent over proportioned matter. Moreover, while in principle, a thing may have more or less even of a transcendental attribute, it is hard to see how any one matter-form composite is more or less beautiful than another in Albert’s sense. For this reason, Albert’s conception of metaphysical beauty is rather distant from what ‘‘beauty’’ normally means.
By contrast, Ulrich of Strasbourg (De summo bono (On the Highest Good) 1987-1989, II.4) does manage to find a way of admitting degrees of beauty into a theory which, like Albert’s, is based on the way in which forms inform matter. Not every bodily individual perfectly exemplifies the species of which it is a member. In order to be perfectly beautiful, the thing must satisfy the four criteria of quantity, number of parts, relation between the size of the parts and the whole, and disposition. The first two of these requirements are fairly straightforward and rule out certain sorts of abnormalities: for its quantity to be correct, something must be of the appropriate size for its species; neither a dwarf, nor a giant, for instance; a human fails to have the correct number of parts if he or she is one-legged or one-eyed. The third requirement is stricter, since a dog with an unusually long tail or a person with too large a bottom would fail it (in line with a certain widespread intuitive notion of beauty). For the fourth requirement, disposition, Ulrich gives the example of the balance of humors in a human. Many people, according to the medieval theory of humors, do not have their humors in balance, but have, for instance, a choleric temperament or a melancholic one: they would therefore fail to be perfectly beautiful according to Ulrich. These criteria, therefore, would permit quite a fine ranking of beauty, based not just on the external characteristics of things, but on their internal bodily constitutions.
This sort of beauty is, however, just one of four general types distinguished by Ulrich. It is essential corporeal beauty. There is also accidental corporeal beauty. Ulrich separates the relationships between substantial form and its matter, and the matter-form composite and its accidents, which Albert considers together when analysing beauty. Essential beauty is the result of the correct relationship between the former pair, so that the bodily thing is a perfect example of its species, and accidental beauty results from the characteristics of symmetry and color that it has from accidents of quantity and quality. Rather than, like Albert, allude to the Ciceronian-Augustinian definition of beauty as an analogy, Ulrich thus incorporates it into his theory, as a different sort of non-species-based beauty. Ulrich also considers that non-corporeal things, such as angels and separated souls, can be beautiful, essentially or accidentally; for instance, a soul is accidentally beautiful through having knowledge. He does not, however, go into much detail over this side of this theory.
Despite the number of books that have been written on Thomas Aquinas’ theory of beauty (or even more ambitiously, his ‘‘aesthetics’’), he writes about beauty only very rarely and always in passing, in his commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius’ On Divine Names and in the Summa theologiae. There are four passages that are frequently quoted. In chap. 4, Lectio 5 of the Commentary, Aquinas identifies brightness (claritas) and consonance (consonantia) as characteristics of beauty, and he remarks that ‘‘although the beautiful and the good are the same in subject, because both brightness and consonance are contained in the definition of the good, yet they differ by reason, because the beautiful adds beyond the good an ordering to the cognitive power that it is thus.’’ In the Summa theologiae (I, q. 5, a. 4 ad 1), Aquinas remarks that ‘‘in the subject the good and the beautiful are the same, because they are both based on the same thing, that is, on the form.’’ But the good is in respect of the appetite: good is what all things seek after. The beautiful, however, is in respect of the ‘‘cognitive power’’ (vis cognoscitiva), he says, ‘‘for things are called beautiful which please when they are seen.’’ And so, he argues, the beautiful consists in due proportion, because sense is ‘‘a certain ratio’’ and it delights in things that are similar to it. The idea of sense as a ratio is taken from Aristotle’s De anima 424a, where he sees the senses as means or ratios, which can be destroyed by sensations so strong that they lose their balance. In a later quaestio in the Summa theologiae (I, q. 39, a. 8), he explains - while talking about the beauty of the Son of God - that beauty consists, not just in due proportion, but also in wholeness or perfection (a thing must not be missing a part) and brightness (claritas), as exemplified by having a shining color. And in IaIIe, q. 27, a. 1, ad 3, Aquinas says again that the beautiful is the same as the good, but differs ‘‘by reason alone.’’ Then he goes on to explain that, whereas the good is that in which the appetite comes to rest, ‘‘it pertains to the definition of the beautiful that the appetite comes to rest in the sight or knowledge of it.’’ He adds that, for this reason, those senses are chiefly concerned with beauty which are most cognitive - sight and hearing (on which see McQueen 1993). Finally, he summarizes his point by saying that ‘‘the beautiful adds to the good a certain ordering to the cognitive power, so that the good may be said to be that which without qualification pleases the appetite, but the beautiful may be said to be that the apprehension of which pleases.’’
Interpretations of these remarks center on two problems. The first is how to reconcile the side of the theory which identifies proportion/consonance, brightness, and wholeness as features in a thing which make it beautiful, with the side of the theory which emphasizes the role of the cognizer with regard to the beauty of a thing (by contrast with its goodness, for instance). Most interpreters insist that Aquinas has an objective conception of beauty - that is to say, things are beautiful in virtue of attributes that they really have, but that we have to make a special use of our intellectual faculties in order to grasp this beauty. Writing originally in 1920, Jacques Maritain (1965) identified a special power of intellectual intuition by which we grasp the beauty of things. More recent analysts (especially Eco 1988:60-63; 2007:281-317) have shown clearly that Aquinas does not suggest or have room for a notion of intellectual intuition, and they have elaborated their own accounts of how we cognize beauty (cf. Mothersill 1984:323-366; Eco 1988; Jordan 1989).
The second problem of interpretation is whether beauty is in fact a transcendental for Aquinas. Most interpreters believe that it is: their strongest argument for this view is that Aquinas identifies the beautiful with the good, and good is certainly a transcendental for him. But Aquinas never explicitly lists beauty as a transcendental, and in his presentation of the transcendentals in De veritate 1.1 beauty is not included. Kovach (1961) - the most thorough collection and analysis of texts on Aquinas and beauty - suggests that Aquinas came to include beauty among the transcendentals only after he had written De veritate. He proposes that for Aquinas beauty was a sort of super-transcendental, which brings the other transcendental attributes together. But Aertsen (1991) has argued powerfully that beauty is not an independent transcendental in Aquinas (nor in general in the thirteenth-century tradition). In his view, Aquinas thought that being beautiful is just a way of being good.
An even more radically minimalist interpretation of Aquinas’ remarks on beauty is possible. All things are good in respect of their forms, Aquinas believes (and he explains why - to be good is to be sought as an end; things are sought as ends because they are perfect, and by being in act, they are in some way perfect; and it is the form which makes a thing be in act (Summa theologiae, I, q. 5, a.3)). Things are beautiful, too, in respect of their forms and the fact that - as perfections - these forms are objectively ends to be sought. There is nothing else in the nature of things on which beauty is based and so, in subject, beauty and goodness are identical. But a thing is called ‘‘beautiful’’ only when simply seeing or knowing its form is pleasing, and that happens when the object has, by virtue of its form, certain qualities (proportion, brightness, wholeness) that delight the cognizer. There is no reason at all to think that all things have these qualities. In the case of proportion, Aquinas says that it delights cognizers because the cognizing senses are themselves proportions. This would suggest that finding something beautiful depends on its having attributes that accord with those of the cognitive powers - not those of this or that cognizer, however, but rather those which cognitive powers must have if they are to cognize. And so on this interpretation, judgments of beauty are for Aquinas, just as they would be for Kant, subjectively universal.
However he is interpreted, Aquinas, like Albert, Ulrich, and the earlier thirteenth-century theologians, developed his ideas about beauty within the context set by Pseudo-Dionysius’ view that beauty is an attribute of God transmitted to all creation, and the Ciceronian-Augustinian view of beauty as a complex quality in the background. One contemporary author, who is not a theologian, had an entirely different source and so a completely different approach. Witelo’s treatise on perspective is an adapted translation from an eleventh-century Arabic author, al-Haytham. For al-Haytham (II.3), an object is beautiful just in case it has properties which affect viewers (he is concerned just with visual beauty, given that he is writing about optics) in such a way that they describe them as beautiful. What are these properties? They include color, but, in the main, they are grouped in antithetical pairs. For example, al-Haytham gives the pair discrete/continuous: separate stars, he believes, are more beautiful than nebulae, but a meadow is more beautiful when its vegetation is continuous than when it is broken up into discrete patches and so is sparse. Clearly, al-Haytham does not believe that his paired characteristics provide a formula for showing what is or is not beautiful. Rather, things are beautiful because they affect us in a certain sort of way, and his antitheses provide a framework for recording some of the different characteristics of different things which have this effect. Witelo makes one important change to al-Hazen’s theory of beauty. Al-Hazen shows no awareness that what is considered beautiful may vary from culture to culture. Witelo (Baeumker 1908:IV.148) recognizes that many types of beauty are based on custom, and that each race will consider that the characteristics of its own members are beautiful. An Arab like al-Hazen will, therefore, judge different colors and proportions beautiful in a human being than a Dane, Witelo explains, perhaps with it in mind that al-Hazen condemns blond hair and blue eyes as ugly.
World History
