(BLOG SERIES) Rebel Music - What is Beauty? [Part 2.2]: Aquinas on Beauty

We haven’t really given a strict definition on beauty yet (except by connecting it to God) because I don’t think we are able to find that on Plato. The most solid definition on beauty I’ve found comes from St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274).

Thomas Aquinas 

In the Summa Theologiae, he gives a definition of beauty that may be considered as deceptively simple. In the Prima Pars, question 5, article 4 of the Summa, he defines beauty as that “which pleases when seen”. At first glance, this might seem too simplistic and inaccurate when compared to our experiences of the beautiful. Don’t we speak of beautiful music too, a kind of beauty that isn’t “seen”, but rather heard? What about the beauty of a properly formed argument? What should we make of God’s beauty, a kind of beauty that we can’t see, at least in this world?

It’s no question, therefore, that the Thomistic account on beauty is so controversial, even among Thomists.[i] Whether beauty is a transcendental is a question that, after all the research I have done on the matter, seems to disturb the Thomist school the most.[ii] There is, of course, still common ground in the midst of the dispute among Aquinas’ disciples. We will rely on the help of people by the likes of Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P., Daniel De Haan, Paul Gerard Horrigan, and Michael Waddell in giving a basic account on Aquinas’ view on beauty.[iii]

It is important that we tackle the question: Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? As we will see, for Aquinas (and the Thomist tradition in general), the answer to this question goes beyond a mere yes or no, because beauty has both an objective and a subjective aspect. Studying beauty in relation to the one who experience it is beauty considered quad nos (this is what’s properly called aesthetic experience). Studying beauty in and of itself, on the other hand, is beauty considered quad se. We’ll tackle the subjective aspect of beauty first (quad nos), then we’ll go to the objective aspect (quad se) afterwards.

Beauty Quad Nos

First, it is important to emphasize that Aquinas is well-known for using what is known in Scholastic philosophy as analogical language. When he says that beauty is that which pleases when seen, then, he doesn’t necessarily mean that beauty is only experience through the eyes. It also refers to “seeing” other truths through means other than the sense of sight. “[T]he meaning of the term has been extended to include reference to knowledge by means of the other senses, as well to intellectual cognition”[iv]. An instance of this is when someone finally understands the mathematical formula being presented by the math professor. There’s no problem when he exclaims “ah! Now I see” when he expresses through words the fact that he’s able now to wrap his head around the formula. Aquinas himself expands on this in the Summa, when he says that the name of sight is either employed “[to signify] the sense of sight [or] according to [other] use[s] of the name… We say ‘See how it tastes, or smells, or how hot it is.’ The name was further applied to intellectual knowledge, ‘Blessed are the clean of heart for they shall see God’ (Matthew 5:8)”[v].

Aquinas sees beauty as a proper object of our cognitive faculties. He sees it as having the same grounding with goodness, namely, in a thing’s form, but they differ in ratio, or concept: if beauty is the object of cognition, goodness is the object of appetition. So, beauty is something to be contemplated, while goodness is something to be desired[vi].

It is also important to realize that when we apprehend the beautiful (it also doesn’t matter what kind of beauty it is for now, just to be clear: it could be a beautiful painting, or a beautiful sculpture, or even a beautiful face), Aquinas gives emphasis on the senses of sight and hearing, on the eyes and ears. There’s a hierarchy in the human senses when it comes to aesthetic experience, for not all are equally proximate to the intellect. The closest to the intellect are sight and hearing, for it is commonly what these senses receive that becomes objects of intellection. We commonly think about the argument that we’ve heard, or the syllogism that we saw written on a philosopher’s paper. In aesthetic experience, it’s commonly about the symphony that we love listening to or the face of a beautiful lady that we love staring at. These are all experiences of the beautiful. But we don’t talk so much about the beautiful taste or the beautiful smell or the beautiful feeling.[vii] This is why the sense of taste, touch, or smell are commonly those which serve our animality, not necessarily our rationality (i.e. eating).

The beautiful is cognized, but cognizing isn’t enough. It should always be accompanied by the passion of delight, or what we can call pleasure. This is an important addition since this implies that the experience of beauty isn’t just a purely intellectual experience, but it is also something that extends to our emotional powers. You can say, then, that beauty enables our cognition and emotion to be linked. Also, it is important to remember that pleasure is that which is felt. A sympathetic person will feel something when he learns his friend is in pain, but it cannot be described as pleasure. Pleasure, is a necessary consequent for the experience of the beautiful.

Beauty Quad Se

Beauty is something you might call a relational property of being[viii]. It is relational in the sense that it has to be related to us in order for it to be appreciated (through experiencing it). However, just because it’s relational doesn’t mean it’s purely subjective, or just a matter of taste. A deeper inquiry into beauty will prove that its relationality is grounded in the beautiful thing itself, not with the beholder of beauty. Hence, the subjective experience of beauty is, first and foremost, grounded in objective reality. (I mean, do we really need to prove that the Mona Lisa painting is actually more beautiful than the things we commonly flush in the toilet in the objective sense?)

Aquinas gives 3 criteria for what makes a thing beautiful: Integritas (wholeness or perfection), Proportio (harmony), and Claritas (splendor or “brightness”). He writes, “beauty includes three conditions, integrity or perfection, since those things which are impaired are by the very fact ugly; due proportion or harmony; and lastly brightness or clarity.”[ix]

Let’s analyze them one by one.

Integritas

Integritas refers to a thing’s wholeness or perfection. It is what a thing is when it lacks nothing and it reaches its fullness, in both existence and/or operation. That which is mutilated, or amputated, has ugliness in it. Imagine if the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore was bombed (hopefully it wouldn't be). Its former glory grounded in its integrity will be gone. Its beauty would have faded, because the parts are now damaged or obliterated. The grandeur of such a structure will be reduced to ashes. It cannot be considered properly a tourist attraction much less a house of prayer. We can also talk about integritas (or lack thereof) of natural things. There’s a huge difference between a fully mature horse that is able to run properly and a deformed horse that lacks a leg. There’s an added vigor and usefulness, to the former that is missing in the latter.

Proportio

Proportio is, I think, better understood when we contrast it to its opposite immediately: chaos, or lack of order. There’s a reason why our mothers hate it when our beds aren’t properly arranged. There’s a reason why there’s a certain awe we feel when an orchestra plays a musical piece with all harmony it can achieve.

Proportio is, as Paul Gerard Horrigan would describe it, “unity in [the] diversity” of parts[x]. A unity without diversity is boring and dull, while diversity without unity is irritating and messy. There’s a certain annoyance we feel when we overhear two people quarreling through shouting at each other, with one loud, angry voice overlapping on the other. There is, on the other hand, a certain inner peace that one can attain when one contemplates on the proper mix of colors and shadows in the paintings of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. (This is also why most, if not all, of abstract art is ugly and I won’t apologize for that).

Proportion isn’t only in the parts of the thing we perceive as beautiful. It should also be in the thing and in our cognitive faculty. There should be a “fittingness” between our ears and the music we listen to, otherwise we won’t like it. More on this later

Claritas

Claritas might, at first glance, be translated as “clarity” in English. But, although that’s acceptable too (at least for me; I haven’t encountered any Thomist yet who objects to this; most probably because they don’t care anyway) it’s commonly translated as “splendor” or “brightness” or “vividness”, and rightly so. For a thing to be considered beautiful, it has to “reveal itself”, in the sense that we shouldn’t work hard to figure it out, otherwise it will only be a problem in need of solving, not a beauty that we need to contemplate on.

Daniel De Haan cites Mark D. Jordan in expanding on the definition of claritas[xi], using light as analogy:

Only when we translate claritas as brightness, brilliance, or radiance, can we understand its uses in transferred senses or in describing the moral or the miraculous. One metaphorical sense appears in linking claritas with glory, reputation, or revelation. “Claritas”, Thomas argues, implies making something evident, making it conspicuous or manifest, and so “clarificari” is used interchangeably in Scripture with “glorificari”. CLaritas is used regularly to describe the radiance of God’s appearing…[xii]

According to Jordan, Aquinas uses claritas to imply both to “the participated light of natural forms that ground their intelligibility and beauty as well as to the participated inner light of the intellectus agens (agent intellect) by virtue of which we achieve intellectual understanding and contemplation of these forms.”[xiii] In other words, claritas could mean the splendor in the thing itself, grounded in its form, or the splendor that the intellect gets from the thing. Once again, there’s the element of beauty quad se and the intellect that perceives the beauty, or beauty quad nos.

Although we have considered this aspect of beauty as the last of all the aspects, we can actually say that it is what makes us notice beautiful things in the first place. The beautiful thing was “evident”; hence we automatically see its beauty.

20^th century Thomist Jacques Maritain, in his work on aesthetics entitled Art and Scholasticism, has a great passage on claritas. It is worth quoting him at length. For him, claritas is the resplendence of a thing’s form. He says that:

[A] certain splendor is, in fact, according to all the ancients, the essential characteristic of beauty – claritas est de rationes pulchritudinis, lux pulxhrificat, quia sine luce omnia sunt turpia – but it is a splendor of intelligibility: splendor veri, said the Platonists; splendor ordinis, said Saint Augustine, adding that ‘unity is the form of all beauty’; splendor formae, said Saint Thomas… Besides, every form is a vestige or a ray of the creative Intelligence imprinted at the heart of created being. On the other hand, every order and every proportion is the work of intelligence. And so, to say with the Schoolmen that beauty is the splendor of the form of the proportional parts of matter, is to say that it is flashing of intelligence on a matter intelligibly arranged. The intelligence delights in the beautiful because in the beautiful it finds itself again and recognizes itself, and makes contact with its own light.

The role of the human faculties in aesthetic experience

So, is beauty in the eye of the beholder? Aquinas would say yes, although it need not be beheld in order for it to be beautiful, just like a properly cooked delicious food need not be tasted in order for it to be yummy. We need to behold it in order to experience the beauty it brings, just like we have to taste the food to experience the tastiness it has. But beauty, just like tastiness, doesn’t depend on us, it depends on the beautiful object. The subjective experience of beauty has its foundations on objective beauty. Beauty quad nos only builds upon beauty quad se.

“But”, you might object, “this seems to me something contrary to human experience. We indeed have different tastes! Whether its music or paintings or any other forms of art. We should therefore conclude that beauty is purely subjective.”

To answer, we have to have a final word on the role of our cognitive faculties in receiving beauty from the world.

Aquinas, in his commentary on book X of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, states that pleasure is concomitant with the perfect operation of our faculties:

[Aristotle] shows that pleasure is a perfection of activity. For we see that the same activity that we said is most perfect is most pleasant; wherever a perfect activity is found in someone knowing, there too a pleasant activity is found. For a pleasure corresponds… also to contemplation inasmuch as the intellect contemplates some truth with certitude.

Among these activities of sense and intellect, that is most pleasant which is most perfect. But the most perfect activity is that belonging to a well-disposed sense or intellect in relation to the best of the objects that fall under sense or intellect. If then perfect activity is pleasant, and most perfect activity [is] most pleasant, it follows that activity is pleasant to the extent that it is perfect. Therefore pleasure is the perfection of activity.[xiv]

The experience of beauty requires proportionality between the beautiful and the cognitive faculties, which means that our cognitive faculties have to be well-disposed in receiving the beautiful. To complete the thought: yes, we indeed have different “tastes”, but that doesn’t mean those which aren’t in conformity to our tastes are no longer beautiful objectively and therefore beauty simply depends on one’s preferences. It only means that those that don’t appeal to us subjectively aren’t proportionate or fitting to our faculties because we aren’t disposed in receiving them. To quote De Haan: “Beauty is already at home in the world; it is our perceptual capacities that need to be domesticated.”[xv]

There’s a certain “imperfection” or “lack of training”, then, with regards to our faculties when encountering new things in the world. We can see something analogous to our training or development in distinguishing truth from lies or good from evil. We need to search, to philosophize, to reason, and to develop virtue in order to know the truth and the good from what’s merely an apparent truth or good.

This also means we have to, as De Haan also wrote, develop “aesthetic virtue”: the ability to know which is really beautiful and which is really ugly. For if we don’t have such an ability, we will think the ugly is beautiful and vice versa! What’s more, this will lead to our cognition only being well-disposed to receive the ugly. We can add, then, that not only does it follow that since certain things don’t fit your taste, therefore they aren’t beautiful objectively; this might also mean that your taste is so corrupted that you simply just can’t recognize what’s truly beautiful.

And since we are going to be focusing on music, let’s concretize the explanation by giving an example from musical taste: just because your ears have been habituated in hearing Skrillex’s music – that you have a taste in his mixes – doesn’t mean his music is really beautiful; and just because you get a feeling of weirdness and discomfort when you attend classical concert doesn’t mean classical music is ugly. There’s just something wrong with your sense of hearing. Get it fixed before it’s too late.

A final word on Divine Beauty

It is an important aspect of Thomistic philosophy (and plain common sense) that effects manifest, in their own way, though imperfectly, their cause. A sight of Van Gogh’s landscape paintings, for example, gives us a glimpse of Van Gogh’s vision of what the world is. Mozart’s music, in one way or another, manifests the said musician’s mind to its hearers.

The world, as we know it, is filled with integrity, proportion, and splendor, not only with man-made art, but also in nature: in the beautiful green forests, in animals, and many more. In other words, the world is beautiful. And this beauty extends, not only on Earth, but throughout the entire universe: the solar system, the stars, the galaxies, and everything in between.

Yes, there’s also ugliness in the cosmos, but we know they ought not be there, just like evil actions: they’re hear but this is not their place. We should remove them, for they are just privations, or perversions, of what ought to be the case. We do this in dealing with the mess in our home: we clean the house. Ugliness, then, is just a mere “lack”: lack of beauty. It is in no way, then, “part” of creation and the Creator’s vision of it. Just like the damages in a sculpture, it wasn’t put there by the sculptor in the first place and was never an aim of the sculptor as to why he made a magnificent statue.

But, leaving aside ugliness at this moment, just as the beauty of Mozart’s music gives us a glimpse at his beautiful mind (regardless of the mistakes of the orchestra in playing it), the beauty in the whole wide universe, from the proper coordination of an army of ants to the wonderful shining of the stars, gives us a reflection of the Beautiful God (regardless of natural disasters and man’s sins). Here we see a “kiss” between Platonic and Thomistic thought: for both Plato and Aquinas, the world points beyond itself; to a Creator, to His wholeness and unity, to His harmonious nature, to His divine light.

This implies an ultimate standard on beauty. This opens up, of course, that we are able to judge which is beautiful and which is not, or which is pretty and which is prettier. This is all based on Divine Beauty, whether painters, poets, and musicians of the medieval and pre-modern era were consciously thinking about it when they are creating their masterpieces. As classical philosophy spread throughout civilization, with its beginnings through Plato and its completion through Aquinas, classical art went with it. What’s more, their development was the culture’s development. Art became one of the ways (in fact, one of the principal ways) in which people showed the world their identity, their “who we are”. The Cathedrals, the hymns, the stories, the statues: all of these reflect the people’s standards, not only in art, but also with regards to morals and religious expression: God is the One Thing Necessary, and here we are to give testimony to that wonderful truth.

It should be clear by now how art and culture are closely intertwined. Culture forms art, and art expresses culture. The decline of one will automatically mean the decline of the other as well. Unfortunately, we are living in the midst of all that. As irreligion and immorality spreads far and wide (with the help of this evil, anti-nationalistic thing called “globalization”), ugliness in art, and, being the focus of our discussion, especially in music becomes standardized as well.

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[i] For some of the modern expositions on Aquinas’ understanding of beauty that are considered authoritative by followers of the Angelic Doctor, See Umberto Eco (1994), The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, translated by Hugh Bredin and Jacques Maritain (1930), Art and Scholasticism, translated by J.F. Scanlon

[ii] For those unfamiliar with Thomistic jargons, a transcendental is that which is coextensive and convertible with being. To make it simpler, a transcendental is that which is found in everything that exists. Thomists would agree that notions such as thing, one, truth, and goodness are transcendentals. It is with beauty that there are mixed views. To ask whether beauty is a transcendental is just another way of asking whether everything is beautiful, or whether there is beauty in everything.

[iii] There’s more than just these four Thomists that I mentioned, but there works will be the most useful when it comes to this essay. See Thomas Joseph White (2017), Beauty, Transcendence, and the Inclusive Hierarchy of Creation; Daniel D. De Haan, Beauty and Aesthetic Perception in Thomas Aquinas; Gerard Horrigan (2012), Transcendental Beauty; Michael M. Waddell (2012), Integrating Beauty: Reflections on the Psychology, Ontology, and Etiology of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae 1.5.4

[iv] Horrigan, Transcendental Beauty

[v] Summa Theologiae, I, q. 67, a. 1

[vi] Summa Theologiae, I, q. 5, a. 4

[vii] Aquinas expands on this in Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 27, a. 1, ad 3.

[viii] I actually prefer calling it a relational transcendental, since I actually believe that beauty is indeed a transcendental. There are good reasons for believing this, but it is a topic I am not going to try to settle here.

[ix] Summa Theologiae, I, q. 39, a. 8

[x] Horrigan (2012), Transcendental Beauty

[xi] De Haan, Beauty and Aesthetic Perception in Thomas Aquinas

[xii] Jordan (1989), Beauty, cited in De Haan, , Beauty and Aesthetic Perception in Thomas Aquinas (emphasis added)

[xiii] De Haan, Beauty and Aesthetic Perception in Thomas Aquinas

[xiv] Aquinas, Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, translated by C.I. Litzinger (1964), emphasis added

[xv] De Haan, Beauty and Aesthetic Perception in Thomas Aquinas