Abstract
The article addresses the basic elements of Thomas Aquinas’s thought on beauty by analyzing some selected texts and points out some of the debates that still exist regarding the interpretation of Thomas Aquinas’s position on various issues, such as the question of the transcendentality of the beautiful. The fundamental aim is to recover some of Aquinas’s basic intuitions for contemporary aesthetics, which no longer makes use of many of the intellectual categories that were in common use in medieval philosophy, and to show how some of Thomas Aquinas’s fundamental ideas are closer to the aesthetic thought of some fundamental contemporary authors than the modern categories with which aesthetics was forged. This article is also intended to show how the modern conception of the beautiful has meant an ontological impoverishment with respect to the medieval thought.
Highlights
For Aquinas, is basically a metaphysical and/or theological concept arising from the thesis that there are characteristics of the res that are conditions which are, if not sufficient, at least necessary in order to legitimately determine that an entity is beautiful
Thomas Aquinas elaborates this idea as he explores what today we would call necessary and sufficient conditions of the beautiful, which have to do with the presence of “the form on the proportioned and determined parts of the matter” (García de Paredes 1911b, p. 8)
If, according to Aquinas, the pulchrum is intimately related to the good, it seems logical to think that pulchra enim dicuntur quae omnibus visa placent
Summary
For Aquinas, is basically a metaphysical and/or theological concept arising from the thesis that there are characteristics of the res that are conditions which are, if not sufficient, at least necessary in order to legitimately determine that an entity is beautiful. It makes no sense to pose the question of beauty (utrum pulchrum sit) in the terms in which the 18th century theorists of taste would later do These latter will answer videtur quod non by reducing beauty to something that is only real in the eye of the beholder. The medieval tradition of the beautiful, is free of this implication as it is a synthesis of two main trends: the Pythagorean–Platonic, mediated by Augustine and Boethius, in which mathematical proportion or harmony is a necessary condition of beauty, and the Neoplatonic tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius, in which the characteristic of beauty is above all claritas. Thomas Aquinas elaborates this idea as he explores what today we would call necessary and sufficient conditions of the beautiful, which have to do with the presence of “the form on the proportioned and determined parts of the matter” (García de Paredes 1911b, p. 8)
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