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Passage Through Beauty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2024

Bernard Kelly
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Id Quod Visum Placet: “That which pleases when seen.” The simplicity of St. Thomas’s definition of beauty is bewildering, embarrassing; and the modern mind which cares so much for aesthetics is likely to be shocked to find that beauty, from which, for some at least, the remnants of all absolute values seem to hang, is dismissed in four ordinary, even commonplace words. The Thomist who seeks to show that this treatment of beauty is neither contemptuous nor insignificant is in danger of appearing to found a complex system of aesthetics on a base incapable of supporting anything of the sort; therefore of failing to convince. And it will probably be admitted that the phrase considered in itself seems almost to give carte blanche to the Thomist aesthetician. Its implications are immensely wide, but if a more acute examination of them is likely to reveal unexpected precisions it becomes a duty to make it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 16 , Issue 186 , September 1935 , pp. 647 - 657
Copyright
Copyright © 1935 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Considered, that is, simply as organized matter.

2 That is integritas, consonantia, claritas. The connection of wholeness with holiness is etymological, not merely a pun. “Whole” or “hale” says the O.E.D. of the root word; and words do not suffer natural change of meaning altogether by accident. Holiness is a kind of wholeness, but so is beauty.

3 Page 242 in the Jonathan Cape edition.

4 Literally “the act of the body,” but act here is not the same as action; it is rather the “principle of actuality.”

5 There are two facile errors to be avoided, (a) that that which is metaphysically distinct is therefore physically separate, (b) that that which is physically united is metaphysically indistinguishable.

6 The anima vegetativa, sensitiva and intellectiva; these are not three souls but one.

7 It belongs to the very meaning of beauty that in the sight or knowledge of it desire should be set at rest. Sum. Theol., I-II, q. 27, a. 1 ad 3.

8 Thomas Gilby, O.P., Poetic Experience. The debt of the present writer to this important essay will be obvious.

9 De Civitate Dei, Lib. XI, c. xxiv.