DAY 322

PHILOSOPHY OF ART

Medieval Aesthetics

DIVINE INSPIRATION

“Ad pulcritudinem tria requiruntur, integritas, consonantia, claritas.”

—St. Thomas Aquinas

A lot happened during the thousand years between the fall of the Roman Empire and the dawn of the Renaissance, but we tend to lump it all together. One reason for this is that the bulk of medieval thought was unified by a core belief in God. The Italian monk Thomas Aquinas is known first and foremost as a Christian theologian, yet he and his fellow saints are also the first place we look for any scholarly output from the Middle Ages.

You could say, rather ironically, that a thinker in the Dark Ages had to be quite a Renaissance man. As it was in Ancient Greece, the same guys trying to figure out the right way to live were refining the scientific method and analyzing art. The main difference in medieval times was that Christ had been born and the Christian God had replaced the pagan gods.

Toward the end of James Joyce’s excellent novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, protagonist and aspiring young artist Stephen Daedalus discusses the definition of beauty with his friend Lynch. After citing the Latin text quoted above, Daedalus translates it as, “Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance,” and he accepts the words of St. Thomas as his own criteria for beauty. The choice of descriptors is very characteristic of medieval thought, reflective of the Judeo-Christian conception of God, and for Joyce to quote it says quite a bit about the era’s enduring impact on Western thought. —CKG