Beauty in Aquinas and Joyce

THE THOMIST A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY EDITORS: THE DoMINICAN FATHERS oF THE PRoviNCE oF ST. JosEPH Publishers: The Thomist Press, Washington 17, D. C. VoL. XII JULY, 1949 No.3 BEAUTY IN AQUINAS AND JOYCE JAMES JOYCE is one of the very few modem artists to quote St. Thomas Aquinas as an authority on esthetic philosophy. Many times, in the esthetic theory presented in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the name Aquinas recurs. The purpose of this essay is to appraise Joyce's pronouncements on the beautiful, using Thomism as a toqchstone. The existence of the beautiful, in terms of the fundamental epistemological problem of realism and idealism, has disturbed esthetic philosophers from Plato to Croce. Does beauty exist in the mind, or does it exist in nature? Is beauty a logical being, a concept; or is it a real being, an extra-mental phenomena ? Or perhaps it is both a product of nature and a product of mental activity. The last of these suggests the traditional solution the Scholastics have accorded this problem of the locus of beauty. They assert beauty is both a physical and a psychical fact. The French neo-Thomist, Maurice de Wulf, viewing esthetic ~61 FRANK L. KUNKEL experience in the light of this objective-subjective interpretation , says the beautiful does not ". . . belong exclusively to things, as the Greeks thought, nor to the subject alone who reacts. and enjoys, as some contemporary philosophers maintain. But it is as it were midway between object and subject, and consists in a correspondence between the two." 1 Leonard Callahan summarizes the whole Thomistic position as follows: " Beauty is not a simple but a complex notion; not an absolute , but a relative conception. In its entirety it exists neither as a physical nor as a psychical fact; it is neither wholly in the object, nor wholly in the subject, but the result of an intimate connection of both object and subject. In fine, beauty is a quality of a work of art or of an object of nature, which by reason of its adaptation to the perceptive faculties of the subject, can arouse a feeling of admiration in him who contemplates it." 2 This dual aspect of the beautiful is clearly indicated in the writings of St. Thomas, as will subsequently be shown. While the unity of the esthetic experience must be insisted upon, it will be advisable to consider its two aspects separately. A choice presents itself at this point between two approaches which cannot be simultaneously presented though they are closely interwoven. Should an analysis of the ontological qualities of beauty be given at the outset, or should the psychological aspects be considered first? Since being is prior to being known, the extra-mental and ontological elements of the beautiful will be considered first, and then the perceptive and emotive characteristics will be analyzed. "Beauty is in the object according to the perfection of its being, the proportion of its parts; and in a metaphysical sense, all things which are, are beautiful." 3 Hence, the three conditions assigned to it by St. Thomas: "For beauty three things are requisite. In the first place, integrity or perfection, for whatsoever things are imperfect , by that very fact are ugly; and due proportion or con1 Maurice De Wulf, Mediaeval Philosophy (Cambridge, 1922), p. 186. • Leonard Callahan, A Theory of Esthetic According to the Principles of St. Thomas Aquinas, Baltimore, 1927, p. 29. • Mortimer Adler, Art and Prudence, New York, 1987, p. 88. BEAUTY IN AQUINAS AND JOYCE fl63 sonance; and again effulgence: so bright colored objects are said to be beautiful." 4 The condition of integrity requires that an object of beauty have a positive fullness, completeness, and a richness of perfection . Integrity or perfection is to be understood not in a moral sense but in its primary ontological meaning, so that an object of beauty is perfect when it lacks no essential parts or elements. "The importance of this factor in arousing a sense of beauty is evidenced by everyday experience. An aspect of nature which suggests incompleteness and imperfection, such as a barren field, leaves us cold and indifferent. The...