The God Who Is Beauty

Beauty as a Divine Name in Thomas Aquinas and Dionysius the Areopagite

Sammon

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781630870805
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

When in the sixth century Dionysius the Areopagite declared beauty to be a name for God, he gave birth to something that had long been gestating in the womb of philosophical and theological thought. In doing so, Dionysius makes one of his most pivotal contributions to Christian theological discourse. It is a contribution that is enthusiastically received by the schoolmen of the Middle Ages, and it comes to permeate the thought of scholasticism in a multitude of ways. But perhaps nowhere is the Dionysian influence more pronounced than in the thought of Thomas Aquinas.This book examines both the historical development of beauty's appropriation as a name for God in Dionysius and Thomas, and the various contours of what it means. The argument that emerges from this study is that given the impact that the divine name theological tradition has within the development of Christian theological discourse, beauty as a divine name indicates the way in which beauty is most fundamentally conceived in the Christian theological tradition as a theological theme. As a phenomenon of inquiry, beauty proves itself to be enigmatic and elusive to even the sharpest intellects in the Greek philosophical tradition. When it is absorbed within the Christian theological synthesis, however, its enigmatic content proves to be a powerful resource for theological reasoning.

Part One

1

Beauty and the Divine in Ancient Greek Philosophy

Plato and Aristotle

The roots of the association between beauty and the divine reach well into the soil of ancient Greek philosophy. This chapter examines this association as it is considered in the thought of the two greatest representatives of that epoch, namely Plato and Aristotle. For both thinkers, beauty is a phenomenon deemed worthy of philosophical inquiry. However, as this chapter will argue, despite every effort to philosophically examine beauty, neither Plato nor Aristotle is able to resolve the tension between beauty as a transcendental, spiritual phenomenon and beauty as manifest in concrete, material forms. Nevertheless, it is precisely their inability to overcome this tension that constitutes their contribution to the issue of beauty as a divine name. For both philosophers, the relationship between beauty and the divine is best characterized as one of ambiguity, but an ambiguity with complex contours. In attempting a philosophical consideration of beauty and its association with the divine, both Plato and Aristotle succeed precisely where they appear to fail. In being unable to discern unequivocally how to identify beauty and the divine they bring to light some of the most significant layers of difficulty involved in such an enterprise. This illuminating ambiguity becomes the treasure they bequeath to posterity.

This chapter begins by examining how Plato configures the association between beauty and the divine. The examination looks to four primary texts where this association is most explicit: the Hippias Major, the Symposium, the Phaedrus, and the Timeaus. When read together, each of these texts constitute an important dimension of what is a much broader Platonic vision of beauty’s relation to the divine. These four texts are ordered according to the way in which Plato’s treatment reflects its own sort of anagogy: from beauty in itself, to beauty as a principle, to beauty as transcendent, to beauty as cosmological. It is within this transcending trajectory where the ambiguity of Plato’s association of beauty with the divine becomes most visible.

The second part of the chapter examines the issue within the work of Aristotle. The approach taken is most fundamentally a metaphysical one in which the relation between beauty and the divine is discerned from his metaphysical accounts of origination and teleology. In an effort to avoid any anachronisms that may result from looking at Aristotelian beauty from within some putative Aristotelian “aesthetic,” this chapter contends that the most accurate and valid approach is to examine beauty insofar as it is treated as a metaphysical theme. Hence, the primary text to be evaluated is his Metaphysics, though other texts are also considered. When Aristotle’s metaphysics of beauty is set alongside Plato’s, a shared ambiguity with respect to beauty’s relation to the divine becomes evident. But where Plato’s ambiguity can be cast within a trajectory toward transcendence, Aristotle’s ambiguity can be seen within his trajectory toward the immanence of form. Together, both thinkers draw out several of the problematic contours of how beauty relates to the divine and consequently set the stage wherein these problematic dimensions may be overcome.

Plato

Beauty holds an esteemed place among those phenomena Plato finds worthy of philosophical inquiry. So much is this the case that his various accounts depicting philosophical inquiry into the phenomenon of beauty often leave the sympathetic reader with a sense that in beauty Plato sees something of the divine. Such a seeing, however, remains rather cloudy, and the reader hoping to discern the contours of how Plato understands the relation between beauty and the divine must overcome a few obstacles.

First, contrary to what one might expect from a thinker concerned with Socratic elenchus, Plato does not provide a systematic, or “definitional,” elaboration of beauty in any one dialogue. The treatment of justice in the Gorgias, or of wisdom in the Philebus, for instance, might naturally lead one to assume that perhaps Plato might apply a similar kind of treatment to beauty. It is an assumption that at first appears confirmed by the contents of the Hippias Major. Only rather than uncovering the essential qualities of beauty, in this dialogue Plato instead provides evidence of beauty’s recalcitrance to certain modes of rational inquiry. And so, unlike justice or wisdom, beauty remains beyond the discursive limits of definition and determination even as it provokes the activity of discursive thought. In other dialogues where beauty is given a prominent place, most significantly the Symposium, the Phaedrus, and the Timeaus, it is a theme that continues to be philosophically treated though in a much less direct way. Without any specific definition of beauty, a unique challenge is posed to the examination of how beauty relates to the divine in Plato.

This situation generates a second obstacle, which concerns the question of how to begin and sustain such an examination. More to the point, what sort of organizing principle might facilitate reading the association between beauty and the divine given the preceding observations? While it is true that beauty in some form or another permeates the whole of the Platonic corpus, influencing other themes in a variety of ways,16 it is principally conceived as a manifestation of a transcendent intelligence that calls all other intelligences to itself by giving the power to name.17 Beginning from this preliminary elaboration of beauty the question becomes how to exegetically organize those dialogues in which Plato treats beauty.

Recently, Drew Hyland has recognized the dialectical interplay of the discursive and the non-discursive that seems native to Plato’s account of beauty. In order to manage this dialectic within the scope of Plato’s work, he proposes a taxonomy that orders Plato’s dialogues according to the extent to which a given theme acts as the focus of the dialogue.18 Thus, there are dialogues that address a theme “focally” w...

Table of contents

• The God Who Is Beauty
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One
• Chapter 1: Beauty and the Divine in Ancient Greek Philosophy
• Chapter 2: Beauty and the Divine in Neoplatonism
• Part Two
• Chapter 3: The Tradition of the Divine Names
• Chapter 4: Beauty as a Divine Name in Dionysius the Areopagite I
• Chapter 5: Beauty as a Divine Name in Dionysius the Areopagite II
• Chapter 6: Beauty and the One
• Part Three
• Chapter 7: The Passage of Dionysius into the Latin West
• Chapter 8: The Journey of Beauty as a Divine Name
• Chapter 9: Beauty as a Divine Name in Albert the Great
• Chapter 10: Thomas Aquinas and the Tradition of the Divine Names
• Chapter 11: Beauty as a Divine Name in Thomas Aquinas
• Chapter 12: Beauty as a Divine Name in Thomas Aquinas
• Chapter 13: Conclusion
• Bibliography