The Beauty of Being

Chapter II

The Most General Properties of Being

The transcendental properties of being are, as we have seen, unity, goodness, truth. These are attributes of being of every class, and are but aspects of being itself as such. In addition to these transcendental properties, there are properties of being that somehow fall short of the truly transcendental. These are two: beauty and perfection. We call these, not transcendental, but most general properties of being. Of these two properties we speak in the present Chapter, which is, accordingly, divided into two Articles:

• Article 1. The Beauty of Being
• Article 2. The Perfection of Being

Article 1. The Beauty of Being

a) Meaning of Beauty　　b) Classification of Beauty　　c) Expression of Beauty

---

a) Meaning of Beauty

The first note or mark about a beautiful thing is that it makes us think well of it, it pleases us, it appeals to us, it wins our approval. And the appeal of such a thing comes to us through the senses, chiefly that of sight, and, secondarily, that of hearing. But this appeal is not a matter of the senses alone. The higher animals have sight, hearing, and the inner sense called imagination, and yet they give no manifestation of an appreciation of the beautiful, no evidence that they sense beauty at all. The senses are the channels of beauty to an understanding mind. Even in the appreciation of a landscape, or of a concourse of sweet sounds, eye and ear are powerless to account for the fact that the scene or the music is discerned as beautiful. The eye and ear are required, indeed, to perceive the objects here mentioned; they are required for the apprehending of this type of the beautiful; but they are not sufficient; back of the senses must be mind or intellect. Hence we are in error when we speak of a sense of beauty, or,—with a fine appreciation of Greek roots,—of the aesthetic sense, if we mean the term sense to be understood in its literal meaning as an organic faculty.

There is beauty in an ordered and well-directed life; there is beauty in the logic of an argument; there is beauty in the deep speculations of a thinker. These are types of moral and intellectual beauty, of beauty that belongs to will and to mind, and no sense is directly concerned with the appreciation of such beauty, for it is spiritual and supra-sensile. Yet the senses are required as avenues by which to come at such beauty; there must be visible evidence of the admirable life; there must be sensible expression of the logic and of the deep and valuable thoughts; else we cannot know of their existence. But no matter how material, how much a matter of the senses, is the manifestation of beauty, the grasp of the beautiful is never a matter for the senses alone. It is the intellect which sees the beautiful, which apprehends it.

Mr. Eric Gill, in his book Beauty Looks After Herself, says that truth is the object of the intellect, and goodness the object of the will, and beauty the object of the whole soul. Now, it is quite true that the object of the intellect is the true (or truth), and that the object of the will is the good (or goodness); but it is not true that “the whole soul” apprehends beauty. The soul operates only through powers or “faculties” which are really distinct from the substance of the soul itself. Now, the soul has two fundamental faculties,—intellect and will. Fundamentally, therefore, the apprehension and appreciation of beauty is a matter of intellect or of will or of both. In so far as the apprehending of the beautiful is rather a matter of knowing than of willing,—and surely it is formally such,—we must say that the intellect is the true aesthetic faculty. But the will has a part to play in the fruition or enjoyment or satisfaction which comes with the appreciation of the beautiful. And the senses of sight and hearing, together with the imagination which preserves the findings of sense and reproduces them, constitute the sentient element of the aesthetic faculty.

Now, while beauty is apprehended by the mind, and while the conditions and state of mind enter inevitably into its appreciation, there must be objective or trans-subjective factors in a thing for it to be truly beautiful. The factors that are objective in a beautiful thing are these:

First, a beautiful thing has about it a natural completeness or integrity. Broken arches or ruined towers may be beautiful, but it is not because of their incompleteness that they are so; if it were, any half-built house would be beautiful, which is manifestly not the case. Completeness or integrity does not mean maturity. There is beauty in a rosebud, and in a little child, quite apart from the implied forecast or promise of what is to come. The rosebud and the child have each a complete nature, even if it be an immature nature.

In addition to completeness or integrity, a beautiful thing must have about it a certain opulence or richness which is powerful in its influence upon the beholder. In a word, it must have a kind of fulness, fineness, and effectiveness. Physical bigness is an element of beauty in some things, but not in all. The fulness and effectiveness of which we speak is rather a kind of richness; a rounded nature richly graced.

The third objective element of the beautiful is variety. A beautiful thing presents to view a certain pleasing complexity of elements or parts, of viewpoints or aspects. There is no beauty in a single sustained tone, unrelated to other tones. There is no beauty in a single curved line which is not a part of any picture. Even that which is perfectly simple is not apprehended as beautiful by man’s mind until it has been intellectually grasped as presenting a variety of logical distinctions.

A fourth objective element of the beautiful is unity or harmony. For variety alone is not beautiful; only that variety is beautiful which is unified in some pleasing integration or harmony. The variety of elements must be brought together in a pleasing, balanced unity. Without harmony, a mere plurality of elements remains a mere plurality, and a mere plurality of things, however individually fine, is not beautiful.

The fifth element — which in a sense sums up and integrates all the others — is resplendence or splendor (sometimes called clarity): that luminous quality or glory which emerges from that which is integrally complete in the fulness of rich and gracious being, and which presents to view a pleasing variety unified in proportionate and balanced harmonies.

These five factors, then, enter into the objective or trans-subjective structure of a beautiful thing. No matter how tastes may vary,—and they vary widely and even wildly,—that which appeals to any taste as beautiful has about it some real or apparent completeness, fineness, variety, harmony, and splendor.

We may define beauty thus: Beauty is an attribute or property of that being which, in its parts, elements, aspects, or activities, manifests, in a manner pleasing to the mind and satisfactory to the will and the emotions, a striking resplendence of completeness and harmony, of proportion and balance.

There are current many famous definitions of beauty, many of them brief and pointed in expression, but for the most part these definitions justify the ancient saying, “Trying to be brief, I become obscure.” Such are the following: “Beauty is the splendor of truth”; “Beauty is the splendor of being”; “Beauty is the splendor of order”; “Beauty is the splendor of perfection.” André and Cousin define beauty as “Unity amid variety,” but the definition is not acceptable for it leaves out entirely the subjective factor, the appeal to the mind. Keats declares:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all / You know on earth, and all you need to know.

But the statement is not true. For while the beautiful is necessarily true with the truth of all being, it is quite easy to instance cases of truth that is not beautiful. The concept of being as such is a true and objective concept, but being as such is too simple and abstract to admit the trans-subjective factors of the beautiful. The beautiful is true, inasmuch as it is being, but it does not follow that the true is necessarily beautiful.

b) Classification of Beauty

1. Beauty is ideal and real. Ideal beauty is a kind of standard in the mind, according to which known objects and activities are measured in judging whether they merit the description of “beautiful.” The perfect ideal beauty, free from every possible mistaken whim or prejudice, is to be found only in the Perfect Mind, that is, in God. Yet there is an ideal of the beautiful in every normal and experienced human mind, limited and imperfect as such a mind ever is.—Real beauty is the objective or trans-subjective beauty of things knowable. It is the beauty of an object that has integrity or completeness, richness of being, variety, unity, resplendence.

2. That which has real beauty has either material or spiritual beauty. Material beauty is that which makes a direct appeal through the senses; it is sensible beauty. Such is the beauty of face or form, of a flower, of a painting, of a piece of needlework, of the starry heavens.—Spiritual beauty appeals to the understanding and the noble will. Thus we find spiritual beauty in a beautiful life (though it be lived in rags and in squalid surroundings), in virtue, in an innocent mind, in a sweet and trusting disposition, in high ideals, in grace, in devotion, in the true religion, in self-sacrifice, in resignation.

3. Real beauty, whether spiritual or material, may be manifested in varying degrees. Thus we distinguish that beauty which gently moves the beholder to a certain tenderness of appreciation (loveliness, charm, graciousness); that which moves him more strongly (beauty simply); and that which overpowers him and renders him incapable of a just expression of his appreciation (the sublime or sublimity). The beauty of a face, of manner, of conduct, is of the first type. Most beautiful objects belong to the widely inclusive field of the second type. The beauty of God, or, in the material order, the beauty of the mighty ocean in a wild tempest, is of the third type, the sublime.

c) Expression of Beauty

The beautiful, in so far as it is capable of material expression by the skill and effort of human beings, who have nobly conceived it in mind and adequately imaged it in fancy, is the object of what we call the fine arts. Art, taken simply, may be defined subjectively and objectively. Subjectively considered, art is a suitable conception, a right idea of how things should be done to produce a useful or a beautiful result (recta ratio factibilium). Objectively, art is the process of producing useful or beautiful things, or it is the fruit of that process.

An art which aims at the production of useful things of bodily character, is a mechanical art. An art which aims at the production of beauty in a fuller knowledge and a nobler life, is a liberal art. An art which aims at the production of beautiful objects in the material order is a fine art. Among the fine arts we list architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry, and music.

What is the relation of art to morality? Can a painting, for instance, be really artistic if it depicts a scene offensive to Christian modesty? May the artist ignore the laws of morality? Is it right to say, “Art for art’s sake”? We shall set forth the answer in a series of three points:

1. It is a fundamental truth to be recognized by artist and critic that there can be no conflicting varieties of beauty. Grades or degrees of beauty, yes; but one sort of beauty conflicting with another, absolutely no. Now, morality is a sublimely beautiful thing in itself, and, in special, the virtue of modesty is wondrously beautiful. Therefore, what comes in conflict with this beauty cannot be itself beautiful. Art which conflicts with the moral law is not art in any true sense of the term. Art cannot be either immoral (that is, in conflict with morality) or unmoral (that is, a thing wholly unrelated to morality).

2. It is the function of philosophical ethics to prove that man, in all his truly human (that is, knowing, deliberate, and free) activities, tends towards happiness in the possession of the summum bonum. In other words, the attainment of complete and endless happiness is the business of life, and towards the proper and full discharge of this business every feature, factor, and function of life must tend. Now, the moral law is the code of rules, the essential directions, for conducting the business of life as it should be conducted. Hence art, far from being a thing indifferent or opposed to the moral law, must be its positive aid and support. Art must be positively moral. That is to say, art must be a worthy human expression of the beautiful in terms that will not debase a man, but inspire him, lift up his heart and will and fancy, evoke noble emotions, and so further man in the attainment of the destiny for which he is put on the earth.

3. One cannot justly say, “Science ignores morality; why does not art have the same privilege?” First of all, science is a thing of the mind; it is concerned with knowledge. Art is not concerned with mind alone, but with will, and with powerful emotions which sway the will. Science seeks to know, but invites no approval upon its findings. To know evil is not to approve evil. Art, by contrast, is expressed in objects that are meant to invite approval, to excite pleasure, to win the will to delight or at least to complacency.

Summary of the Article

In this Article we have learned the meaning of beauty and the beautiful. We have found that the subjective factors in the apprehending and appreciation of the beautiful are not the only ones to be considered; certain objective or trans-subjective factors exist, and these are perfections in the beautiful object itself, viz., completeness or integrity; fulness or opulence of being which gives effectiveness; unity of parts or aspects; harmony or balance of elements; and resplendence. We have classified beauty as real and ideal; spiritual and material; and have discerned certain degrees of beauty which make an object simply beautiful, graceful or charming or lovely, or sublime. We have considered the expression of the beautiful in the fine arts. We have discussed the mistaken principle of “Art for art’s sake,” and have seen wherein it is fallacious.