The Turning Point in the Question of Pulchrum: Thomas Aquinas and Early Franciscanism

Abstract

This article aims to examine the transformations of the concept of pulchrum that took place in the thirteenth century between Thomism and early Franciscan thought. Specifically, it explores and compares the theme of “pulchra enim dicuntur quae visa placent”, introduced by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae, and the theme of “creatural” beauty, introduced by Francis of Assisi and then taken up above all by Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, identifying these as pivotal moments of transition in the medieval discourse on the pulchrum.

1. Introduction

To avoid easy anachronisms and gain a better understanding of the actual and the crucial role played by Thomas Aquinas in the evolution of the medieval question of Beauty, as well as the context in which this role developed, it is necessary to undertake a rather long and complex journey, which this study will seek to summarize and simplify as much as possible, while avoiding simplistic generalizations and clichés.

Continuing with the oversimplifications, we often hear about the contrast between the Franciscans and the Dominicans, particularly between Thomas and Bonaventure, who were almost the same age and died in the same year, 1274.

The paper would like to show at least one aspect here, namely that relating to pulchrum, in which not only is there no opposition in the thinking of the two great Christian philosophers, but a certain complementarity of positions can be seen. Or rather, Thomas’s position paved the way for Bonaventure’s position and, more generally, for the position of Franciscan culture. That is, regarding the beauty of poietic production, the Thomistic position was preparatory to the Franciscan one, even though the Franciscan position then objectively overcame the Thomistic one, which instead remained tied to the entirely Augustinian idea that poetic fictions cannot encounter the true.

2. The Role of Pseudo-Dionysius’ De Divinis Nominibus

But let us take it step by step and try to understand things clearly. There is no doubt that the common starting point, both for the Dominicans—Thomas, and before him Albert the Great—and for the Franciscans, was Pseudo-Dionysius’s De divinis nominibus (Schäfer 2003; Dewan 1980; Clavell 1984; Bartos 2004). What is striking, in fact, is that all the great thinkers of the time—Franciscans and Dominicans alike—from Alexander of Hales and Robert Grosseteste to Albert the Great, and from Thomas Aquinas to Bonaventure, began their reflections on beauty with a commentary on the Treatise on the Divine Names left by this mysterious Neoplatonist of the early sixth century, long believed to be none other than Dionysius converted by Paul of Tarsus during his speech of this last to the Athenian philosophers on the Areopagus, as reported in Acts of the Apostles 17:16–34.

Nevertheless, what is so decisive in that treatise and, more generally, in the so-called Corpus Dionysianum that it led thinkers of such calibre to engage with it and to begin their reflections on beauty precisely there? In short, the treatise attempts to reconcile the rational requirements stemming from the ontological hierarchy typical of Greek thought with the creationist demands of Judeo-Christian origin. This hierarchy is taken up by the Corpus Dionysianum in its Neoplatonic sense, founded on the idea that the divine resided only in the highest and most beautiful things in nature, which participated in it to varying degrees, or in human praxis and poiesis when they imitated these lofty models1, but it is now interwoven with creationist claims deriving, for example, from Gen 1:31: “God saw everything that he had made [ἐποίησεν], and behold, it was very good.”2 In other words, the treatise attempts to combine the characteristics that entities must objectively manifest to be considered beautiful3 with the idea that every creature, precisely because it is a creature—that is an entity created by God or, in some way, attributable to God through human making—is, as such, beautiful.

Now, how can we resolve this contrast between the effects of a typically Greek rationality, which is suited to discerning, distinguishing, and differentiating, and those of a faith that instead tends to include, mingle, and merge? The solution proposed by Pseudo-Dionysius is, as is well known, the so-called apophatic, or negative, approach (Mainoldi 2017). Since no name is adequate to God and no human intuition can comprehend him, the most appropriate way to approach him is not to affirm what he is, but rather what he is not. That is, to affirm his supra-substantial essence, ὑπερούσιον, and his “invisible perfections”—an expression taken from Paul’s vocabulary in Rom 1:20 but invested with an entirely new meaning in the term ἀόρατον—while denying every perceptible trait through what he calls “apophatic revelations” (ἀποφατικαὶ ἐκφαντορίαι). This means referring to representations of forms which, as he says in CG 140C, are radically dissimilar (διὰ τῶν ἀνομοίων μορφοποιϊῶν) to God; that is, depicting him through images and names that can bear no resemblance to him, so as to remove from the uninitiated the illusion that God is in some way intelligible, and instead to restore his true being as ἄρρητον, that is, unspeakable, inexpressible, ineffable.

In this way, one can consistently arrive at the paradox that, to speak of God, to utter the name of God, Pseudo-Dionysius (CG 145A) asserts that the dissimilar simile (ἀνόμοιος ὁμοιότης) with the lowest of creatures, a worm, “the most dishonourable of all comparisons and the one that seems to be the most different”, is the most appropriate. This comparison, he continues, constitutes a “holy dissimilar figuration” (ἀνόμοιος ἱεροπλαστία); and here he is alluding figuratively to Ps 22:6, where the one who cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” then adds: “But I am a worm and not a man, the scorn of men and despised by the people”.

Now, this apophatic logic—through which this enigmatic Christian theologian reinterprets the mystery of kenosis—differs greatly from that of the patristic tradition, which is instead tied to a fundamentally typological framework (Auerbach 1944; Guastini 2021). Moreover, in elevating allegorical discourse as the only adequate way to speak of divine realities and, indeed, to provide a logical justification for the medieval practice of pansemioticism—according to which every entity can stand for any other, symbolise any other entity, an attitude typical of the more speculative Middle Ages4—it also has a direct impact on the question of beauty. For Pseudo-Dionysius, beauty is light, splendour, claritas, yet in sensible things it manifests itself above all in its very opposite: as σκότος, darkness. Therefore, it is precisely this apophatic device, this via negativa, this “dissimilar mode”, that enables Dionysius to find beauty in everything, because paradoxically he finds its opposite there: darkness, that ugliness5 through which he can indirectly trace his way back to τὰ ὑπερουράνια καὶ θεῖα θεάματα, the hyperuranian and divine spectacles and feel the need for them.

In other words, Pseudo-Dionysius finds beauty “in each thing according to its nature”, as he states in these passages, thereby placing it, according to later tradition, among the transcendentals, that is, among the properties convertible with being. And this happens precisely because he does not in fact find beauty in anything: for no sensible thing, strictly speaking, can be considered truly beautiful. Each thing retains an element of material opacity that distances it, to varying degrees, from true beauty, from that τὸ ὑπερούσιον καλόν (De div. nom., IV, 701C) that bestows beauty on every being but is perceived in sensible things by the human intellect only in the mode of privation.

A privation which—following the best tradition and mindset of Neoplatonic eroticism, though now reinterpreted in a creationist framework—acts as an incentive to seek beauty everywhere, as a lack that leaves beauty to be desired, creating the pneumatic void into which the memory of the supersensible idea of kallos is inserted. Something that operates in the form of nostalgia, of desiderium, of longing for beauty. Ultimately, it functions as beauty’s erotic meaning, which traverses the sensible world not to linger within it, but rather to transcend it completely.

From this point of view, among other things, we can say that the influence which, according to many interpreters6, the Corpus Dionysianum is thought to have exerted on the poetic culture of Abbot Suger must be significantly reassessed. Suger, the renowned Cluniac abbot-architect entrusted with the renovation of the cathedral of Saint-Denis on the outskirts of Paris—under which the mortal remains of Dionysius the Areopagite were believed to be buried—and who transformed the old Carolingian church into a ‘Gothic’ one, carried out his project according to criteria which, though drawing on Dionysius’ vocabulary, particularly his metaphysics of light, were in a certain sense the exact opposite of the Dionysian teaching.

Whereas Dionysius, following the apophatic principle of dissimilarity or “dissimilar similarity”, taught that the soul could be elevated even, if not especially, through ugly and deformed things, Suger, by contrast, assigned a central role to beauty. The beauty of stained-glass windows and of the most iridescent materials as gold, pearls, and purple, used in the restoration of Saint-Denis and intended to produce sensory delight (precisely what Bernard of Clairvaux and Cistercian culture famously reproached him for), is interpreted by Suger in terms of faith. He conceives such beauties and precious materials as aids to the enjoyment of God, that is, as typological signs of the resplendent divine mysteries.

As in the case of Suger, even in the case of Thomas, despite the strong and explicit influence that Dionysius exerted on his thought—second only to that of Aristotle and perhaps even greater than that of Augustine—whole Quaestiones of the Summa Theologiae7 are explicitly devoted to Dionysius and to the problems raised by his apophatic logic, yet we find ourselves in a context that is completely different from Dionysius’s own. To understand this, we need to retrace, together with Thomas, a path that runs, so to speak, alongside rather than within Dionysius’s logic.

3. The Shift Introduced by Thomas Regarding Pulchrum

As mentioned above, Thomas first drained the Dionysian allegorical swamp. This moving beyond the Dionysian theses can be clearly seen in Thomas’s unprecedented position on pulchrum with respect to earlier tradition. However, to understand this properly, we need to proceed step by step.

In Quaestio 1 of Part I of the Summa theologiae, Thomas addresses the question of the figurative meaning of Scripture. For Thomas as well, spiritual realities are presented in corporeal form, and it is fitting, he says, that this should be so, “for God provides for everything according to the capacity of its nature” (S. Th., I, q. 1, a. 9, co.). And it is natural for human beings to arrive at intelligible things (intelligibilia) through sensible things (sensibilia), since, he adds, following Aristotle, “because all our knowledge originates from sense” (ibid.). Here, to justify what he calls the “metaphorical” meaning attributed to Scripture, he continues to cite Dionysius, but he also brings Augustine into play alongside Aristotle, above all the Augustine of De mendacio, Contra Faustum Manichaeum, the Quaestiones evangeliorum, and De Genesi ad litteram, in which we can discern the full figurative and typological weight Augustine assigns to the mendacia found in Scripture.

In fact, only at first glance do statements such as “it is befitting that in the Holy Scriptures divine and spiritual things [divina et spiritualia] should be put forward by means of comparisons with material things [sub similitudine corporalium]” (S. Th., I, q. 1, a. 9, co.) suggest that we are reasoning according to a Dionysian allegorical logic. In reality, the expression sub similitudine corporalium gives us a meaning that is in fact the exact opposite of a logic that privileged the ἀνόμοιον, the dissimilar, considered similar (ὅμοιον) to the prototype only insofar as it is radically different from it on the sensible level; that is, only insofar as it is abstracted from its content, and thus only in a logical-formal sense.

This can also be seen in the stark differences between Thomas and Dionysius about homiletics and the ideal recipient of Holy Scripture. Whereas Dionysius chose “dissimilar sacred figures” as a means of distinguishing the initiated from the profane—from whom the truth had to be concealed—following an intellectualist attitude typical of a Neoplatonism permeated, over the centuries, by Gnostic influences, the reason Thomas gives for the use of biblical metaphors is quite the opposite. It is grounded, rather, in concern for those whom he calls in these passages the rudes, the simple, who can use such metaphors to better grasp the spiritualia per corporalia. In this case, everything is genuinely attributable to the Pauline spirit8 and conceived in the name of a Scripture that is, he adds, a common good for all.

Hence, among other things, the precisely Augustinian distinction—which will later be superseded, as we shall see, first by Franciscan thought and then by Dante, even though Dante remained a Thomist—between the usefulness of biblical metaphors and the uselessness of poetic ones. But we will return to this later. What matters now is to understand where this discussion leads.

Indeed, although at the end of Quaestio 1 Thomas acknowledges that Dionysius is right in arguing that spiritual things must be presented under the figures of base rather than noble bodies, the reasons he gives are far less speculative than those offered by Dionysius and, in fact, take him in an entirely different direction. They lead him, in Articulus 10 of this same Quaestio of the Prima Pars, to highlight not an apophatic, negative character of truth and of the representations of truth conveyed by Scripture, but rather a character that is, if anything, polysemous in the representations that truth engenders. This leads Thomas to reaffirm the Augustinian doctrine, elaborated in De Genesi ad litteram, of the four senses of Scripture (S. Th., I, q. 1, a. 10, arg. 2). That is, he reaffirms a multivocality that, he insists, should not be understood as an ambiguous expression, as a logical amphiboly, but rather as the interpreter’s recognition of the capacity of biblical texts to enrich themselves progressively with layers of meaning beyond the literal. These additional meanings were placed within the narratives by their inspirer, that is God himself, who foresaw their fulfilment in advance, but which, from the limited standpoint of the human interpreter, can only be disclosed gradually over the course of history.

In short, it is that ability to “grow with the little ones”, cum parvulis, which Augustine had already recognized in (Confessions, III, 5, 9) as the most characteristic feature of Scripture and the greatest obstacle for those who approach it with intellectual pride. This reveals the Thomistic conception of truth as not apophatic but, continuing to use the distinction originally found in Aristotle’s Organon, cataphatic. Namely, affirmative, although its very affirmation must now be understood unlike in Aristotelian logic, as a gradual process that unfolds over time within a dimension of historicity that was entirely absent from Dionysian logic.

As it did for Augustine, what prevails in this perspective is a dimension of knowledge that we could well describe as charismatic in opposition to the Greek notion of adequacy. Thomas himself would pass on the Greek definition to posterity in the famous formula adaequatio rei et intellectus (cf. S. Th., Iª q. 16 a. 1 co.), while William of Auvergne had already expressed it a few years earlier in an arguably even more fitting way as adaequatio intellectus ad rem, the adequation of the intellect to things (Schulz 1993). Thomas discusses this non-adequate dimension in Quaestio 1 before arriving at the above conclusion by discussing the differences between what he calls sacred doctrine from the philosophical–rational disciplines. The latter are rational sciences concerned with being and with its conversion to the true; but sacred doctrine goes beyond reason. As a discipline ordered to the salvation of humankind, it comes from “divine revelation” and from faith (S. Th., Iª q. 1 a. 1 co.). It is something “higher than human knowledge” (S. Th., Iª q. 1 a. 1 ad 1), from which reason and philosophy themselves proceed. Whereas science proceeds from self-evident principles, this sacred doctrine, as Thomas says, proceeds from articles of faith which are neither self-evident nor universal but particular; such as, he adds, the story of Abraham and Isaac whose authentic meaning is given to us by divine revelation and not by reason.

Although the sciences, being more evident, appear more certain and unquestionable, while faith, by definition, is susceptible to doubt, the latter is nevertheless superior because it transcends them, coming as it does from revelation. In these passages, we can discern the matrix of Aristotelian dialectic—anapodictic science, that is, non-demonstrative yet capable of guiding the principles, themselves non-demonstrative, of demonstrative science9. In Thomas, however, the place that had belonged to established opinion, to the ἔνδοξα, is now occupied by faith, which guides reason. Indeed, Thomas maintains that sacred doctrine which comes to us “not through natural reasoning” but “by revelation”, and which governs and directs all our knowledge, can be described as “wisdom in the highest degree” (S. Th., Iª q. 1 a. 6 co.), since it is capable of judging the principles of all the sciences that are demonstrated by reason (ibid., ad 2).

It is no coincidence that Thomas devotes the entire final part of Articulus 6 to the question of judgment. It is precisely within the dimension of judgment—entrusted, he says, “to the wisdom given by the Holy Spirit”—that the question of truth is regulated and that we can come to grasp something of the mystery of God according to a doctrine, a theology, in which God is far more the subject than the object. In other words, deeply shaped by Aristotelianism, he is essentially reiterating something not very different from what Augustine had said centuries earlier, when he translated Paul’s theological teaching into a philosophical gnoseology. He is saying that true knowledge, before being a matter of adaptation or correspondence of the intellect to the state of things, before being a matter of adaequatio, is a matter of intentio animi, as Augustine called it: that is, a disposition of the soul, when it is capable of listening to the truth through faith in the mysteries revealed by Scripture, when it accepts that truth lies within us who seek it, in the interiority of our soul rather than in the exteriority of things. He is therefore saying, in his own way, what Augustine had said: that we can know only what we in some sense already know—what has been revealed to us by grace through faith, by a revelation that precedes every cognitive act.

This is the charismatic trait I was referring to which—despite the differences concerning the role assigned to reason, undoubtedly more significant in Thomas than in Augustine, and despite the terminological nuances and distinct traditions from which they emerge—nevertheless links Augustine and Thomas, across the centuries, in matters of faith and grace. More broadly, it characterizes the revolution in thought that Christianity brought about in relation to Greek thought and its Hellenistic–Roman offshoots.

If Dionysius had confined himself to overturning Greek logic in an apophatic manner—so to say, “dis-adequating” words from things, distancing saying from the said—Thomas, like Augustine before him, undertakes a very different operation. Following Paul, he transfers the activity of understanding from the realm of the letter, or even of its negation, to the realm of the spirit. And this shift—whose final outcome is modern subjectivity, both as its secularized expression and, it must be said, as its partly inverted form: a movement from something more interior to us than we are to ourselves, a shift from Augustine’s intus magister to the self-conscious and self-determining subject of modernity—is precisely what causes the aforementioned allegorical swamp to begin to dry up.

From the perspective of such a spiritual disposition, not all allegories are valid anymore; not all symbols are acceptable anymore. The apophatic logic according to which a term becomes more adequate the further it is from what it designates, according to which the more imaginative the relation, the more fitting it is, no longer holds. In this new orientation of thought, only tropes and metaphors, as Thomas calls them using Aristotle’s vocabulary, are valid insofar as they respect the rule of analogy. One can speak of God in positive terms because, as he writes in Quaestio 13, also in Part I (a. 5 co.), between God and creatures there exists a relation “according to analogy that is proportion” which, if not univocal (a relation of pure identity), is not equivocal either (a relation of mere difference). It is a relation which, however approximate, nevertheless allows the mind to establish unambiguous, even if not obvious or certain, similarities—unlike scientific ones—between things and events.

In short, the ground is no longer favourable to the allegorical pansemiosis of the early Middle Ages. When it comes to the “divine names”, one can no longer say everything and its opposite. Neoplatonism has fulfilled its task among other things by bringing the question of beauty as a transcendental back to the forefront, but it is now being overtaken by the first glimmers of a new realist spirit. Thomas and scholastic Aristotelianism are the first major protagonists of this spirit, which heralds a new attitude: the attitude of an age in which the reality of things, and their very beauty, are returning to prominence.

However, it cannot be overlooked that, when it comes to poetic art, Thomas still thinks largely in the manner of Augustine. For him, only Holy Scripture possesses such a charismatic breadth10 as to allow spiritual things to be translated “into bodily metaphors”. In other words, only Scripture possesses what Augustine called allegoriae in factis. Poetic art, being inferior to Scripture in doctrine and deficient with respect to truth, can produce only allegoriae in verbis, figures of speech that improve linguistic expression and make it more pleasing, but that are inadequate for attaining truth. Therefore, as he concludes in the following Articulus, number 9, poetic representations, unlike Holy Scripture, “are not competent to teach divine things by means of similarities with bodily things [sub similitudine corporalium rerum]”11. And this is precisely because their intentio differs. The intention of Scripture is to use metaphors for the sake of truth, whereas the intention of the poetic arts, he states here, is to use metaphors for the sake of the pleasure produced by their representations.

I will return to this question at the end, when discussing the contribution that Franciscanism made to this new spirit. At this stage, after this lengthy contextualisation—which I nevertheless believe has been useful for grasping certain issues within their actual context of development—I would like to turn to the way Thomas conceives pulchrum. In fact, the way in which Thomas surpassed the Dionysian tradition on beauty, in my view, also allows us to better understand his highly complex conception of beauty. Just as semantics and scriptural hermeneutics are determined within the dimension of intentio and therefore by the auctor of the text and the animus of the interpreter, so too is the question of beauty determined within the dimension of visio and judgement. Indeed, it is within the context of a new and growing auctoritas granted to the subject—although, to be clear, not yet identifiable with the modern subject—that, in my opinion, the problem of beauty as a transcendental must also be situated. This is a vexed issue that has engaged generations of interpreters of Thomistic philosophy (De Munnynck 1923; Pouillon 1946; von Balthasar 1965, III 1/1, pp. 354–69; Roblin 1977; Aertsen 1996; Kerr 2002; Monachese 2013)12.

This is the crux of the matter. Once it has been established that the dilemma concerning whether or not to include pulchrum among the transcendentals arose from Dionysius’ apophatic logic—and that, for this reason, the entire tradition on the transcendentals subsequently grappled with the work in which Dionysius laid the foundations for the question, namely the De divinis nominibus—we can now see how Thomas was the first to truly overcome it. While placing himself among the continuators of a tradition that had generally prevailed from Grosseteste and Albert the Great onward and while maintaining the Dionysian approach, albeit gradually purified of its more speculative aspects, Thomas in the Summa theologiae, by introducing the novel element of visio among the components characterising the question of pulchritudo, became the first to effectively break away from the Dionysian position.

Although it is impossible to reconstruct all aspects of the question, one point, the main one, must be identified with precision: namely, the conditions under which it would have been possible for Thomas to include pulchrum among the transcendentals, that is, among the qualities that can be predicated of every entity as such, ens, unum, verum, bonum, and which are therefore, as tradition held, convertible with being. As we know, there are conflicting opinions on this issue, and leading scholars, from Étienne Gilson to Umberto Eco, to name but a few, have grappled with the problem, which has also been fuelled by certain ambiguities and oscillations that accumulated over the years in Thomas’s writings.

Without, of course, any ambition to resolve the matter, I would nevertheless choose the high road adhering, as is always best in such cases, not to what we would like him to say, but strictly to what Thomas says in his writings on pulchrum. And if anything, I would try to place his statements within their historical context. Among these statements, there is never one suggesting that pulchrum should be included among the transcendentals, that is, the claim that pulchrum constitutes a characteristic of being as such. Why is this? In my opinion there is a very specific reason, one that concerns his way of conceiving pulchrum, which differs markedly from that of Dionysius.

As is clear from what has been said above, Dionysius transmitted ancient speculative ideas, particularly of Platonic origin, into Christian culture. Among these is the notion, typical of classical Greek thought, that beauty is an objective property of entities, independent of those who enjoy it and consisting of very specific characteristics: συμμετρία, ἁρμονία, τάξις (i.e., order, regularity), πρέπον (proportion, appropriateness). All these characteristics were recognised in entities considered καλά, beautiful, whether they were the direct product of nature or the result of human poiesis, that is, of τέχνη, which imitated nature precisely in its beauty. In this regard, Dionysius adopts a position that mirrors these views without, however, overturning their logic: beauty is a quality inherent in entities, but—and here lies the novelty, entirely internal to Neoplatonic logic though expressed in scriptural terms—it is hidden in the depths of things, to such an extent that its suprasensible reality often appears more clearly where the senses perceive it as absent than where they perceive it as present. In deformitas rather than formositas, in the lowliness of creatures such as worms rather than in the splendour of others such as peacocks, to give another animal example.

In relation to this position, the crucial role played by Thomas in defining the problem of beauty becomes perfectly clear. He was the pivotal point, the fulcrum, on which the question of beauty began to shift from the ancient conception toward the modern one, eventually rotating 180 degrees. For beauty, from being a quality immanent in objects recognised for this reason as καλά, beautiful, that is, from being an “objective” quality of things, would become, in modernity, a “subjective” property. This is the major transformation undergone by the idea of beauty. And this change would have a significant epistemological effect, progressively reinforcing the notion that beauty no longer speaks to us, as was thought in antiquity, of the substantial order underlying the apparent heterogeneity of the things of the world—whether interpreted in the manner of Greek metaphysics, as the intelligible revealed through sensory experience, or in the manner of the Christian faith in a God who created heaven and earth, became man, and intended to leave traces of beauty in creation—but rather speaks to us of something else. It speaks to us, instead, of ourselves: of how we judge, of how our faculty of judgement is constituted, that is, of the transcendental structure of subjectivity. This is what will become visible—one need only think of Kant—once the rotation of which I have spoken has completed its full orbit.

On reflection, it can be said that the history of aesthetics is itself the history of the gradual shift in the idea of beauty toward subjectivity. From this perspective, the origins of aesthetics are not, as is often claimed, to be located in the eighteenth century. Rather, I would argue that eighteenth-century aesthetics was, on the contrary, the outcome of a longer process—one that the history of aesthetics has often failed to consider and whose essential features it has failed to recognise.

To illustrate this point, let me offer just one example: that of the distinguished historian of aesthetics Władysław Tatarkiewicz. In his well-known work History of Six Ideas, which includes a treatment of the idea of beauty, he considers the issue I am discussing so central that he even devotes an entire chapter to it, entitled Beauty: the Dispute between Objectivism and Subjectivism, in which we find statements such as the following:

The dominance of the objective aesthetic thus lasted for long centuries, until at last the 18th century saw the victory of the subjectivist aesthetic. Subjectivism now found numerous adherents and exponents in France, even more in Britain.13

Put this way, it almost seems as if the idea that beauty is something subjective and unquestionable were a sudden discovery of modernity, entirely unknown to antiquity. But the reality is much more complex, and if we look at the origins of the issue, this becomes clear. If we are dealing with a shift that ultimately produced a 180-degree change in the conception of beauty from ancient to modern times, we must identify the exact moment when this idea first began to turn. And surprising as it may seem, if we pose the question in genealogical terms (see Faas 2002), it can be said—following remarks made on occasion, for instance by Umberto Eco (Eco 1970; see also Eco 1987)—that this starting point is represented by Thomas Aquinas, in whose positions on the beauty, we can glimpse the initial trace of the transition from an ontological vision of beauty—in this sense “objective”—to a vision also aesthetic, in the sense of linked to the faculties, sensitivity and intellect, of the maker and the user (and therefore, in this sense, “subjective”).

Thomas still conceives of the poetic arts in terms, as has often been said, of a defectus veritatis and an infima doctrina, as he notes in the Summa Theologiae, in comparison to Holy Scripture, which is inspired by God. In this, he follows the central tradition of early Christianity which, particularly with Augustine, had established an insurmountable hierarchy between religion and poetic art—the latter being conceived solely as an auxilium to faith. And yet he is also the one who, by beginning to separate the problem of the intrinsic qualities of beauty from that of individual perception, raises the question of beauty in an ambiguous way for the first time. While preserving its objective aspect, he also subtly shifts it, as if driven by an irresistible force of thought—a force not yet discernible in his teacher Albert the Great, who regarded beauty simply as resplendentia formae, a radiance emanating from a thing’s form—toward the direction of its later subjectivization.

The question is precisely that of the so-called ‘transcendentals’, that is, those predicates that can be objectively affirmed of every entity insofar as it is an ens creatum by God, the one who is supremely true, good, and so on. Thomas identifies five of them: verum, bonum, unum, res, and aliquid, without ever adding pulchrum. This last is what Dionysius, and then much of the subsequent tradition, had more or less directly added to the list, beginning with the conviction expressed by Dionysius in chapter IV of De divinis nominibus that pulchrum and bonum are identical.

In his commentary on Dionysius’ work, probably written shortly before he began Part I of the Summa Theologiae, Thomas does not yet raise any particular difficulties regarding this identification. He reiterates the idea that it is God who radiates beauty into creatures, that it is God who is pulchrificus—as he will say again, using this extraordinary term taken directly from Dionysius (In De div. nom., chap. 4, l. 5)—and thus he once more emphasises the objective properties of beauty: consonantia and claritas, to which he will later add the requisite of the debita proportio.

However, in his great mature work, although he begins from the same considerations, he moves in another direction, one that makes the association of pulchrum with the transcendentals far more problematic. In effect, the Dominican philosopher never adds pulchrum to the list of transcendentals in his Summa Theologiae. And why does he not add it? I believe we can safely say that the very omission of pulchrum from the transcendentals reveals his new approach to the problem. He probably refrained from including it precisely because he perceived its dual nature: objective, as his predecessors had understood it—first and foremost Aristotle, of course, but then Dionysius, through apophatic theology, and Albert the Great—and yet also, in a certain sense, subjective.

Indeed, when comparing pulchrum with a transcendental such as bonum, which Dionysius and many of his commentators had identified as fully equivalent, Thomas clearly sees that although both “are based on the same thing, the form”, they nevertheless differ in part, in that bonum is an objective cause, whereas pulchrum is the result of a more subjective judgement related, as he says here, to vis cognoscitiva of the man (S. Th. Ia, q. 5, a. 4 ad 1). This leads him to formulate a statement that stands midway between ancient and modern thought.

Actually, the sentence that follows the passage just quoted—one of the most famous and controversial in all of what has been somewhat improperly called “medieval aesthetics” and which almost serves as a watershed between the ancient, fully objectivist conception of beauty and the modern subjectivist one—reads as follows: unlike bonum, “beauty, on the other hand, concerns the cognitive faculty [pulchrum autem respicit vim cognoscitivam]: for beautiful are those things which, to the eye, give pleasure [pulchra enim dicuntur quae visa placent]”. However, this is immediately followed by: “Therefore, beauty consists of due proportion [Unde pulchrum in debita proportione consistit], because our senses delight in things that are duly proportioned, as in something similar to themselves”.

In short, this position already reveals, in its very formulation, an oscillation between an objective and a subjective understanding of beauty: things are beautiful, yet they can be so only with the concurrence and assent of vision. By ‘vision’, of course, we mean intellectual and theoretical vision, not merely ocular or sensory vision—yet still a vision arising from within the soul graced by God, rather than a simple adaequatio, adaptation of the intellect to the thing. Beautiful things, then, but in relation to which the gaze begins to prevail over the object, while nevertheless remaining a gaze upon the thing.

But why this oscillation? Because Thomas, with the formidable insight that characterises his philosophy—even in its very structure: quaestiones in which he presents a thesis, an antithesis, often drawn from the pagan and especially Aristotelian tradition, and finally a synthesis, a “Catholic” resolution—is bringing everything to a decisive point. He is bringing to light potentials that have always, though implicitly, pressed from within the horizon of Christian faith and culture. A horizon in which spiritual interiority—the same interiority that his near contemporary Bonaventure drawing on the Augustinian notion of the Magister, which is intus, namely more inward to our soul than ourselves14, attributes to the one he calls the Doctor interius—was understood as the proper place of grace, of caritas. That is, the place of the force capable of filling intellect and sensibility, understanding as well as sight and hearing, in short, every faculty, and thereby enlivening them.

It is precisely this perspective which, by removing beauty from an entirely objective framework, when at the end of the Middle Ages the power that had until then been almost absolute, namely that of charity, began to wane—contrasted by other forces and by that process of “rebirth” and return to the pagan past characteristic of the humanistic–Renaissance trajectory of European culture—would prepare the ground on which the subjectivisation of beauty, mentioned earlier, eventually prevailed.

It is precisely here, in the initial phase of this oscillation, in which Christian pulchrum cannot help but manifest itself in all its complexity, that the question of visio—namely the element that will prove decisive for the fate of the very idea of beauty in modernity—begins to emerge. It is the element that will ultimately relocate beauty from the realm of things in themselves—where it had been regarded as a trace of the divine, whether in a Greek metaphysical sense or in a Christian Trinitarian one—to the realm of the judgement of taste in which human subjectivity and cognitive faculties are projected.

4. The Franciscan Novitas on Pulchrum and Its Influence on Dante

Even so, what can be observed in Thomas Aquinas concerns only the beginning of the theoretical transformations affecting the notion of pulchrum in the medieval Christian context. From this perspective, one need only consider the cultural developments associated with the Franciscan movement. There is, of course, much more that could be said on the subject, but considering what has been discussed so far, it can be summarised as follows.

Probably no one in the Christian world was better able than Francis of Assisi to evoke sensible beauty as a means of ascending to the suprasensible. Indeed, an adjective, the adjective creatural, was even coined to capture the spirit of his faith, which was entirely based on the recognition and glorification of the signs left by the Creator in creatures, from humans to the humblest beings, with whom Francis engaged in a passionate dialogue. This dialogue inspired his famous Canticle of Brother Sun, the very foundation of Italian poetry in the vernacular, written in praise of all creatures and, from the mid-thirteenth century onward, exerting an unprecedented influence in the Middle Ages in terms of reach and depth on literary, pictorial, and theatrical forms, first in Italy, from Giunta Pisano to Cimabue and Giotto, from Jacopone to Dante, and then throughout Europe15.

On the strictly Franciscan side, it was, as is well known, especially Bonaventure who reflected philosophically on the idea of beauty, taking up the Franciscan conception and describing it in the famous words of the Hexämeron as an illumination, a vestigium Dei, a refulgentia divini exemplaris, albeit cum tenebra permixta (Coll. in Hexäm, XII, 14). A great scholar of Bonaventure’s philosophy, such as von Balthasar in Gloria, perfectly captures this when he writes of it as “ein demütiges Sich-einfügen Gottes in die verschwindend kleinen Ausmaße der Kreatur [a humble insertion of God into the small dimension of the creature]” (von Balthasar 1962, p. 353).

Here, the question of the intentio with which we perceive the beauty of creatures, the beauty of nature, becomes crucial, and Bonaventure treats it entirely on the level of affectus, of feeling. This feeling now plays a decisive role in apprehending a beauty that is no longer conceived as purely objective, but begins to be perceived affectively, through an internal, entirely charismatic gift in man, capable of enabling him to see the beauty hidden within the apparently ugly, the joy concealed in what is painful, limited, or finite, in other words “creatural,” in creation.

But in the case of the Franciscan tradition, there is more, and I would like to conclude with this point. Unlike Thomas Aquinas, who, as we have seen, maintained an ambivalent position on the poetic arts, the Franciscan sensibility toward the beauty of creation had a direct influence on the poetic activity of his time. You can think about Dante, who in Canto XI of Paradiso, with great irony, has Thomas tell the story of Francis—“Nacque al mondo un sole … [a sun rose on the world …]”—and in Canto XII, has Bonaventure tell the story of Dominic. Dante, whose poetry, as Auerbach has shown16, is deeply imbued with Franciscanism, focuses on what he calls in Canto XXXI of Purgatorio the “second beauty”17, which only the true “artist”18, capable of perceiving beyond what is merely seen, can reveal through the first, most immediate beauty. An example of this second beauty is precisely a creature like Beatrice, whose earthly beauty, as we read in the aforementioned Canto XXX of Paradiso, “si trasmoda [transcends]”, that is, it is transfigured beyond us, to the threshold of heavenly beauty, which human limitations can never fully reach and which nevertheless she embodies and whose beauty is revealed in the vision of those who love her, such as Dante himself.

This is where Italian humanism begins. We are speaking of nothing other than the religious motives underlying that journey which, through Cimabue, Giotto, and Dante—as the great minds of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from Ghiberti to Vasari, clearly recognized—would carry the Middle Ages beyond itself and into the Renaissance.

So, what do we find at the end of this journey? We find a notion of art that increasingly focuses on “first beauty” and pays less and less attention to “second beauty.” Consider, for example, Petrarch, who, barely a generation after Dante, in the Secretum, confesses to an Augustine tailored to his own needs, rigorous and merciless, that he renounces the imperishable in the name of Laura’s mortal beauty (cf. Petrarch 2016). In this way, he ends up contrasting the first and second beauty that Dante, inspired by Franciscan teaching, had instead intertwined in Beatrice, uniting the sacred and the profane within her.

However, this development pertains only to the secularization of a process that began with Thomas Aquinas and found its poetic expression in Dante. Dante, though an admirer of Aquinas’s philosophical greatness, was nevertheless able, by listening to the Franciscan voice, to extend beyond the Scriptures the spiritual significance that Augustine and Thomas had not conferred upon poetry, granting it only what Thomas called the sensus parabolicus.

From this perspective, it can truly be said that perhaps no field is more perspicuous than the history of aesthetics for understanding how secularization exhibits all the characteristics of the heterogenesis of ends. That is, a process that begins with one intention but, in the course of its development, achieves another, almost opposite. In this sense, the trajectory of pulchrum at the end of the Middle Ages is particularly striking. Over the course of just a couple of generations, thanks to Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure in philosophy, to Giotto and Dante in the arts, the concept moved from a strictly objective consideration of beauty to one that, while not yet subjective in the modern aesthetic sense, nevertheless opened a path in late medieval culture that would never again be closed in the centuries that followed.