Anam Cara

Every act of thinking, mostly without our realizing it, is secretly grounded in these presences. If the One, the True, Being, the Good and the Beautiful were to vanish, the thought in the mind would have no pathway out to the world. Put simply, these presences guarantee our sense of meaning and sustain the sense of order, truth, presence, goodness and beauty in our world. For the medieval mind beauty was a central presence at the heart of the real. Without beauty the search for truth, the desire for goodness and the love of order and unity would be sterile exploits. Beauty brings warmth, elegance and grandeur. Something in our souls longs deeply for that graciousness and delight. When we advert to the presence of beauty, the direction, rhythm and energy of our lives become different.

The medieval mind did not believe that beauty was either the result of a mental attitude that longed to see beauty or a surface presence in Nature or a product of the artistic mind. They did not believe that a human person could simply create beauty. In the medieval view reality was a series of symmetrical levels issuing from God and culminating in God’s perfection. All beauty derived ultimately from the beauty of God. Thomas Aquinas was the towering figure in the thought world of the Middle Ages. His system of thought is a magnificent architecture. In saying that beauty was a transcendental, Aquinas was claiming that beauty dwells in the depth of things. The same notion is also put memorably by Yeats in his poem ‘The Rose upon the Rood of Time’:

Come near, that no more blinded by man’s fate,

I find under the boughs of love and hate,

In all poor foolish things that live a day,

Eternal beauty wandering on her way.

Come near, come near, come near – Ah, leave me still

A little space for the rose-breath to fill!

CLARITAS:

W

HEN

T

HE

F

ORM

O

F

B

EAUTY

S

HINES

Each object is in reality a small virtual volcano.

HÉLÈNE CIXOUS

THE MEDIEVAL WORLD LOVED SYMBOLS. IT OFTEN PROBED THINGS so deeply to discover their supernatural reality that it ended up losing sight of the sensuous presence of the thing itself. But the thought of Aquinas is remarkable in its continuous insistence on the real, sensible presence of things. Each stone, tree, place and person was in its depths the expression of a divine idea. Consequently, each thing had a unique form. No thing is accidentally here. Nature is not dispersed chaos but a series of individual forms. The form is at once the structural principle of a thing and its essence and vital source. Aquinas had an understanding of nature and experience as dynamic, as constantly unfolding. His philosophy is a hugely intricate poetics of growth and becoming. Beauty was to be understood as the perfection of a thing. Perfection is not static or dead, it is the fullness of life which a thing possesses: this is what constitutes the adventure of knowing in the system of Aquinas. To know a thing is to awaken to its depth, complexity and presence. According to him, each thing secretly and profoundly desires to be known. Consequently, his notion of beauty is grounded in that deep knowing. This is how the beauty of a thing shines out in claritas of form. Beauty is magnetic because it calls forth a thing’s presence.

INTEGRITAS:

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HE

D

ESTINATION

O

F

G

ROWTH

Part of what it means to be, is to be beautiful. Beauty is not

superadded to things: it is one of the springs of their reality. It is

not that which effects a luscious response in perceivers; it is the

interior geometry of things, making them perceptible as forms.

FRANCESCA ARAN MURPHY

For Aquinas beauty also included the notion of integrity, integritas. He understands that each thing is alive and on a journey to become fully itself. Integrity is achieved when there is a complete realization of whatever a thing is supposed to be. Integrity is the adequacy of a thing to itself. There is here a sense of achieved proportion between a thing and what it is called to be. Creation is always in the heave of growth and becoming and when a thing journeys towards its own perfection or fullness of life, it is also secretly journeying towards the divine likeness. The integrity of beauty is that inner straining towards goodness and completion. There is a wonderful urgency within things to realize the dream of their individual fulfilment; nothing is neutral, everything is on its way.