THE SYMPHONY OF BEING: The Transcendental Status of Beauty and its Anthropological Significance in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas

This thesis examines Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy of beauty and its significance for the human person’s relation to reality. In the first part, I outline Aquinas’s general understanding of the transcendentals, and raise the central question concerning their systematic and cumulative order, as they unfold the primal fullness of being. I seek to clarify this order by means of Aquinas’s discussion concerning the opposition of the one and the many, and I introduce the Augustinian triad species-mode-order as fundamental to his conception of the order among the ‘relational’ transcendentals, and the distinction of the beautiful among them. In the second part, I confirm the initial conclusion of part one in three stages. First, by comparing the beautiful and the good, in which context I argue that the traditional interpretation of beauty as merely a species of the good is mistaken, and I highlight the significance of the ‘honourable’ as a key category for Aquinas’s understanding of beauty. Secondly, by analysis of the distinctive ratio of the beautiful in terms of ‘brightness’ and ‘harmony’, and the connection between, on the one hand, this Dionysian dual formula and, on the other hand, the Augustinian triad which thematises beauty’s place in the systematic order of the relational transcendentals. Thirdly, by highlighting the subtle connection between beauty and love in Aquinas’s thought, as the anthropological correlate of the ontological argument made in the previous two chapters. Among other things, I conclude that recognition of beauty’s transcendental status, and its essential connection with love, is essential to a theological anthropology. Indeed, I argue that Aquinas is a resource for a vision that places beauty at the centre of our encounter with the world, as the wonderful sense of homecoming which enables us to reverentially honour, and take delight in, the harmonic otherness of others as other.