Aquinas on the Relation of Goodness to Beauty

Abstract

In the following, I will illustrate the relationship between goodness and beauty in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. In particular, I intend to show that the best way of understanding Aquinas’ view of beauty is to dissect his terse, three-fold definition of beautiful things as “those which please when seen,” and that, in so doing, we find several constituents of his view that relate beauty to goodness: (i) objective features of objects and events, (ii) the subjective features of human perception of such objects and events, and (iii) the pleasure attending the apprehension of the goodness of such objects and events. An investigation into the relationship between goodness and beauty could go in two different directions: First, it might focus on the objective features of the beautiful, and such would involve situating beauty within the scheme of the transcendentals. Second, it might focus on the relationship of the pleasure involved in the apprehension of the beautiful to the good, and such would involve situating beauty within the scheme of the ethical. The first of these two approaches has been more often attempted. Here, I attempt an investigation into the second avenue. I endeavor to show that, for Aquinas, following the Greek kallokagathic tradition, beauty falls not only into the aesthetic system of values, but also the ethical.