Relation between Beautiful and Good

Relation between Beautiful and Good

Thesis Statement

Does beauty have an inherent association with the divine?

Pseudo-Dionysius

Beauty as a divine name in Dionysius may be examined from this two-fold foundation. With respect to beauty as bound up with the divine identity, beauty may be considered as a transcendent plenitude. This consideration generates three relevant subcategories: beauty as the good, beauty as light, and beauty as intelligibility. With respect to the way that God causes beauty in things, beauty may be considered as a principle of determination. This consideration also generates three relevant sub-categories: beauty as emanation, beauty as a unity in plurality, and beauty as hierarchy. The chapter concludes with an examination that brings both of these aspects into a teleological context, namely, beauty and the One.

Perhaps the most fundamental feature of Dionysian beauty in its context as a divine name is the way in which it is described as a transcendent plenitude. The transcendent dimension in itself is widely recognized though it is a feature of the Areopagite's thought that has at times become an object of criticism. One evaluation of Dionysius's views on beauty concludes that “either before nor since has there been an aesthetics more transcendental, more a priori, and more divorced from the real world and from normal aesthetic experience.” Other historians of aesthetics evaluate Dionysius's elevation of beauty to the highest point of transcendence, i.e., by making it a 'name of God,' as little more than“confusion.” What seems neglected in such judgments is that for Dionysius, transcendence is never an empty space of remote distance but refers to the plenitude of divine being. Consequently, beauty in such a state does not remain removed from the world but rather pours itself forth as the very appearance of the world itself (Jordan, 2008).

Beauty as a divine name is integral to this vision. In Divine Names 4, 7 Dionysius establishes some of the fundamental principles for how he understands beauty, principles that resonate in other areas of the Corpus Dionysiacum. That beauty is a transcendent plenitude accounts for the fact that it constitutes both the source of beautification as well as those things that become beautified (Koutras, 2002):

But the beautiful and beauty are not to be divided, as regards the cause which has embraced the whole in one. For with regard to all created things, by dividing them into participations and participants we call beautiful that which participates in Beauty; but beauty, the participation of the beautifying Cause of all the beautiful things.

Beauty and all beautiful things are united in a principle of causality, which itself 'embraces the whole in one.' Following Plato, Dionysius invokes the scheme of participation to describe the relationship between this cause and its beautified effects. But in light of the fact that a divine name is porous to its transcendent source, Platonic participation undergoes some modification in Dionysius's configuration of causality by virtue of the plenitude of the participated source. Unlike Platonic participation, which involves an immediate and direct relation ...