Quotations and a Question
1Plato's world, that is to say the Western world, is primarily a world for knowledge. The ability of knowledge to reproduce in the mind what beings are in reality is called truth. Therefore truth is that which is closest to being, whereof it reproduces the traits as faithfully as the image of an object in a mirror. [...] The certainty that this integration of partial truths can always be carried further is the secret of the amazing development of Western science. Yet, admirable as it is, man's science of the universe adds nothing to its reality. [...] What such a philosophy finds difficult to understand, and even admit, is that anything new should be produced at all. There is indeed an intelligible beauty, and it is the highest of all on account of its very intelligibility. The point is that the splendor of truth is specifically different from the beauty of art....At the beginning and before everything else there is being. The next best after being is truth, without which being would be for us as if it were not. On the other hand, since being is best, truth already implies the good, the love of which is the love of being. Beauty is added to the other transcendentals as a supererogatory grace, which is like the flowering of being.
The Arts of the Beautiful, Etienne Gilson
2It is by virtue of the beautiful that we are able to acquire a lasting remembrance of the true world. This is the way of philosophy. Plato describes the beautiful as that which shines forth most clearly and draws us to itself, as the very visibility of the ideal. In the beautiful presented in nature and art, we experience this convincing illumination of truth and harmony, which compels the admission: "This is true." The important message that this story [i.e Phaedrus] has to teach is that the essence of the beautiful does not lie in some realm simply opposed to reality. On the contrary, we learn that however unexpected our encounter with beauty may be, it gives us an assurance that the truth does not lie far off and inaccessible to us, but can be encountered in the disorder of reality with all its imperfections, evils, errors, extremes, and fateful confusions. The ontological function of the beautiful is to bridge the chasm between the ideal and the real....We could say that the work of art signifies an increase in being....Art is only encountered in a form that resists pure conceptualization. Great art shakes us because we are always unprepared and defenseless when exposed to the overpowering impact of a compelling work. Thus the essence of the symbolic lies precisely in the fact that it is not related to an ultimate meaning that could be recuperated in intellectual terms. The symbol preserves its meaning within itself.
The Relevance of the Beautiful, Hans-Georg Gadamer
In response to a recent informal discussion concerning the famous "Ode on a Grecian Urn," I post these thoughts as a prompt for thinking about the nature of poetry and its response to the world. That is, can we equate truth and beauty?3[W]ithin the narrative of Western philosophy, with its myth of independent reason and the power of mind to transcend the limits of language and determine the limits of possible knowledge by the agency of unaided reason, metaphysical speculation (as a purely deductive enterprise of rational reflection) proves finally to be a contradiction in terms of that narrative. [...] To put the matter differently, the unity of metaphysics is a convenient fiction, a way to exclude voices, other ways of naming the difference of being from beings or the relation of the one to the many. [...] Theology is not an art that abstracts from history toward eternity, from facts toward principles, but one that -- under pressure of the history it is called upon to interpret -- finds the sphere of its narrative expanding into ever greater dimensions of the revealed, crossing the line between the creaturely and the divine (and so that between the ontic and the ontological) because that line is already crossed, not symbolically but in fact, in the concrete person and history of Jesus....The Christian understanding of beauty is analogical, in two senses: in the simple analytic sense, that whatever "beauty" means is grasped only by analogy, by constant exposure to countless instances of its advent, and through constant and continuous revision; and in the more radically ontological sense, that beauty is not some property discretely inherent in particular objects, but indwells the analogical relationship with all things, each to the other, as a measure of the dynamism of their involvement with one another. The Christian use of the word "beauty" refers most properly to a relationship of donation and transfiguration, a handing over and return of the riches of being.
The Beauty of the Infinite, David Bentley Hart
