The other day one of my readers commented that my squeamish contempt for the Tommy Robinson types isn’t so much moral as aesthetic.
I wrote back, saying that all aesthetic judgements are latently moral and vice versa. The response was automatic, involving no conscious deliberation at all. For me, that was like saying that water is wet and Sancerre is dry.
However, the issue rates more than a throwaway line. In fact, the link between morality and beauty has attracted the attention of some of history’s greatest minds: pre-Socratic philosophers like Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle, followed by medieval scholastics like Albertus Magnus and Aquinas, then subsequent Catholic theology, and of course classical German thinkers, most notably Kant.
Both Plato and Aristotle devoted much attention to what they called ‘transcendentals’, objective ontological properties of being they defined as Truth, Beauty and Goodness. The key word there was ‘objective’: the transcendentals weren’t contingent on personal tastes, ideologies or cultural diversity.
Moreover, they existed as One – meaning that a deficit in one transcendental also diminished the other two. In other words, what’s true and moral is also beautiful, what’s beautiful is also moral and true – and hence what’s ugly can be neither true nor moral.
Aquinas, who was said to have baptised Aristotle, saw the obvious link between the transcendentals postulated by the Greeks and Christian doctrine. God is One, and He is Truth, Goodness and Beauty. The unity of the three thus made a natural journey from philosophy to theology.
Common to all the pre-Christian, Christian and post-Christian thinkers on aesthetics is their insistence on the objective nature of beauty (natural or artistic), and its inseparable unity with truth (thought and logic) and goodness (morality).
That beauty is objective and not contingent on personal tastes is in no way contradicted by the obvious fact that some people find Bach’s fugues beautiful and rap ugly, and for some others it’s the other way around. Beauty is a signal that can be clearly picked up by some receivers, distorted by others and missed altogether by others still. But the signal remains the same. It’s an objective wave that exists irrespective of any receiver’s capacity to grasp it.
This is merely the post-rationalised background to something I had felt intuitively long before I lay my hands on the writings of Plato or Aquinas. My first judgement of people, their actions and ideas has always been aesthetic. However, it took me decades to learn to trust my aesthetic judgement, especially as related to truth and goodness.
For whatever it’s worth, I think my judgement has earned a measure of such trust, for all the times it has gone wrong. Hence I believe that good and intelligent people have to be beautiful – but not necessarily in the sense of every such woman resembling Venus de Milo or every man Belvedere Apollo.
It’s just that a lifetime of pondering the subtle complexities of life and trying to work out a true and moral response to them has to leave a biographic imprint on a person’s face. So does a life of coarse amoral venality dominated by the pursuit of unworthy gains, but that would be a different imprint.
This isn’t at all the same as Cesare Lombroso’s version of criminal anthropology. He was a social Darwinist who believed that criminality was hereditary. If so, an analysis of a man’s physiognomy should provide a reliable clue to his moral character.
I more or less agree with Lombroso’s conclusion, but not with his premise. Heredity may give a bias to a man’s life, but it doesn’t determine it. That task falls on the aggregate of moral, rational and aesthetic choices a man makes freely throughout his life. No set of genes, however strong, takes away a man’s free will. A criminal’s DNA doesn’t decide to kill. He does.
Free will is to me axiomatic, as it was to Dr Johnson, who once said: “Sir, we know our will is free, and there’s an end on it”. If we are but automata whose life is predetermined by God (for those who believe in him) or DNA (for those who swear by it), then our humanity is a total waste – then Bach, Shakespeare and Vermeer are merely background noise, bedtime reading or interior decoration.
This is a long response to my reader’s comment, something that I originally reduced to a few words. It’s also an explanation of my feelings about some of our contemporaries, especially those involved in politics.
Speaking of Tommy Robinson, for example, all the best men I know share his concerns about the growing Muslim presence in our life. Even I share it, although this doesn’t form the axis around which my worldview revolves.
But that’s neither here nor there. One look at that tattooed thug’s face, typically contorted by hatred, one second of listening to his harangues, and aesthetic judgement kicks in, saying: “This man is rotten.”
The same – and here I know I’m going to upset some of my American friends – goes for Donald Trump, with his Mussolini-like gurning. How does a man acquire such facial expressions over a long lifetime? Certainly not by constantly holding his actions to moral tests and his thoughts to intellectual ones.
My aesthetic alarm goes haywire every time Trump struts his stuff in front of cameras, every time I hear or read his crude and illiterate pronouncements. I just know he’s a bad man, even though he does have many good ideas. I can see why many Americans will vote for him – I’d do so myself, given the current choice. What I can’t understand is how anyone can genuinely like Trump, this utterly unlikeable man.
I hope I haven’t upset my American friends too much. If I have, I can only take refuge in the old saying: Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas.
Speaking of old sayings, the one about beauty strikes me as wrong. Beauty is no more in the eye of the beholder than truth is in the mouth of any speaker or goodness in the actions of any man. Such things are ontological properties of everything that is.
We have come to the point beyond “all men are created equal” to “all men are equal” and even “all ideas (or feelings) are equal”. No discrimination toward an objective standard is allowed. In fact, any opinion that even leans towards what used to be an objective standard is not allowed. Thus, one cannot state he prefers Bach to rap or hip-hop, or Vermeer to excrement in a jar.
When I hear someone use phrases like “best life”, “best self”, “my truth”, I know it is just some thinly veiled excuse to indulge in objectively decadent or immoral behavior.
You can add Keats and Nietzsche to those who have identified beauty with virtue. Nietzsche rejected the philosophy of Socrates not because of its logical defects but because Socrates was ugly. Before he became an amateurish philosopher, Nietzsche was a professional philologist who published a valuable edition of Theognis, the ultra-conservative poet who made “kalos” and “agathos” inseparable. So you can add not only Keats and Nietzsche but also Theognis to your list.
But Isaiah was first: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings!”
It’s no coincidence that Christian painters (before the corruption of recent times) have always tried to depict Christ and his saints as beautiful. It’s a fact that Christ and his saints are beautiful.
(This would lead naturally to a discussion of the Holy Icons and the Western Church’s misunderstanding of them, but this is your blog, not mine, so I’ll shut up.)
Thank you for your comments; they are always perceptive and informative. Just to be contrary, I actually love icons and even own a dozen or so. It’s mostly Protestants who misunderstand them — I know many Catholic (and even some High Anglican) churches that have icons on their walls. For example, Vézelay Basilica, which houses some relics of Mary Magdalene, even hosts regular icon exhibitions. And Byzantine iconoclasm rose within the ranks of Eastern Church, didn’t it? That’s it, my contrary bit is done for the day.
I don’t think I’m always perceptive and informative. More often than not, perhaps. And I’m participating here because you’re perceptive and informative much more often than not.
I have only five icons at home: St Basil the Great; St Athanasius; St Constantine and St Helena; St Photius the Great; and St Elijah the Prophet. I don’t often venerate them: in fact, I sometimes shout abuse at St Basil and St Athanasius when I encounter a difficult passage in their writings.
In other words, I treat my icons as friends rather than as heroes, but nevertheless they bring the Kingdom of Heaven into my home, and thereby bring my home into the Kingdom of Heaven.
This sacramental quality of the Holy Icons is what the West doesn’t understand. You depict your saints more realistically than we of the East do, but you don’t befriend them.
Neither of us is a Protestant or an Iconoclast, so there’s no point in debating their errors.