Cusa on Beauty

OK, I can't stop writing down remarks from Hart, so here's another:

"Nicolas of Cusa remarks that eternal wisdom is tasted in everything savored, eternal pleasure felt in all things pleasurabl, eternal beauty beheld in all that is beautiful, and eternal desire experienced in everything desired (Idiota de sapientia 1); he even claims that a man who sees a beautiful woman, and is agitated by the sight of her, gives glory thus to God and admires God's infinite beauty (Excitationes 7)."

The last example seems a particular apt illustration of Hart's claim that the category of "ethics" (in distinction from aesthetics and logics) is a postlapsarian intrusion in a world that originally was a seamless manifestation God's glory and beauty, which are identical (by the doctrine of simplicity) to God's righteousness and holiness and truth. Adam looking at Eve was "agitated by the sight of her," yet without sin. The moral distinction between trembling before God's beauty in a beautiful woman and lusting after a beautiful woman arises only in a fallen world. Indeed, in an unfallen world, one could not fail to be "agitated by the sight of her"; such a failure would be a fall, because it would reflect an unwilling to grant glory to God and give thanks.

As Hart points out in a section I quoted in the previous post, this raises the question of the unity of the transcendentals. They are separable into true, good, and beautiful only in a fallen world. Redemption would seem to demand the reunification of these, and the demolition of thought, life, and institutions into categories of logic, ethics, and aesthetics. Perhaps advocating "the good, the true, and the beautiful" perpetuates the fractured world of Adam. In Christ, we should perhaps speak only of the glory of God, which is His righteousness and His faithfulness. Any institutional or disciplinary separation of arts, philosophy, and ethics/politics seems to aid and abet the continuation of a world that is passing away rather than anticipating the world that is to come.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, June 17, 2004 at 10:27 AM

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