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ABSTRACT
I discuss three accounts of the spiritual significance of aesthetic experience. Two of these perspectives I have taken from the recent literature in theological aesthetics, and the third I have constructed, building on Thomas Aquinas’s conception of the goods of the infused moral virtues. This broadly Thomistic approach occupies, I argue, a middle ground between the other two, on account of its distinctive understanding of the role of theological context in defining spiritually significant goods. These perspectives are not mutually exclusive, but they do present rather different conceptions of the ways in which aesthetic goods can contribute to spiritual well-being, and provide a focus for religious practice.
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Notes
1. The ‘acquired’ moral virtues are produced by a process of habituation, as Aristotle explains in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book II. For instance, I can acquire the virtue of courage by repeatedly doing the courageous thing in situations of danger. The theological virtues, by contrast, depend directly on the agency of God, and are in this sense ‘infused’.
2. For a helpful discussion of the relationship between Aquinas’s account of the virtues and that of his philosophical and theological forebears, see Inglis, ‘Aquinas’s Replication of the Acquired Moral Virtues’.
3. Summa Theologiae 1a2ae. 63. 3 ad. 2. Unless otherwise indicated, I am following the Blackfriars translation of the Summa Theologiae, edited by Thomas Gilby.
4. ST 1a2ae. 63. 4.
5. The text reads: 25Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. 26Therefore I do not run like someone running aimlessly; I do not fight like a boxer beating the air. 27No, I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave [chastise my body and bring it into subjection] so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize. (New International Version).
6. I have not made much of the ‘infused’ character of the infused moral virtues, that is, their status as directly God-given, rather than as produced by way of some process of habituation, but it is also true that neighbour love shares the aetiology of the infused moral virtues. See ST 2a2ae. 24. 2, where Aquinas is discussing whether love of God is infused, and ST 2a2ae. 25. 1, where he maintains that ‘it is specifically the same act whereby we love God, and whereby we love our neighbour’, in the Benziger Bros translation, accessed 28 January 2017.
7. ST 2a2ae. 25. 10, Benziger translation. Charity here is ‘caritas’, or what I am calling neighbour love.
8. ST 2a2ae. 25. 11 ad. 2, Benziger translation.
9. For an illustration of the painting, see https://www.virtualuffizi.com/the-cestello-annunciation-by-sandro-botticelli.html, accessed 20 April 2017.
10. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 186.
11. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Book IV, Section III.
12. Gaita, A Common Humanity, 18. Gaita associates the nun’s example with ‘the impartial love of saints’ (24), and we might reasonably suppose that he regards her conduct as a paradigm of neighbour love. Perhaps, then, the concept of neighbour love implies not only certain behavioural tendencies, of the kind that we have noted, but also an appropriate bodily demeanour.
13. We might be inclined to say that Gaita takes the bodily demeanour of the nun to be appropriate as an acknowledgement of the moral status of the patients. But that way of putting the matter would not be faithful to the strand of his thought which represents this sort of response as, at least in part, constitutive of the ‘common humanity’ of human beings, rather than simply a recognition of it.
14. Swinburne, ‘The Christian Scheme of Salvation’, 305.
15. Ibid., 305.
16. Swinburne distinguishes between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ obligations: this obligation will be, at least, objective. See Ibid., 295.
17. Begbie, “Beauty, Sentimentality and the Arts’, 63.
18. Ibid., 68.
19. Pattison, Art Modernity and Faith, 185.
20. For a helpful discussion of this ‘contemplative’ tradition in aesthetics, see Wolterstorff, ‘Art and the Aesthetic.’.
21. See https://www.nationalgalleryimages.co.uk/imagedetails.aspx?q=NG666&ng=NG666&frm=1, accessed 28 January 2017.
22. Compare Pattison’s treatment of Craigie Aitchison’s Crucifixion 1994. Despite its overtly religious subject matter, he seeks to read the picture in the first instance independently of any theological frame: Art, Modernity and Faith, 186–188.
23. See his comment: ‘grace does not destroy nature but perfects it’: ST 1a. 8 ad. 2, Benziger translation.
24. In this paper, I have concentrated on the contribution of bodily demeanour to the realisation of spiritually significant aesthetic goods. Elsewhere, I have argued that such goods can also be realised in our perception of the everyday sensory world. See my paper ‘Aesthetic Goods and the Nature of Religious Understanding’. I am grateful to the John Templeton Foundation, and the Happiness and Well-Being project, hosted by St Louis University, for a grant which supported the writing of this paper. I offer my thanks too to two referees for the journal for their most helpful comments on an earlier draft of the paper.
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Mark Wynn
Mark Wynn is a professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Renewing the Senses: A Study of the Philosophy and Theology of the Spiritual Life (Oxford UP, 2013), Faith and Place: An Essay in Embodied Religious Epistemology (Oxford UP, 2009), and Emotional Experience and Religious Understanding: Integrating Perception, Conception and Feeling (Cambridge UP, 2005).