Think of all those characteristics that define beauty for you. Are they the same as those that define it for others? No?
In the seventeenth century, a textbook called Epigrammatum Delectus was an anthology of epigrams collected from ancient and medieval authors by collaborators Pierre Nicole and Claude Lancelot. The former wrote an introductory essay in which he addressed the question of beauty. The translator of the work, J. V. Cunningham, called Nicole’s introduction “An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in Which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams.”
Ah! The difference a few hundred years make. The purpose of the anthology is to meet the “two ends of instruction…learning and character.” For the collaborating editors character was the more important. In short, these two guys gathered together verses they believed would enhance character through instruction. To that end they excluded verses from people like Catullus and Martial because they contained the “filthiest obscenities” they believed would corrupt the minds of young men and start them down a slippery slope toward bad character.
They did not, however, exclude all such epigrams because, as the translator explains, even in some such obscene epigrams some good might be found. Extracting that good for the student would prevent a perusal of the works for their “filthy” content. Yeah, sure. I’m pretty sure these two guys didn’t know much about concupiscence. Both would also object to modern ideas of character development in a society that on the surface seems to disdain any particular moral lessons.
Anyway, their anthology of epigrams was “to serve morality and to promote judgement.” Such a purpose would ultimately, Nicole and Lancelot believed, enhance character because it was based on the judgment of what is beautiful. Now, to address your own judgment of beauty:
Nicole writes this about judging something like a literary work as beautiful:
“Indeed everyone in the act of judging embraces a hastily conceived opinion and follows his impressions without reflection or judgment. Thus it is that few have made any attempt so far to arrive at an exact knowledge of the nature of true beauty, by which in the last analysis all else must be determined; rather, each has immediately pronounced that to be beautiful which affected him with some sort of pleasure.”*
In this view, we judge beauty by our gut feeling, and we can all see some evidence for this in popular fads. Women’s fashion has bounced, for example, between jackets with shoulder pads and bare shoulders. Alternatively perceived as enhancing and spoiling the beauty of the wearer, neither fashion has been permanent. We can cite other examples from music, dancing, theatre, art, and motion pictures. Nicole says, “Consequently, if we wish to dissociate ourselves from the fickle mob of opinions, we must have recourse to reason, which is single, fixed, and simple.” In this he paraphrases Cicero, writing, “time that erases the fictions of opinion only confirms the judgements of nature.”
So, what is this nature that is the basis for judging beauty? Pardon the longer quotation here:
“Reason leads us directly to nature and establishes that to be generally beautiful which accords both with the nature of the thing itself and with our own. For example, if an object that is excessive or defective in some part is thought ugly, it is because it diverges from nature which demands a completeness in the parts and despises excess. Almost everything that is judged to be ugly is so judged for the same reason: you will always observe that there is here some flaw at variance with a rightly constituted nature. Nevertheless, for an object to be declared beautiful it is not enough that it answer to its own nature; it must also be congruent with ours. For our nature, being invariable both in the soul and in the body endowed with senses, has definite inclinations and aversions by which it is either attracted or estranged.”
Like so many others, Nicole wants to acknowledge some universality of the “beautiful.” There is something in us that knows beauty when we see it in any form. It’s in our nature. And that same “something” that is part of our nature enables us to distinguish what is “ugly” in Nature as well as in the arts. “True beauty “agrees both with the nature of things themselves and the inclinations of our senses and of our soul.”
If we agree, are we Neoplatonists? Is there some “ideal” beauty in the Nous? Is there a perfect tree that is the ideal of all specific trees, a tree that is unchangeable, unaffected by a deciduous character? Is there an ideal body shape? Face? Literary style?
How much of your character is shaped by your sense of the beautiful? How different is your sense of beauty from that of others? On what might you agree? Beauty is…
*Cunningham, J. V., Trans. An Essay on the True and Apparent Beauty in Which From Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams by Pierre Nicole, The Augustan Reprint Society, Publication Number 24 (Series IV, No. 5), Los Angeles, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1950.
In the seventeenth century, a textbook called Epigrammatum Delectus was an anthology of epigrams collected from ancient and medieval authors by collaborators Pierre Nicole and Claude Lancelot. The former wrote an introductory essay in which he addressed the question of beauty. The translator of the work, J. V. Cunningham, called Nicole’s introduction “An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in Which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams.”
Ah! The difference a few hundred years make. The purpose of the anthology is to meet the “two ends of instruction…learning and character.” For the collaborating editors character was the more important. In short, these two guys gathered together verses they believed would enhance character through instruction. To that end they excluded verses from people like Catullus and Martial because they contained the “filthiest obscenities” they believed would corrupt the minds of young men and start them down a slippery slope toward bad character.
They did not, however, exclude all such epigrams because, as the translator explains, even in some such obscene epigrams some good might be found. Extracting that good for the student would prevent a perusal of the works for their “filthy” content. Yeah, sure. I’m pretty sure these two guys didn’t know much about concupiscence. Both would also object to modern ideas of character development in a society that on the surface seems to disdain any particular moral lessons.
Anyway, their anthology of epigrams was “to serve morality and to promote judgement.” Such a purpose would ultimately, Nicole and Lancelot believed, enhance character because it was based on the judgment of what is beautiful. Now, to address your own judgment of beauty:
Nicole writes this about judging something like a literary work as beautiful:
“Indeed everyone in the act of judging embraces a hastily conceived opinion and follows his impressions without reflection or judgment. Thus it is that few have made any attempt so far to arrive at an exact knowledge of the nature of true beauty, by which in the last analysis all else must be determined; rather, each has immediately pronounced that to be beautiful which affected him with some sort of pleasure.”*
In this view, we judge beauty by our gut feeling, and we can all see some evidence for this in popular fads. Women’s fashion has bounced, for example, between jackets with shoulder pads and bare shoulders. Alternatively perceived as enhancing and spoiling the beauty of the wearer, neither fashion has been permanent. We can cite other examples from music, dancing, theatre, art, and motion pictures. Nicole says, “Consequently, if we wish to dissociate ourselves from the fickle mob of opinions, we must have recourse to reason, which is single, fixed, and simple.” In this he paraphrases Cicero, writing, “time that erases the fictions of opinion only confirms the judgements of nature.”
So, what is this nature that is the basis for judging beauty? Pardon the longer quotation here:
“Reason leads us directly to nature and establishes that to be generally beautiful which accords both with the nature of the thing itself and with our own. For example, if an object that is excessive or defective in some part is thought ugly, it is because it diverges from nature which demands a completeness in the parts and despises excess. Almost everything that is judged to be ugly is so judged for the same reason: you will always observe that there is here some flaw at variance with a rightly constituted nature. Nevertheless, for an object to be declared beautiful it is not enough that it answer to its own nature; it must also be congruent with ours. For our nature, being invariable both in the soul and in the body endowed with senses, has definite inclinations and aversions by which it is either attracted or estranged.”
Like so many others, Nicole wants to acknowledge some universality of the “beautiful.” There is something in us that knows beauty when we see it in any form. It’s in our nature. And that same “something” that is part of our nature enables us to distinguish what is “ugly” in Nature as well as in the arts. “True beauty “agrees both with the nature of things themselves and the inclinations of our senses and of our soul.”
If we agree, are we Neoplatonists? Is there some “ideal” beauty in the Nous? Is there a perfect tree that is the ideal of all specific trees, a tree that is unchangeable, unaffected by a deciduous character? Is there an ideal body shape? Face? Literary style?
How much of your character is shaped by your sense of the beautiful? How different is your sense of beauty from that of others? On what might you agree? Beauty is…
*Cunningham, J. V., Trans. An Essay on the True and Apparent Beauty in Which From Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams by Pierre Nicole, The Augustan Reprint Society, Publication Number 24 (Series IV, No. 5), Los Angeles, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1950.
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