Aquinas on Beauty by Christopher Scott Sevier

Author:Christopher Scott Sevier [Sevier, Christopher Scott]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780739184257
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2015-02-11T16:00:00+00:00

From this passage, the meaning of beauty as proportion, first in Augustine and derivatively in Aquinas, emerges. The beautiful image “fills the measure of that of which it is the image,” in respect of which it is “made equal to” (coaequatur) that of which it is the image. This is the sense is which he says there is “such great fitness (tanta congruentia), and prime equality (prima aequalitas), and prime likeness (prima similitudo).”56 The image and that of which it is an image “differ in nothing,” are “unequal in no respect,” that is, are “in no part unlike.”57 What he is making clear, through a series of parallel expressions, is that the appellation of beauty, applied to an image, relates to its approximation to its object or exemplar. It is in this sense that the Son is said to be an express image of the Father, since the image (i.e., the Son) “answers exactly to Him whose image it is.”58

What Augustine makes clear, in the passage to which Aquinas defers, is that the equality of the Son to the Father consists in part due to the absolute approximation of the Son to the Father, of the image to the exemplar. There is, in fact, no gap between the image and the thing of which it is the image. In this case alone is the image exact, indistinguishable from that of which it is the image.59 This exact fitness of image can be found in exemplary form only within the godhead itself, for no creature can attain to such an exact likeness. Human beings are like God, and are said to be created in God’s image; but with human beings, as with any created being, there is always a gap between the exemplar and the imitation. Thus Aquinas contrasts two ways in which something can be said to be an image. In the example he provides, the exemplar is the King.60 In one way, something can be said to be in the image of the King because they share the same nature, as in the case of the King’s son. In another way, something can be said to be in the image of the King because it shares a likeness, but not of the same nature, such as you’d find in the King’s likeness on a coin. The likeness of the Son to the Father is of the first type, while the likeness of human beings to God is of the second type.61 There is a qualitative difference, rather than one merely of degree, between the two sorts of likenesses. The Son is the exact image of the Father (perfecta patris imago), and that is why the Son is said to be “the image of the Father” (imago patris), whereas human beings are imperfect images (imperfectionem imaginis), and so are not called simply “image” (homo non solum dicitur imago), but are more appropriately said to be “to the image” (ad imaginem).62

It is in this sense of image, as exact likeness, that

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