It is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Many people repeat that phrase without knowing who uttered or wrote it. Actually, the man to pen those words probably dictated them to his secretary, Brother Reginald. When Thomas Aquinas dictated it the words were somewhat different: “pulchra dicuntur quae visa placent.” It might be translated as such: “things are called beautiful upon being seen.” Part of what St. Thomas was getting at here is that beauty is subjective, but not in the way we usually think. Beauty is subjective in the sense that it needs a subject to recognize it: a red rose must be gazed upon for one to receive its beauty. 

 

What is beauty, then? For St. Thomas, beauty is a perfection of the being of an object. Dr. McNamara puts it this way: “When we know things easily and deeply because they clearly manifest what they are, we call them beautiful” (22). Put simply, “When we experience a beautiful thing, we get a flash of the understanding that God has of that thing;” the idea God had in His mind when He created it. 

Looked at in this way, beauty takes on an intellectual and a moral aspect. The “beautiful thing delights the mind because the mind is made to know Truth and love the Good and therefore delights in the Beauty that reveals them both most clearly” (24). Beauty might thus be understood as the bringing together of the truth of what the rose is and the goodness it carries with it. 

St. Thomas’ view of the beautiful, of course, presupposes an ordered nature. Indeed, it presupposes a natural world built with intention, built with a purpose. God created the world with a good purpose, i.e. truth and goodness. Beauty is thus the recognition of ordered nature, the recognizing of God’s good purpose for the rose: seeing what it is, what it means in the context of God’s ordered nature. 

Because recognition of such beauty raises our mind to questions of the right ordering of nature, we can also see that “our desire for God is part of our ordered nature.” Indeed, “beauty pleases our souls, which long for an understanding of God” (24).  

This explains why beauty is deeper than merely the skin. The outside of something is part of its beauty, but its moral character also reveals its beauty or lack thereof. For example, it’s hard to recognize the beauty of a house built by means of lying because it does not resemble the goodness of the family meant to reside there. 

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Such an assertion that claims “no norms for Beauty, [also] infers no norms for Truth or Goodness” (23). So it is that with the dictatorship of relativism surrounding beauty, we also lose our handle on truth and goodness. 

Let us pray on these Summer days when we celebrate our liberty, that we will have eyes to see God’s ordered creation and recognize in its beauty the truth and goodness in which He created all things!