Medieval Aesthetics

(400-1400 C.E.)

 

With the decline of the Roman empire in the early Middle Ages, art and speculation about it became even more localized in particular institutions. We must always be careful not to project our concepts of "art" and "aesthetic feeling" back onto cultural situations where those concepts and practices did not exist. Art flourished, but it belonged to the church, the court, and special civic institutions. Artist practiced a craft or were scholars, monks, or traveling poets. Philosophical treatments of art are found in the context of theology and mystical writings. A medieval "aesthetic" exists in continuity with its classical roots. It is built on harmony and proportion, a love of color and form, and a deep sense that symbols project significance beyond their individual appearance.

Neo-Platonism continued to be influential in a Christianized form through the Middle Ages. It was transmitted through two primary sources and a multitude of influences and unacknowledged references. The two most important sources were the writings of Augustine of Hippo (354-430) and the sixth-century Syrian monk whose work was taken to be by Paul’s disciple Dionysius the Areopagite. Augustine incorporated many Platonic elements in his theology. In particular, he was able to use the neo-Platonic concept of spiritual being to solve the problems about the existence of evil and the incorporeal nature of God. In aesthetics, this concept made available the hierarchical movement, which found harmony in the whole universe and beauty as its object. Pseudo-Dionysius presented parts of earlier neo-Platonists directly in the guise of Christian doctrine. Divine names and a form of dialectical negation opened the hierarchy to speculation. Both Augustine and pseudo-Dionysius distrusted beauty itself, however. It was too pagan. Christian writers throughout the Middle Ages struggled with the competing claims of beauty as the highest value and the tendency of aestheticism to distrust anything that was too sensual. Only medieval mysticism was able truly to embrace both at once.

Later medieval philosophers and theologians reintroduced Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato. Neo-Platonism remained influential, but it took more concrete, individualistic forms in response to Aristotle’s unification of form and sense. In the Renaissance, an increasing emphasis on experience, artistic expression, and individual achievement and skill shifted aesthetics away from beauty as a divine harmony toward beauty as a felt, sensual first step toward a higher consciousness. The aesthetic payoff of art was something that an individual could feel rather than an intellectual union of individual minds with the divine mind. Changes in the philosophy of beauty paralleled a changing status and function of art. No matter how skilled, medieval artists were largely anonymous conduits for a divine inspiration. As first Aristotlelianism and then a revised neo-Platonism took hold, artists appeared as individuals whose skill exhibited their own perceptions as well as those communicated to them. Most of the elements remain the same, but artists now produced individual works about individual objects for individual consumers. The aesthetic in its modern sense—a science of feeling as such—became possible.

The Medieval selections are from Bonaventure and Dante. Bonaventure illustrates briefly the way that neo-Platonism informed the High Middle Ages, and Dante shows how a transformation already had begun to take place by the beginning of the fourteenth century even though medieval theology continued to shape his literary form.