The concept of beauty in Dionisii Karthusian’s treatise “On the Grace of the World and the Beauty of God”

Abstract

The concept of beauty in philosophy received its foundation in scholastic metaphysics. The content of this notion was far from the meaning it would receive in modern aesthetics. Aesthetics connects the intellectual experience of contemplating beauty with sensuality while in medieval natural theology pulchrum was comprehended by way of the cognition of the idea as the radiance of form in matter. In his understanding of beauty Dionisii the Carthusian used the ideas of his predecessors such as Augustine, Alexander of Hales, Thomas Aquinas. He thought beauty as transcendental. But in his interpretation there was a transition from a purely rationalistic explanation of beauty to the recognition of the constitutive role of sensuality in aesthetic experience. The representation obtained in this way is the basis of the idea of a beautiful thing. Beauty comes from form which is related to the species of a thing. God is Beauty as such. Therefore, the explanation of the impression received from the experience of beauty is connected with the ability of contemplation in the act of vision of things. They impressed the perfect image of the Creator. This image raises our cognitive faculty to the ultimate level of aesthetic evaluation. And despite the fact that Denis did not raise a created beauty to the level of a self-sufficient object of knowledge we may see that a gradual movement in this direction was being made.