The Aesthetics Of Thomas Aquinas, by Umberto Eco

This book happens to have been the author’s first book, and while it was a book whose contents were deeply interesting to me, they are not the sort of contents that I think would be of interest to most readers.  To appreciate this book, likely a few of the following questions would have to be answered in the affirmative.  Are you interested in philosophical discussions about beauty and its role as a virtue?  Do you care about the thoughts of Thomas Aquinas about anything?  Are you interested in the philosophical musings of medieval Hellenistic Christian thought?  Are you interested in the way that questions about beauty intersect with other philosophical concerns?  If you answered yes to at least one of these questions, you would likely get something out of this book.  Eco is certainly sympathetic to the philosophical thinking of Thomas Aquinas and makes a strong effort to uncover a fair-minded Thomist approach to aesthetics within Aquinas’ writings.  Admittedly the subject is somewhat obscure, and the author’s philosophical interests are likely not very common, but as someone who found much to agree with albeit much to be puzzled about in this book, I must admit that I am part of the small audience to which this book is aimed.

This particular book is a bit more than 200 pages and is divided into eight chapters.  The book begins with a preface that justifies a revision and further edition of the book as well as a note from the translator.  The main contents of the book begin with a discussion of the historiography and plan of research concerning the thoughts of medieval thinkers about the subject of aesthetics (1).  After this comes a look at beauty as a transcendental value in both Aquinas’ texts as well as with regards to modern interpretations (2).  After that there is a discussion of the function and nature of the vision of aesthetics in medieval thinking (3) and a discussion of the formal criteria of beauty, not least how it relates to other concerns that Aquinas had relating to integrity and clarity (4).  There is then a discussion of concrete problems of Aquinas’ view of aesthetics and its applications in such areas as the beauty of Christ, mankind, music, play and playful verse as well questions of symbolism, allegory, and poetics (5).  After this the author discusses a theory of art (6) that can be drawn from Aquinas’ writings on beauty as well as a look at the question of judgment (7) and then a conclusion that wraps up the author’s thoughts.

Again, this book is a philosophical inquiry about an often neglected area of an important medieval thinker who is mainly of interest to traditional contemporary Catholics, and as such is certainly not aimed at a very large audience.  Yet even for readers outside of philosphical Hellenistic Christianity, the author does present some striking insights even if much of the text is admittedly challenging to get through, and that comes particularly in the author’s insights that any philosophical system is going to contain within it some sort of contradiction to reality, for any model of reality is going to oversimplify and distort that reality so that it may be conceptually understood.  Moreover, we can only read out of a text those layers and aspects that correspond to what we understand and recognize, and so our readings frequently distort what we come into contact with because we can seldom grasp all that a good author has to offer.  It can be readily seen that this book will offer limited use for a reader seeking to appreciate Aquinas through Eco’s writings (or that of any other commentator) not least because we can only appreciate through a commentary those aspects of the original text that the commentator was able to relate to where we can relate to the commentator as well.