Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

wider implication here, compared to the way it is used today. ‘Good order’ might be a more suitable term — invoking a world that is harmonious and where truth and goodness reign. Thomas Aquinas, following the ancient Greeks, said beauty consists of wholeness, harmony and radiance. James Hillman (The Soul’s Code) interpreted Aquinas’s views to give us a slightly expanded version of these three aspects. There is physical beauty — that is, the beauty of particular things. (Wholeness.) There is intellectual beauty — that is, the beauty of things in general. (Harmony, especially mathematical harmony.) And then there is spiritual beauty — the beauty of things in the light of eternity. (Radiance, such as the radiance of the goddess Aphrodite.) Hillman suggests that beauty is not a reliable guide to truth. But he talks about seeing things clearly as the means by which we can properly know the world. Other authors (Elaine Scarry, Tielhard de Chardin, Iris Murdoch) connect seeing with beauty, in that clearly seeing others will lead us into discovering their underlying beauty. In The Sovereignty of the Good, Iris Murdoch says: ‘Attention, a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality, is the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.’

Plotinus likewise recognised moral as well as physical beauty. For him, moral beauty is a person’s character and a reminder of the individual soul’s connection with the world soul (anima mundi). Physical beauty is just a reflection of this deeper connection. Plotinus said: ‘How then can anyone be in beauty without seeing it? If he sees it as something

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