Beauty among the Transcendentals in the Summa Halensis

Beauty among the Transcendentals in the Summa Halensis1 Justin Shaun Coyle "So I think, Hlppias," Socrates muses in Plato's Hippias Major, "that I have been benefitted by conversation with both of you; for I think I know the meaning of the proverb, 'Beautiful things are difficult.'"2 Among beauty's difficult things, at least for readers of Scholastic texts in the last century, stands the question of its transcendental status. Is beauty a transcendental determination of being like one, true, and good? The transcendental question kindles debate in recent literature. Probably it burns hottest in Thomistic camps.3 Sometimes scholars pose the question to the Summa halensis (SH) too, an early summa confected under the direction Alexander of Hales.4 Beauty's place there, as in Thomas Aquinas's [End Page 875] texts, lacks consensus among its readers. That a single interpretive reading of Scholastic arcana should fail consensus hardly scandalizes. What does, however, is how this literature conducts its investigation of beauty's transcendental status without registering the peculiarities of Alexander's transcendental thought. This article assays beauty's status among the transcendentals by registering those peculiarities. Doing that, I show, reveals something unexpected. SH conceives beauty very differently from its readers allow or notice. Alexander—I call him that5—evinces little interest in sorting beauty's transcendental status (which he finally denies). He prefers to speak beauty with Trinitarian grammar. For Alexander, beauty does not name one transcendental determination of being among others. Instead, he identifies [End Page 876] beauty with the very taxis of the Trinitarian persons—it forms their structure, their taxis, their "sacred order."6 It is exactly this taxic shape of Alexander's theological aesthetics that the literature pays little mind. There is little wonder why: the Trinitarian grammar of beauty in SH transgresses the constricted boundaries of the transcendental status question. So this article meets the transcendental question in Alexander's Summa mostly to transfigure it. Only a transfiguration of the question renders Alexander's elegant and highly distinctive Trinitarian aesthetic again visible. That, anyway, is what this article seeks: the public display of Alexander's Trinitarian aesthetic for appreciation and scrutiny. Or so the goal—here is its structure: First, I relay an aporia in the literature over beauty's transcendentality SH. Second, I commend an anonymous thirteenth-century text that reinscribes and reshapes Alexander's position on beauty. Third and before concluding, I study a forgotten scene in Alexander's Summa to remember his alternative Trinitarian account. That account bears considerable promise, I think. But it must first be recovered from depths that have long since passed out of theological memory. Is Beauty a Transcendental? An Aesthetic Aporia I begin by opening an aporetic gap,7 one that yawns between two answers to the question of beauty's transcendental status in SH. The prima pars of SH seems to subordinate beauty to the good, at least structurally. Alexander affords one, true, and good each a treatise all their own.8 Beauty merits no such treatise—not even a membrum or chapter. It claims only a single article9 within a larger dialectical cycle of questions on [End Page 877] the good's relation to other terms—to being, to beauty, to the final cause.10 Some readers parlay Alexander's structural subordination of beauty to the good into a metaphysical hierarchy. Beauty, they think, "becomes more or less an epiphenomenon of the good."11 Often these readers say vanishingly little about how beauty relates to other transcendentals. On their view, it matters only that beauty does not number among them. That beauty appears indexed to the good means it forms a second-class transcendental, whatever indeed that might mean. But Alexander's prima secundae weaves another tale. Its long treatise De pulchritudine creati begins thus: Next to consider, after the conditions of creatures with regard to quantity, are the conditions of creatures with regard to quality, and these are true, good, and beauty. But truth and goodness were discussed above in the treatise on the essential things said of God. Now follows a consideration of the beautiful or beauty.12 True, good—and beauty?13 Beauty...