St. Thomas and the Bard:

'On Beauty in the Tempest and the Limits of Aesthetic Experience'

Daniel Fitzpatrick, Holy Apostles College & Seminary, Conn., USA, at Studia Gilsoniana.

"We wait with some level of anxiety to see how Miranda will respond to the sight of other men later. Will she find them more beautiful than Ferdinand and, like Romeo turning from Rosalind to Juliet, turn also from the Ferdinand she has so recently declared the ultimate object of her affection?

"St. Thomas Aquinas, in typical fashion, provides us a fairly straightforward way out of our apparent conundrum, our uncertainty as to Miranda’s taste, by his definition of beauty: “Pulchrum autem respicit vim cognoscitivam, pulchra enim dicuntur quae visa placent.”1 The beautiful, that is, is that which, having been seen, pleases in respect of its ability to touch the cognitive power of the observer. ..." (p. 791)

See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, in Great Books of the Western World (first edition, 52 Vol., 1952) volumes 19-20, and Great Books of the Western World (second edition, 60 Vol., 1990) volumes 17-18.

See Shakespeare, Great Books of the Western World (first edition, 52 Vol., 1952) volumes 26-27, (second edition, 60 Vol., 1990) volumes 24-25.