Mediation of Beauty

So what about beauty? Is beauty mediated?

First of all, what is beauty? I don't really know, so I think I'm going to go with (Pseudo-)Dionysius: "καλός καλεῖ" - "Beauty" (kalos) "calls" (kalei). Beauty is that which draws us. Or, more properly, something that moves us as rational/spiritual creatures, since animals aren't called by beauty. (and the draw of beauty is something deeper than the draw a hungry man feels for a steak.)

But I think the way that beauty calls to us is only through a form of some kind. Beauty is itself a mediation. You can't have access to a pure beauty apart from its form! (in a non-loaded way - whether you think like Plato that beauty comes from participation of the Form of Beauty or like Aristotle that it's in the mind of the perceiver, you will have to admit that beauty does not come without some sort of "body").

Consider art. Remember when I talked about media as being opaque or translucent? I think the project of art seems to be trying to use a medium in the most transparent way possible. Think about literature: we can use volumes of words to describe concepts in philosophy, but the words can seem to be partially a hindrance to the meaning being conveyed, even while they're revealing other things. In poetry, however, you are using words specifically through their individual veilings and unveilings, to optimize their concrete character as words, to create a harmonic structure from their inbuilt network of meanings and senses. (for more on this see the later part of this post from the old blog.

I think this applies to visual arts and music too; we can use sound (voice) to communicate, or pictorial symbols to indicate things, but in normal contexts we use them in an abstracted way, just getting away with the bare minimum, as if we're constricted by the medium. But again, through art, we really focus on that particular medium and really focusing on using it as matter according to all the things it hides and reveals.

Let's illustrate with the example of sound. The sound of a human voice is a pile of sine waves of sound bouncing through our vocal tracts that add to each other to give the unique but periodic squiggle-wave of the individual human voice (since waves don't exist on top of each other, they meld together to make one wave: the peaks and valleys adding and canceling each other out until the pattern eventually repeats again). And, as intelligent beings, we use this combination of sound waves to communicate intelligible words.

Now, in music, we do not just take these waves as they are, and how they've added up their random periodic squiggles; we optimize the resonances - we put extra focus on the resonances of the different waves together until that they add up together into periodic *sine wave* motion; the result being that instead of just a spoken word, it is a sung word, it has a unified pitch with a series of harmonics within it. (Until we optimize the resonance, all the individual component waves kind of cancel out each other's order).

If you were able to follow my analogy, I congratulate you (and I grossly simplified it because I am only pretending to remember phonetics). What I am trying to say is that we have "media" floating around in the world, whether that be sound or matter or anything. Then we as human beings endow it with intelligibility, make it into a word, or a stop sign, or something, where its being-a-word or being-a-stop-sign is largely secondary to the meaning it is pointing to. In art, however, we put extra focus on how we can communicate through the particularities of this word, through its being-this-word, with these particular connections or this particular pronunciation; we find a way to make our meaning optimally resonate through this particular medium, so to speak. Or, perhaps we can phrase this better: something is art to the extent that it focuses on how the medium as a medium can optimally communicate to us (because a philosophical work can be artistic - von Balthasar, Marion, and Nancy are all very poetic, and so their form is rather artistic, even while this form is more secondary to their projects than it would be for someone with the primary intention of writing poetry).

One more fundamental distinction with this analogy: "finding the optimal resonance" of the medium isn't an intellectual calculating process - just like we don't calculate when we sing, it's more an intuitive connection that when these waves add up right, we sense it. There is hard intellectual work to be done in art, certainly, but the artistic thinking is more to sense or intuit where these resonances are strongest, because it's not something we have the ability to calculate.

So this was a lot of rambling: what have we said so far?
Art is a mediation that optimizes the mediating, or that makes the medium as transparent as possible by taking full advantage of the particularities as a medium. Art is a way of conveying beauty, truth, and goodness that is not even conceivable without a form - mediation is most proper to it.

And where were we going?
Beauty is fundamentally through mediation.

Let's throw it our test case: angels? Do angels appreciate beauty? Do angels know form? I don't know how to answer. Only that form must be more than physical - I know for myself I often find ideas quite beautiful (even like pure math - things that have no physical form). Thus, presumably, angels can have an appreciation of the beauty of non-corporeal form. But I don't think they would have art - art is still related to incarnation, and the enfleshment of ideas in some kind of physical form. Art relates to beauty, but not all beauty is art. (abstract mathematics can be beautiful, but it is not, strictly speaking, art)

Don't go looking for logical proof of this here; I am just exploring and sharing what seems right to me. But it seems to me, once again, that access to pure beauty without mediation of some kind if nonsensical.

Next up: the Incarnation (if I feel bold enough to speculate on something I am wholly unqualified to talk about...).

Mediation of Goodness

At first, this seemed to me a natural conclusion of being embodied: since we are not pure spirit, we must then cloak all access we have to truth on the spiritual level with the flesh of words... (although, again, cloak gives a connotation that makes it sound like merely an obstruction - but yet access is only possible through the particular nature of words as entities which hide and reveal at the same time.) When angels know, they intuit the truth fully and completely, as far as they are able, without the need for words or discursive reasoning.

And yet, truth is not the only thing that is mediated. The angels, specifically, made me begin to wonder about the mediation of the Good. (Pseudo) Dionysius the Areopagite states in his Celestial Hierarchies that the nine choirs of angels are the medium through which God's grace flows to us - it is not an obstacle, according to Dionysius, but merely the proper medium through which God's grace propagates.

First reaction: what a beautiful thing, that God's goodness is so personal he has so many persons bring it to me, both human persons and angelic persons. I know how clearly I can experience the love of God not only through the created world, but especially through my friendships with certain people, who are unique images of God - I never thought of the angels like this, but it makes sense that I should be able to experience his love in non-embodied people as well.

Second reaction: any finite creature is still only a creature - does this mean we can never have access to God himself?

I don't know the answer to this question. One answer is: God can work how he pleases, so probably, we have access to God both directly and through other people (is this more or less common than the infused knowledge of truth (without concepts) through the Holy Spirit?)

A second answer: Can we ever really experience God himself on this earth, at least until we are saints? God is simple, and so we couldn't have a part of him, and yet infinitely far beyond our ability to take in - it really is a miracle for us to be able to experience GOD in any way (as in any Christian authors, including Jean-Luc Marion: if finite man were to be able to experience God, that thing would not be worthy of being called God, God being by definition outside of our experience). Through the Incarnation God has elevated our nature to a supernature (deification, as the Fathers would say), but due to original sin we do not start in full union with God - this is only possible through grace and hard work as we grow in likeness to him. So perhaps saints, in full union with God, are able to experience him, somehow, on earth.

But for the rest of it, maybe it is the role of the angels to "break down" an "experience" of God somehow so that we can get something of a connection with him... and yet already I've plunged into a kind of crazy cataphatic speech that starts bracketing concepts left and right - first of all, angels are finite creatures, as we are - so how would they be able to experience God, unless through a supernatural miracle? (This might not be so big of a problem: we believe that the good angels are already participating in the beatific vision, right? So perhaps their supernatural knowledge has already been bestowed.) Second, what would it mean to "break down" God, if he is purely simple? How could any piece have any relation to something that is fundamentally without pieces?

Perhaps it is because God's simplicity is a rich simplicity. The Neo-Platonists believed the One was beyond all being, a monad that has no relation to the created order, something we can't attribute anything to - we can't even say the One is One, or it would no longer be purely one, since we would be attributing Sameness to it and now it contains multiple forms within itself (think Plato: a thing is what it is through participating in forms, and for Neo-Platonists, even Sameness is a form that one must participate in). But our God is a Trinity, first of all, and when we say God is simple, we do not mean we can attribute no quality at all to him, like the One, but that we somehow attribute everything to him, fully - God IS goodness, God IS mercy, God IS love... (imagining Heidegger's surly German frown, I feel compelled to add "whatever we mean by IS, of course")

I am sorry to post with such a lack of cohesion - but this problem is something that cannot be grasped so easily, at least not yet - I do not have the proper set of concepts, so must struggle through all these words (and here we have illustrated something about the mediation of truth finding a concept is not just correspondence to an individual "thing" out there, but a framework, or a certain viewpoint).

So once again, the question: the Good - seems to be mediated.

And I don't think this is a consequence of embodiment now: angels, as finite beings, cannot have a full experience of the good in itself either, without the supernatural gift of God.

Also, perhaps the mediation of truth is not a consequence of embodiment either: angels may intuit the truth simply, but Aquinas talks about how the higher angels are able to understand more than the lower angels, and so they constantly teach the lower angels by breaking down these concepts to levels fitted for their understanding (not breaking down temporally, or in discursive reasoning, but simply taking a seraphim-sized concept and cutting out a archangel-sized piece which the archangel will comprehend immediately).

Mediation, then, seems to be simply a result of being finite. Because we are creatures, we cannot have access to the unlimited, the Truth, the Good itself.

(Yes, I alluded to it briefly, but where does the Incarnation come in? Well slow down! I am not only finite and constricted by words, but I am constricted by the two-dimmensional character of discursive reasoning - - haha, as scattered and four-dimmensional as my disorganized thoughts appear above. Perhaps we shall say I am limited by the two-dimensional medium of communication that is writing.)

So, a recap:

PROBLEM: If a concept or essence is simple, how can it be broken down into understanding?
Even moreso, If God is simple, how can anything about him be broken down into understanding?

PROBLEM: If we don't approach God directly, how is that not an obstacle, ultimately, to God's love? If you love someone, you want to be with him directly, you don't feel that his love is magnified if it always coming through messages from other people - that seems less direct.

Next up: Beauty.

Mediation of Truth

This is one of those questions: I thought it might be small, but its roots stretch deep into everything that I do. I don't have an answer; I don't even have the question, really. But I can point at its general direction, in three (or more?) rambly parts - I apologize this is far less polished than most things I blog about.

It first occurred to me, as I was writing a history paper: why should it be that I spend all this time reading so many different words that other authors invested so much time and energy to write, just to break down and unlock a handful of the concepts they disclose? Oftentimes if we were to try to summarize what we learned from a book it could be done in less than a tenth of the size we've read, and that's a generous estimation. Then, further, if I want to convey very simple concepts to someone else, I must write them in pages and pages for this reader of mine to have a reduced understanding of my reduced concepts gleaned from the author himself (who himself reduced his conception in writing).

I am no physicist, but this is hardly a closed system! Where does all this energy go? Why do we need all these words dedicated to the purpose to unlocking a concept that, once known, is quite clear and simple?

Wouldn't it make more sense if we could have access to the concept itself? And if, once grasped, we could communicate it to others in a few simple words, words proportionate to the simplicity of the truth we have grasped?

And yet it seems that in order to have access to the truth, it must be mediated. Truth may come to us, but not in itself. And so we need words, volumes and volumes of them. We need analysts, we need interpreters, we need historians, we need synthesizers, all to get at a simple concept.

Some words are better than others; some descriptions are better than others. Language can be an opaque medium, as when authors stumble over word choice and lack any sense of subtlety for grammar.

Or, language can be translucent - I don't think any medium can be crystal clear (but more on this later). An author can use words and images (a secondary kind of medium within the medium of language itself that also helps us understand a concept!) in a way that captures quite well the meaning he is trying to convey.

But apart from the infused knowledge of the divine, which we have no agency over, concepts in ourselves are alienated from us except through media of some kind.

(Yes, we will get to art... but not quite yet.)

invocatio

Psalm 131

O Lord, my heart is not proud
My eyes are not raised too high
To occupy myself with great things
With things that are too wonderful for me

But I have calmed and quieted my soul
Like a child quieted on its mother's breast
Like a child quieted is my soul

O Israel, trust in the Lord
From this day forth and forevermore!