The concept of the good in St. Thomas’s understanding refers to biological and moral considerations, and the kinds of pleasure derived from them are called biological pleasure and moral pleasure. Both biological and moral feelings desire for an end, the satisfaction of the natural needs and that of the “cultural” needs. The natural needs in man are easy to understand because they often include preservation of life and sexual instincts, while the cultural needs in man require elaboration. It is commonly believed that our moral feelings are social constructs. Without moral cultivation and training, most people are not aware of moral values. With more and more nurturing as such, they tend to exhibit a higher expectation of morality. As a result, the moral feelings that men have are given a cultural meaning. The sphere of goodness thus refers to a moral concern and end(s) of a social conduct.
Since St. Thomas’s main point is about the theoretical distinction between the spheres of the good and the beautiful, he does not need to focus on the problems of practicality in life, and the element of reason can serve every cognitive faculty. Yet, when the practical problem of preferences comes in, the position of reason might be loosened. George Santayana is very straightforward to negate reason in an aesthetic
judgment: “Preference is ultimately irrational” (15). If the arbitrary ideal of reason is swayed, biological or moral pleasures will be often mixed with aesthetic pleasure.
When human beings are regarded as objects of beauty for seeing and contemplating, the aesthetic pleasure aroused by their physical and spiritual beauty often involves mixed judgment and pleasure.
St. Thomas is a forerunner to Kant in the sense that he, who lived some five hundred years earlier, propounds the concept of “disinterestedness” in its primitive form; the two philosophers point out the element of detachment and non-functionality in an aesthetic activity. According to Kant, the delight which “determines the judgment of taste is independent of all interest” (42). Yet, when human beauty is taken as the object of beauty, the whole matter becomes complicated. Kant acknowledges that
the beauty of man (including under this head that of a man, woman or child) … presupposes a concept of the end that defines what the thing has to be, and consequently a concept of its perfection; and is therefore merely appendant beauty. Now just as it is a clog on the purity of the judgment of taste to have the agreeable (of sensation) joined with beauty to which properly only the form is relevant, so to combine the good with beauty, (the good, namely, of the manifold to the thing itself according to its end,) mars its purity. (73, emphasis mine)
Most people thus do not apply a non-conceptual judgment to the beauty of their kind because they, as insiders and the “interested,” are trapped in a mist of prejudices that would usually intervene their pure aesthetic judgment. Hence, the difficulty of maintaining a non-conceptual and disinterested attitude toward the beauty of human beings. If man’s physical and spiritual beauty are merely appendant beauty, these two levels of beauty can be treated as dispensable, but the case proves to be the contrary: most mundane folks regard them as necessary and essential. It is from such an insistent mentality that a debate over physical and spiritual beauty is launched in Chaucer’s Tales.
On theoretical as well as practical bases, every beautiful object is able to arouse the sense of beauty, and the sense of beauty should have a fairly large application to
things like inanimate, artistic objects and even human beings. Such a sense of beauty is a kind of order and reason, according to St. Thomas.11 Since God creates man as His creations, there should be no contradiction in treating an individual as an object of beauty. In saying this, I do not intend to reify an individual. Instead, the strategy is to adopt human beings, especially the role of wife, as a medium through which her husband’s sensibility and perception of her physical and spiritual beauty can be explored in Chaucer’s Tales.
When talking about physical beauty of people, a woman’s outward beauty is often one of the focal points. It will be easy to find examples concerning the value of female physical beauty. As early as in the Song of Songs,12 the Church is being praised as a beautiful woman. The bridegroom invokes: “Come from Lebanon, my bride,/ Come from Lebanon, come!” (Song 4:8) and recalls the physical beauty of the bride in the song of the lovers:
Ah, you are beautiful, my beloved, ah, you are beautiful!
Your eyes are doves behind your veil.
Your hair is like a flock of goats
streaming down the mountains of Gilead.
Your teeth are like a flock of ewes to be shorn, which come up from the washing,
All of them big with twins, none of them thin and barren.
Your lips are like a scarlet strand;
your mouth is lovely.
Your cheek is like a half-pomegranate behind your veil.
………..
Your breasts are like twin fawns, the young of a gazelle
that browse among the lilies. (Song 4:1-3, 5)
11 “The forms of artificial bodies result from the conception of the craftsman, [and]… they are nothing else but composition, order and shape” (St. Thomas, ST, Part II [Second Part], Q.
96, Art. 2 ad 2).
12 “The Old Testament,” The New American Bible, 1991, 1986, 1970, Online, Confraternity of Christian Doctrine.
Here, the intrinsic as well as the extrinsic attributes of the bride are elevated to a transcendental dimension even though the intimate relation between the Lord, or the Lover, and his people, or the beloved, is described in secular terms. The author of the Songs does not compare the beauty of the Church to that of the male, because female beauty extracts a profounder cognition in the realm of human imagination.
The beautiful image thus arouses aesthetic pleasure via the operation of sensuous beauty and the contemplation of intellectual beauty.
In Chaucer’s Tales, the cognition of the physical and spiritual beauty of a wife also proceeds from the sense of beauty to the operation of the intellect, two levels of beauty that elicit aesthetic pleasure. Though it is difficult to quantitatively gauge the impact of the beautiful in real life, beauty has been the deciding factor in the choice of spouses. According to So, the search for the aesthetic value embodies a quest desire (1993:92). This is exactly the behavior pattern of the characters in the Tales. A husband searches for the values of physical and spiritual beauty embedded in a wife.
While in the various Chaucerian tales we can occasionally find that how a wife aesthetically feels attracted to her husband, we may narrow down the discussion to a husband’s sense of beauty toward his wife, leaving out the reverse direction of such feelings.
II. The aesthetic debate on physical and spiritual beauty in the Tales
The issue of the hierarchy of beauty is not merely a topic for the learned ecclesiastics in the Middle Ages. Chaucer is also interested in such a topic and formulates it via his personae in the Tales. Some pilgrims are more receptive to physical or sensuous beauty, such as the Miller, the Merchant and the Wife of Bath, while others are consciously responsive to spiritual or intellectual beauty, such as the Man of Law, the Clerk, the Franklin and the Second Nun. Eco explains the change in our psychological state when seeing a beautiful object. In clear and unmistakable language he remarks: “When we reflect upon the objective and rule-governed character of perceived phenomena, we discover our own connaturality with their proportions, that there are proportions also in ourselves” (1986:77, emphasis mine).
Beauty thus corresponds to the inherent ideas of these pilgrim-tellers.
However, in practicality, the distinction between the two levels of beauty is often polarized into the physical versus spiritual qualities of people. The dichotomy of these two types of beauty is further reinforced by Christian canons and doctrines that instill in the medieval men the superiority of internal beauty over external beauty.
The fear of the danger and transience of physical beauty leads to the condemnation of its aesthetic value. In Chaucer’s Tales, such a stereotypical attitude toward beauty is also dealt with, and he seems to present a debate on the coexistence and non-coexistence of these two levels of beauty in the various types of marriage he portrays.