《坎特伯里故事集》中婚姻之美學

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(1)國立㆗山大學外國語文研究所碩士論文 A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE INSTITUTE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE NATIONAL SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY. 《坎特伯里故事集》㆗婚姻之美學 THE AESTHETICS OF MARRIAGE IN THE CANTERBURY TALES. 研究生：郭如蘋撰 By JU-PING KUO 指導教授：蘇其康教授 Advisor: PROFESSOR FRANCIS K. H. SO. ㆗華民國九十㆓年七月 July 2003.

(2) 論文名稱：《坎特伯里故事集》㆗婚姻之美學頁數：156 頁校所組別：國立㆗山大學外國語文研究所畢業年度及提要別：九十㆒學年度第㆓學期碩士學位論文提要研究生：郭如蘋. 指導教授：蘇其康教授. 論文提要：本論文嘗試探討傑弗瑞•喬叟在其《坎特伯里故事集》裡所呈現的婚姻與㆗ 古美學之間的關係。聖湯馬斯•阿奎納斯(St. Thomas Aquinas)提出美與技藝(art) 的理論，主張美乃由「比例」(proportion)、「清澈」(clarity)與「完整」(integrity) ㆔要素組成，而技藝具有模仿與製造的特性。本文借用聖湯馬斯所提出之美與技藝的理論，對喬叟於其《故事集》裡所描繪的婚姻所蘊含之美與技藝的要素作㆒ 詮釋。筆者視美與技藝為兩種關鍵性的美學概念，並以類比(analogy)為方法重新建構美學與婚姻之間隱含、想像的空間。婚姻可視為㆒種美的表現，透過聖湯馬斯的美學理論，可分析出《故事集》㆗呈現的婚姻形式與內容以及㆗古美學感受力之間的呼應與差距，以及婚姻如何體現「比例」、「清澈」與「完整」之美學。本論文第㆒章從聖湯馬斯的「比例」理論探討《故事集》裡〈牛津學者的故事〉、〈律師的故事〉、〈第㆓位修女的故事〉、〈紳士㆞主的故事〉、〈商㆟的故事〉、〈磨坊主㆟的故事〉、〈巴斯婦㆟的序言〉以及〈巴斯婦㆟的故事〉㆗所描述的貴族婚姻與平民婚姻之形式，如何呼應此㆒美學要素。第㆓章著重分析包含物質之美與靈性之美的「清澈」要素在婚姻㆗扮演的角色，另㆒方面，㆖述多則故事㆗對於美的此兩層級是否共存於婚姻之辯論也是討論的焦點。第㆔章探討「完整」要素與婚姻之間的密切關聯，並延伸㆗古技藝的內涵，使之與婚姻㆗的「生殖技藝」 (procreative art)互相連結，進而分析生殖技藝與婚姻的完整性之間的互動。結論闡明喬叟對於㆖述故事㆗貴族與平民的婚姻美學之立場。關鍵詞：傑弗瑞•喬叟，《坎特伯里故事集》，婚姻，聖湯馬斯•阿奎納斯，美，技藝，「比例」，「清澈」，「完整」，「生殖技藝」.

(3) Title: The Aesthetics of Marriage in The Canterbury Tales 156 pages Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Sun Yat-sen University Date: July 2003 By: Ju-Ping Kuo Advisor: Professor Francis K. H. So Abstract: This thesis aims to interpret the elements of beauty and art in the marriages portrayed in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales by means of St. Thomas Aquinas’s theory of beauty and that of art. St. Thomas asserts that beauty consists of three elements: proportion, clarity and integrity, and that art imitates and denotes production.. I take beauty and art as the crucial concepts and use analogy as the. inquiring tool to examine the imaginary domain between beauty and art as applied to marriage, meanwhile investigating the implied language of intercommunication between aesthetics and marriage. Marriage is taken as a representation of beauty; its different forms and contents portrayed in Chaucer’s various tales will be analyzed so as to see to what extent they reflect and diverge from medieval aesthetic sensitivity and how aesthetic theory can be adopted to interpret medieval marriage.. In Chapter. One, the theory of “proportion” is applied to the various forms of marriage depicted in the Tales to explore how the marriage of the nobility and that of the commoners will correspond to this element of beauty, as portrayed in “The Clerk’s Tale,” “The Man of Law’s Tale,” “The Second Nun’s Tale,” “The Franklin’s Tale,” “The Merchant’s Tale,” “The Miller’s Tale,” “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” and her tale.. Chapter. Two examines the roles the variants of “clarity,” that is, physical and spiritual beauty, play in marriage, and a debate on the coexistence and non-coexistence of physical and spiritual beauty of a wife among the pilgrim-tellers will be demonstrated. Furthermore, in Chapter Three I shall extend the medieval concept of art to that of the “procreative art” in marriage, and explore the relationship between the procreative art and the “integrity” of marriage in the aforementioned tales.. The conclusion. discusses Chaucer’s positions on the aesthetics of marriage of the nobility and that of the commoners portrayed in the tales. Key words: Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, marriage, St. Thomas Aquinas, beauty, art, “proportion,” “clarity,” “integrity,” “procreative art”.

(4) Table of Contents. Introduction Concept of beauty in the Antiquity and the Middle Ages Concept of art in the Antiquity and the Middle Ages Medieval aesthetics Aesthetic judgment St. Thomas’s aesthetic theory Thesis statement Methodology Chapter One: The “Great Theory” as Evidenced in the Marriages in the Tales Theory of “proportion”: the “Great Theory” The relationship between the form of marriage and the theory of proportion Mathematical aesthetics in the form of marriage Mathematical aesthetics suggested in the iconography of marriage Proportions of age, estate and religion between the couples in the Tales Proportion of age between a couple Proportion of estate between a couple Proportion of religion between a couple Chapter Two: The Debate on the Coexistence and Non-Coexistence of Physical and Spiritual Beauty in the Marriages portrayed in the Tales St. Thomas’s definition of “clarity” The sense of “seeing” Distinguishing the beautiful from the good Mixed pleasure The aesthetic debate on physical and spiritual beauty in the Tales Argument: physical vs. spiritual beauty in marriage Counterargument: physical and spiritual beauty in marriage Aesthetic pleasure and moral or biological pleasure Reconciliation in “The Second Nun’s Tale” Chapter Three: The Integrity of Marriage and the “Procreative Art” in the Tales St. Thomas’s definition of “integrity” and “art” Integrity The medieval definition of art. 1 3 6 10 11 13 15 18 22 23 26 27 29 30 33 43 49. 59 60 62 64 66 69 70 79 87 93 98 99 100 102.

(5) St. Thomas’s theory of art The procreative art Bridal chambers/rooms and bridal “workshops” The “Sely instrument” The bridal chambers/rooms and bridal “workshops” in the Tales Aestheticism of the bridal chambers in “The Man of Law’s Tale” and “The Clerk’s Tale” Sacredness of the bridal workshops in “The Man of Law’s Tale” and “The Clerk’s Tale” Imitation-pleasure Aestheticism of the bridal rooms in “The Merchant’s Tale” and “The Miller’s Tale” Profaneness of the bridal workshops in “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” “The Merchant’s Tale” and “The Miller’s Tale” Affection between Madonna and her “work of art” in “The Man of Law’s Tale” and “The Clerk’s Tale” Integrity of marriage without procreation in “The Second Nun’s Tale”. 103 105 107 108 110 111 115 121 125 133 138 141. Conclusion. 145. Works Cited. 151.

(6) Introduction. The topic of marriage in The Canterbury Tales [henceforth called the Tales] is not a new issue in Chaucerian criticism.. Among previous critics, George L.. Kittredge, who creates the term “Marriage Group,” is one of the most authoritative figures.. The term designates a cluster of tales narrated by Chaucer’s pilgrim-tellers,. including the Wife of Bath, the Clerk of Oxford, the Merchant and the Franklin (185-211). Many Chaucerian critics have thereafter adopted this frame of reference for their discourses on the subject of marriage.. It stands to good reason that the. debate on the sovereignty in marriage, which the Wife of Bath initiates, draws most readers’ attention.. In looking at the Tales from a broader perspective, nevertheless,. one shall find that many tales outside the “Marriage Group” also portray the theme of marriage.. For example, “The Miller’s Tale,” though conventionally categorized. under the genre of fabliau because of its comic and coarse actions, deals with the husband and wife relationship as well. “The Man of Law’s Tale” too discusses the subject of marriage in two dramatic and epic episodes concerning Constance’s marriages, first with the Sultan of Syria and later with King Alla of Northumberland. Among other tales, the hagiography in “The Second Nun’s Tale” also dwells on how a marriage can be sublimated from a physical to spiritual relationship when the bridal pair forgo the practice of the conjugal debt to reach a tacit agreement in serving God. To one’s surprise, nearly three fourths of the Tales revolve around the notion of marriage in one way or another.1. 1. The deployment of diverse opinions concerning. Eighteen out of the twenty-four complete tales are set in the framework of marriage: “The Knight’s Tale” (as the tale approaches its end), “The Miller’s Tale,” “The Reeve’s Tale,” “The Man of Law’s Tale,” “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and her Prologue, “The Summoner’s Tale,” “The Clerk’s Tale,” “The Merchant’s Tale,” “The Squire’s Tale,” “The Franklin’s Tale,” “The Physician’s Tale,” “The Shipman’s Tale,” “The Prioress’s Tale,” “The Tale of Melibee,” “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” “The Second Nun’s Tale” and “The Manciple’s Tale.” Among these, some tales such as “The Knight’s Tale,” “The Squire’s Tale,” “The Physician’s Tale” and “The Prioress’s Tale” do not explicitly portray a couple’s married life but do mention their legitimate offspring, and therefore are generally included as those that deal with the theme of marriage..

(7) Kuo. 2. the subject of marriage no doubt shows that Chaucer reveals his great interest in exploring the relationship between husband and wife and the nature of marriage. When people nod to agree to a marriage or shake their heads in disapproval of a mismatched couple, both judgments depend on their value systems. How a marriage is evaluated can be as diversified as economical, political, ethical, moral, religious, ideological and/or aesthetical.. This thesis will only focus on the aesthetic aspect of. marriage because it has been a relatively unexplored area in the discussion of the marriages in the Tales.. By aesthetical judgment of marriage is meant the application. of aesthetic concepts to the interpretation of marriage.. Something peculiarly. aesthetic can be found in one’s decision to enter into marriage. When choosing their potential spouses, people pay special attention to their choice from various points of view and considerations. The aspects of the candidates’ age, estate and religion along with their physical appearance and spiritual qualities all have vital influence on the shaping of a future household. These criteria lay stress on an aesthetics that involves an appropriate proportion of age, estate and religion between a couple which suggests harmony and hence beauty. The Venetian Franciscan Fra Paolino in 1314 explained that the inhabitants of an ideal household in the medieval period consist of a husband, a wife and their children (de La Roncière 157).2 Battista Alberti had a similar notion of a family.. In 1434, the moralist Leon A couple, children, maids,. menservants—“That is what people refer to as the family” (qtd. in de La Roncière 158).. From these two moralists, one can realize that the elementary unit of a. household is the married couple. Moreover, children are usually regarded as part of the integrity of marriage.. Altogether, factors such as proportional age, estate and. religion between a couple, the physical and spiritual beauty of a wife as well as the production of offspring contribute to the aesthetics of marriage. These conditions seem to be social, moral and religious, yet indeed they are also bolstered by medieval aesthetic concepts, such as proportion, appropriateness, harmony, clarity and integrity,. 2. In addition to a couple and their offspring, Paolino considers a female domestic to wait on the couple as essential in a household, yet de La Roncière comments that such a condition is “a luxury” (qtd. in de La Roncière 157)..

(8) Kuo. which are almost synonyms of beauty in that period.. 3. To adopt these aesthetic. notions against a reading of medieval marriage will enable us to channel the marriages described in the Tales into a history of aesthetic experience. The history of Western aesthetics since the Antiquity involves many complicated issues. The aesthetic discourse includes academic areas such as “the philosophy of language and the theory of value, and in neighboring disciplines, such as psychology, literary criticism and art history.”3. To handle the complexity of the various subjects. of aesthetics is definitely beyond the grasp of a single thesis and my capability.. In. addition, Władysław Tatarkiewicz, the foremost contemporary Polish humanist and a European historian of aesthetics, has contributed numerous articles and volumes of books on the development of Western aesthetics.4. Hence, I shall only give a very. brief account of some major aesthetic notions in the Antiquity and the Middle Ages which are narrowed down into the categorization of beauty and art.. Concept of beauty in the Antiquity and the Middle Ages The concept of beauty has a long history as early as in ancient times.. Plato. points out three supreme kinds of values or judgments—truth, goodness and beauty, which have persisted in European thought ever since (Tatarkiewicz 1980:1). While we are not interested in Plato’s view of these three values, we may focus on the continuance of the concept of beauty from the Antiquity to the Middle Ages.. The. concept of beauty in the Antiquity and that in the medieval period share many similarities. A narrower view of beauty includes only physical and sensuous things, such as shapes, colors and sounds, while a wider view extends the concept to abstract and intellectual things, such as thoughts and ideas. 3. Greek philosophers, like. Wreen and Callen, “Foreword,” Beardsley 1982:7. Among Tatarkiewicz’s works, two important articles on western aesthetics are “Did Aesthetics Progress?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 31.1 (1970a): 47-59 and “The Great Theory of Beauty and Its Decline,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 31.2 (Winter 1972): 165-80. Two important books of his on aesthetics are History of Aesthetics: Medieval Aesthetics, ed. Cyril Barrett, and trans. R. M. Montgomery, 3 vols. (The Hague: Mouton, 1970) and A History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics, trans. Christopher Kasparek (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980). 4.

(9) Kuo. 4. Pythagoras and the Sophists of Athens, take sight and hearing as the two important senses that can most fully appreciate beauty (Tatarkiewicz 1980:122).. Of these two. senses, the faculty of sight particularly invites ancient and medieval thinkers to reflect on aesthetic problems.. Through the mechanism of seeing, people are not only. sensuously perceptive to the phenomena of beauty but also intellectually cognitive of the implicit harmony derived from them. Five main propositions about the discussion of beauty in the Middle Ages have been handed down from the Antiquity:. 1. Beauty consists in the proportions of parts; 2. Beauty consists in the appropriateness or suitability of things to their end; 3. Beauty is an objective property of things; 4. Beauty is apprehended both by the senses and the mind; and 5. Beauty is found in Nature and in the arts. (Tatarki ewicz 1970a:47-48). The first proposition indicates that the mathematical relationship between objects or within an object contributes to beauty because a good arrangement of parts results in balance, harmony and order.. The second proposition states that the idea of. appropriateness denotes the notion of symmetry and harmony.. For the third. proposition, the objectivity of beauty highlights human beings’ ability to judge an object from the reality of its existence, instead of from the total subjectivity of the observer.. The question of the objective characteristic of beauty is brought up by St.. Augustine, who formulates the problem of beauty with great precision: “Is a thing beautiful because it pleases or does it please because it is beautiful?”5. The former. condition emphasizes subjectivity, while the latter objectivity in the action of seeing or perceiving. St. Augustine answers the question by saying that a thing pleases because it is beautiful. Such an approach treats beauty as an objective quality of things, although the activity of appreciating beauty needs a subject who practices subjectivity. 5. St. Augustine’s privileging the idea of objectivity of beauty influences. St. Augustine, De vera religione, XXXII, 59, qtd. in Tatarkiewicz 1970a:51; please also cf. Tatarkiewicz 1970:59..

(10) Kuo. 5. the mentality of the medievals toward aesthetic polemics, and we see this again in St. Thomas Aquinas’s aesthetics. St. Thomas says, “A thing is not beautiful because we love it, but is loved by us because it is beautiful and good.”6. The fourth proposition. about the discussion of beauty explains that beauty is perceived via the senses and contemplation. The last proposition that Nature and the arts contain beauty can be widely applied.. The arts refer to the products of human skills or the skills. themselves, and Nature can include objects like the sky, flowers, trees, animals and mankind. Among these propositions, the theory of proportion has been the most prominent throughout the history of Western aesthetics.. The belief that beauty is based on the. concept of proportion started in Greece around 500 B.C. and has persisted in a variety of forms to the present day (Tatarkiewicz 1972). Proportion can be assigned to abstract and concrete qualities. Tatarkiewicz terms the theory of proportion as the “Great Theory” of European aesthetics and discusses its influences in a series of his works on Western aesthetics.7. The “Great Theory” finds its supporters such as. Boethius, Robert Grosseteste, St. Bonaventure, Albert the Great, St. Thomas and William of Ockham, who all agree that beauty consists in the proportion of parts and numbers.8. To be qualified as beautiful, an object needs to be well-proportioned. among its components as well as within itself. The notion of proportion is applied not only to physical objects but also to intellectual ideas. A thought is beautiful when it fulfills the requirement of proportion or harmony between it and human intelligence. 6. St. Thomas, Expositio super Dionysium de divinis nominibus [On the Divine Names], IV, 10 (Mandonnet 398), qtd. in Tatarkiewicz 1970:259. 7 The term “Great Theory” serves as the title for Tatarkiewicz’s article “The Great Theory of Beauty and Its Decline” (1972). 8 Tatarkiewicz summarizes the similar points of view shared by early and late medieval philosophers. In Boethius, “Beauty seems to be an adequacy of parts”; the Scholastic Robert Grosseteste explains beauty as the concordance of the proportions; St. Bonaventure observes that all delight “depends on proportionality”; Albert the Great asserts that the concept of beauty “implies the proportion of elements”; St. Thomas says: “Beauty requires consonance and clarity”; and later Scholastics such as William of Ockham are faithful to the opinion that beauty is “the proper proportion of numbers” (Tatarkiewicz 1970a:50)..

(11) Kuo. 6. Concept of art in the Antiquity and the Middle Ages In addition to the concept of beauty, art is another main concept in the domain of Western aesthetics. Tatarkiewicz explains that the ancient Greeks have no word to denote those artistic activities that we today subsume under the name “art,” and neither do they linguistically or conceptually distinguish between crafts and the “fine arts” as we do today.. Other names such as craft, skill or technique suit the ancient. idea of art better than our term “art” does (Tatarkiewicz 1980:51). The ancients take every skill and every production as “art” if it is based on rules.. Similar to the Greeks,. the medieval men lack a theory of the fine arts because their focus is on the distinction between liberal and mechanical arts (Eco 1988:181), not on that between crafts and the fine arts. “Art” without a modifier in that age means the liberal arts, instead of the non-liberal arts (Tatarkiewicz 1980:57). On top of that, the seven liberal arts of the era are coupled with the seven mechanical arts.9. In addition to its productive. character, art also designates knowledge which is required for crafts.. Art as. knowledge includes intellectual activities such as poetics, grammar, rhetoric and eloquence, while art as production refers to the productive character of manual or servile activities.. From the Antiquity, the Middle Ages and down to the Renaissance,. both the “skill” required to command an army and the “skill” required to make a statue are called arts. To put it another way, the medieval notion of art contains two main elements: cognition and production, and cognitive art is regarded superior to productive art (Eco 1988:164). To the ancients, art also designates a collection of objects and the capability to produce them (Tatarkiewicz 1980:3). Four major propositions in the Middle Ages about the discussion of art are inherited from the Antiquity:. 9. The seven liberal arts are grammar, rhetoric, logic or dialectic (constituting the trivium), and arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music (constituting the quadrivium) (MED, Part A.4 401). The Scholastics since the twelfth century also tried to classify the “mechanical arts.” For example, Hugh of St. Victor divides the mechanical arts into seven arts: “lanificium (supplying men with wearing apparel), armatura (supplying men with shelter and tools), agricultura, venatio (both supplying food), navigatio, medicina and theatrica” (in Tatarkiewicz 1980:57)..

(12) Kuo. 7. 1. Art is based on rules; 2. Art is not creative; 3. The function of art is not expression; and 4. Art is either productive or imitative. (Tatarkiewicz 1970a:52). For the first proposition, art in the medieval period is a kind of knowledge or skills and is subject to universal laws. Rules denote order, reason and proportion in the production of objects. The second and third propositions make explicit that what constitute the medieval concept of art are the human ability to produce things and the product itself, not the psychological condition of the artist. do with creativity or expression.. Hence, art has nothing to. Lastly, art is either productive or imitative.. Mimesis, the Greek name for imitation, is a protean term, but basically this concept and its cognates indicate “a constant relation between something which is and something made like it” (McKeon 122).. The notion that art imitates is thus further. strengthened by the exclusion of artistic expression and creativity. Similar to the ancient attitude toward art, the medieval men also believe in a hierarchical order of art: the liberal arts are superior to the mechanical ones. During the process of production, craftsmen must bear in mind that the works to be made are to meet the functional and moral purposes.. Art ought to act as a medium of. instruction. Works of art such as painting, sculpture and architecture are always among the items taken as exemplars of the beautiful, a liaison that relates art to beauty. Tatarkiewicz asserts that the functions of art in the Middle Ages are mostly religious, moral, practical and/or educational; only incidentally are they aesthetic (1970:291). That is to say, art for art’s sake is a relatively recent invention and hence unheard of among the medieval men. The medieval view of art holds that the practical use or the task of art “is not desired for its own sake, but to decorate life with the splendour which it could bestow” (Huizinga 244). The above-mentioned propositions of beauty and art inherited from the Greeks also find expression in the Renaissance, while some of the propositions are modified in modern times. Tatarkiewicz in his article “Did Aesthetics Progress?” has done a.

(13) Kuo. succinct yet thorough examination of the development of Western aesthetics.. 8. After. analyzing important aesthetic propositions in these various eras, Tatarkiewicz declares that the Middle Ages and the Renaissance share many aesthetic propositions, among which the most essential ones are: beauty consists in right proportion and concordance of parts, and beauty is perceived by the mind and the senses; arts are either productive or imitative, and arts rely on rules which are based on knowledge.. In modern times,. aesthetics refers to a discipline in the domain of philosophy, and it incorporates the two concepts of “beauty” and “art” as its two main categories.. David Cooper. indicates that aesthetics after 1750 first became an academic subject in German universities, and it had been mainly concerned with the fine arts (48).. From the. previous basis, Cooper draws out two focal points. First of all, the year 1750 proves to be a watershed in the history of Western aesthetics for in that year the term “aesthetics” was first applied to the studies of beauty and art when Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762) coined it (Tatarkiewicz 1980:7).. Yet, if one traces its. earlier appearance, aesthetics has its etymological origin from Greek and refers to a mental knowledge, which is contraposed against a sensual knowledge (1980:3). The second point in Cooper’s statement reveals that the fine arts have been the core for the studies of beauty and art ever since their turning point in 1750. The name “fine arts” was dubbed in 1747 by Charles Batteux, French abbe and writer on philosophy and aesthetics, and he is the first to equate art with beauty in the history of Western aesthetics (Tatarkiewicz 1980:7, 29). As the enterprise of art develops, the range of the discoursing domain gradually narrows from the literary arts to the visual arts (Tatarkiewicz 1980:21). Eco remarks that “a great deal of modern aesthetics considers artistic form to possess an ontological value superior to that of natural forms, just because it is a product of the human spirit” (1988:173). Tatarkiewicz also expresses a similar view of the shift of aesthetic discourse: modern aesthetics gives more weight to the beauty of art than the beauty of nature and emphasizes more on the expressive and emotional function of art (1970a:56). Another way of saying this is that people nowadays tend to emphasize more subjectivity than objectivity of the aesthetic experience.. As the scope of.

(14) Kuo. 9. aesthetic objects narrows, the reflection on natural beauty in the Antiquity and the Middle Ages is transformed to the focus on art, namely representational arts and fine arts. Cooper also observes that the worries of the ancients and the medievals about the moral impact of art disappeared from the philosophical purview during the eighteenth century when Baumgarten labeled “aesthetics” as a philosophical term of art (viii). As for the question of the development of Western ae sthetics, Tatarkiewicz concludes that important changes have occurred in the history of aesthetics around and after 1750.. Yet, for about two thousand years (500 B.C.~1500) Western. aesthetics has undergone only partial changes (1970a:58-59). He distinguishes the progress of the arts from the progress of the theory of the arts and contends that the practice of the arts does not progress: It has been said, and correctly been said that Shakespeare, Goethe, Tolstoy, are not above Aeschylus and Homer, that Michelangelo is not more perfect than the Greek sculptors; neither is Rembrandt a greater artist than Van Eyck. Artists are different; arts have different forms and styles. They change and they do so rather often. They change but they do not progress. (58, author’s emphasis) On the other hand, the theory of arts progresses as its concepts become sharper and its propositions richer. Yet, major propositions have been known since ancient Greece, consequently the theory of art progresses but it does not change (58).. One. interesting and pertinent metaphor has been devised by Tatarkiewicz in comparing and contrasting ancient aesthetic theory and modern aesthetic theory: one aesthetic theory, the “classical” one, has for at least 2000 years been the leading theory. This is not contradicted by the fact that simultaneously other theories have been set up. Those had fewer adherents and their acceptance was less continuous. The history of aesthetics has been a pluralistic history with several different trends; but the importance of its component theories was not equal. The classical theory has been for centuries the freeway of aesthetics. It had, of course, its mergings and exits, as every freeway has. But for centuries other theories were only side roads of aesthetics. (57-58, author’s emphasis) However, after 1500 things change. The classical theory is no more the freeway of.

(15) Kuo 10. aesthetics; it seems to be a road of less importance.. While there are new roads, none. of them becomes a new freeway (58).. Medieval aesthetics In the Middle Ages, the classical theory of beauty is still a commonly known freeway, especially the theory of proportion.. Yet, it takes a different hue in the. Middle Ages in light of the integration of Christianity.. The notion of beauty in the. Judeo-Christian philosophical system shows a shift to spiritual and religious features of beauty. Eco observes that Christianity confers upon most of the aesthetic issues a quite distinctive character, hence medieval thinking on aesthetic matters is original (1986:4). Early Christians view that spiritual beauty is the kind of beauty to be held in esteem, keeping in mind that the only true beauty worthy of admiring is God.. In. fact, the basis of Christianity has “no need of science or philosophy, still less of aesthetics” (Tatarkiewicz 1970:1). What draw many medieval thinkers’ attention are theological issues, like the relationship between man and God as well as an understanding of God. Tatarkiewicz continues, “The Christian view of the world was based first and foremost on the New Testament. But the New Testament contains even less aesthetic factors than in the Old Testament” (1970:11-12).. In the Old. Testament, beauty is mentioned in The Book of Wisdom (11:20): God is said to “have set in order all things by measure, number and weight.” 10. While in the New. Testament, the beauty of mercy and that of fraternity, instead of the beauty of physical forms, are emphasized.. Later in the fourth century, St. Augustine followed the same. track of aesthetic philosophy, in which he was interested in the objectivity of beauty as well as the elements of harmony and proper proportion of parts that constitute beauty.11 10. The key concepts in St. Augustine’s theory of beauty are “unity, number,. Qtd. in St. Augustine, The City of God, XII, 19. The Book of Wisdom speaks of the beauty of creation and of works of art. Its mathematical theory of aesthetics is evidence of Greek influence. The assimilation of Greek and Christian elements is to be very important for medieval aesthetics. Tatarkiewicz states that “the authority of the Scriptures allowed it to be propounded and led to the unexpected result that a mathematical theory became one of the main aesthetic theories of a religious period” (1970:7). 11 St. Augustine holds that things are beautiful when “their parts are similar to one another.

(16) Kuo 11. equality, proportion and order” (Beardsley 1975:93).. All these terms share two. characteristics: reason and order. That how the medieval Christians understand God is a theological issue, yet it is usually uttered in aesthetic terms.. For example, in Song of Solomon, the speaker. utters: “Let me see thy countenance, and let me hear thy voice, for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely” (2:14). 12. The addresser tries to appreciate the. beauty of God by arousing the audience’s visual and audio sensations, the involved two senses being the most cognitive ones according to the medieval philosophers.. In. the prime era of Scholastics, philosophers also utilize the concept of beauty to discourse their understanding of God and the world.13. Even though there is then. discourse on beauty as such, when the Scholastic movement moves into the late Middle Ages, the most powerful thinkers become enthralled by the theological, ontological and epistemological problems rather than aesthetic problems so much so that most aesthetic remarks tend to be brief and peripheral to the main thought of the Scholastics (Beardsley 1975:89).. Yet, aesthetics somehow finds its way into the. philosophical systems of the Scholastics.. Indeed, the question of beauty could not be. “omitted from an all-embracing Summa, particularly in those chapters which dealt with God and the world” (Tatarkiewicz 1970:213).. Aesthetic judgment Aesthetics and its chief concepts, such as beauty, art, creativity, form and so on, are “among the most general and most enduring possessions of human mind”. and their relationship results in harmony” (Tatarkiewicz 1970:49). 12 This translation comes from Tatarkiewicz 1970:13. 13 According to Robert Grosseteste, an Oxford Franciscan, Bishop of Lincoln from 1235, when we say that “God is beautiful, this means that he is the cause of all beauty” (Commentary in Divina nomina [Pouillon, 321]), qtd. in Tatarkiewicz 1970:232. Ulrich of Strassburg, pupil to Albert the Great and fellow classmate of St. Thomas, also adheres to the tradition of using aesthetic terms to describe God. He writes, “God in Himself is not only perfectly beautiful and the highest degree of beauty, but is also the efficient, exemplary and final cause of all created beauty” (De pulchro [Grabmann, 75]), qtd. in Tatarkiewicz 1970:244..

(17) Kuo 12. (Tatarkiewicz 1980:4). All these concepts are usually accompanied by judgment of values.. Immanuel Kant defines aesthetic judgment as a non-conceptual and. disinterested judging, which is not grounded in the subject’s personal interests, de sires, needs or susceptibilities. This is certainly a highly human intellectual capability. Kant, however, also acknowledges that the intervention of the pleasant and the good always happens, because of the mechanisms of human nature. For example, the notion of disinterested judgment is often penetrated by sensory pleasures such as those derived from the beauty of mankind (Kant 73). Five centuries earlier, St. Thomas also distinguished pure aesthetic pleasure from biological pleasure. 14 14. Summa Theologica, Part II (Second Part), Q. 141, Art. 4 ad 3. Summa Theologica will be henceforth called ST. According to the on-line version of The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, which is translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (2000), the summa falls into three parts, of which St. Thomas subdivides the second into the first part of the second part, and the second part of the second part. He never finished the third part, therefore his followers composed an ending from his earlier writings, and their work is “the supplement.” We usually see the following in notes and parenthetical references: 1. “First Part” (Prima Pars), 2. “First Part of the Second Part” (Prima Secundae Partis), 3. “Second Part of the Second Part” (Secunda Secundae Partis), 4. “Third Part” (Tertia Pars) and 5. “Supplement to the Third Part” (Supplementum Tertia Partis). Each part breaks down into questions, each of which consists of articles. In the deployment of each article, “objections” on one side of an issue are followed by an argument supporting the other side, which is introduced with the formula sed contra (“on the other hand”). Next are St. Thomas’s solutions in the body (corpus) of the article, that is, his replies to the aforementioned objections. Replies open with ad (“to”) followed by a number. There have been numerous formats of citing St. Thomas’s Summa Theologica. For instance, Eco in his The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, employs the following format: “ST, I-II, 27, 1c,” which reads “Summa Theologica, the first part of the second part, question 27, article 1, St. Thomas’s solutions in the corpus.” In other situation when Eco refers to a specific reply of St. Thomas’s, the word “ad” is put after the number of the article and before that of the reply. For example, “II-II, 180, 2 ad 3” reads as “the second part of the second part, question 180, article 2, St. Thomas’s responsio to objectio 3.” Margaret A. Gist, on the other hand, adopts a different method. In her Love and War in the Middle English Romance, she uses the following format: “Summa Theologica, Part II (First Part), Q. 27, Art. 1,” yet she does not employ the marking of “ad” or “c” to pinpoint a certain passage; instead she refers to an article per se. A third example is Tatarkiewicz’s method of citation in his History of Aesthetics: Medieval Aesthetics. In citing “ST, I-II, 27, 1c,” he follows the format of “Summa theol., I-a II-ae, q. 27 a. 1 c,” and “II-II, 180, 2 ad 3” is written as “Summa theol., II-a II-ae, q. 180 a. 2 ad 3.” In this thesis, I will synthesize all these methods of citation, and “ST, I-II, 27, 1c” will be written as “ST, Part II (First Part), Q. 27, Art. 1c,” and “II-II, 180, 2.

(18) Kuo 13. Sometimes, the desire to possess an object of beauty can also easily intervene one’s disinterested aesthetic judgment.15. Thus, interestedness often infiltrates through the. senses and the mind to the extent that a “mixed” experience, judgment and pleasure is brought up.. St. Thomas’s aesthetic theory In the Western history of aesthetics, there are numerous great philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle as well as Kant and Hegel, before and after St. Thomas, and their theories are influential.. According to Hegel (1770-1831), Kant speaks “the first. rational word on aesthetics,” and The Critique of Judgement has formed the basis of subsequent writings on the theory of beauty and art.16. Yet, among these important. figures, St. Thomas is more culturally, religiously and aesthetically integrated with the social background of Chaucer’s Tales than other philosophers. Therefore, it shall be more appropriate to employ St. Thomas’s aesthetic theory to shed light on the interpretation of beauty and art in medieval marriage.. Furthermore, during the. Middle Ages, it is the Scholastics who contribute most to the discourse on aesthetics. ad 3” as “ST, Part II (Second Part), Q. 180, Art. 2 ad 3.” All St. Thomas quotations in this thesis are taken from the on-line version of The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, unless otherwise specified. 15 To further demonstrate how disinterested judgment can be intervened by circumstances, I would like to propose a situation wherein disinterestedness is inadvertently turned into interestedness. Once in the National Gallery, I was looking at an oil painting titled “Hylas and the Nymphs” by John W. Waterhouse. The artistic ambiance infected me so much so that I had been immersed in its mythological counterpart for some time. The sense of disinterestedness naturally infiltrated my mind because there was no selfish desire on the painting. After having enough of the sight of the masterpiece, I left the exhibition room and was “inevitably” led to the museum gift shop. Exactly then, my desire to possess a replica of the “Hylas and the Nymphs” oil painting welled up. I realized the necessity to purchase at least a poster or a postcard while I was there because I probably would not return to the National Gallery during my whole life. Thus, the interestedness penetrated into the unselfishness of my aesthetic experience. This should be what Kant categorizes as the judgment of the pleasant and of the good, not of taste (44-48). This is to show how easily the sentiment of disinterestedness can be transformed into emotional engagement. 16 “Kant, Immanuel,” The Oxford Dictionary of Art, ed. Ian Chilvers and Harold Osborne (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997). Oxford Reference Online. Oxford UP. 25 April 2003. http://www.oxfordreference.com/.

(19) Kuo 14. Among these scholars, St. Thomas with the magnitude and variety of his intellectual achievements, has a distinct view on aesthetics which is “one of the most frequently quoted of all medieval statements on aesthetics and is even regarded as the quintessence of Scholastic aesthetics” (Tatarkiewicz 1970:248). Though St. Thomas does not compose a systematic treatise on aesthetics, three essential elements are usually regarded to constitute St. Thomas’s theory of beauty. On the other hand, the views of aesthetic pleasure and the apprehension of beauty form his definition of beauty.17. On top of that, he also has a distinct theory of art.. In his theory of beauty, St. Thomas asserts that beauty consists in proportion, clarity and integrity: beauty includes three conditions, “integrity” or “perfection,” since those things which are impaired are by the very fact ugly; due “proportion” or “harmony”; and lastly, “brightness” or “clarity,” whence things are called beautiful which have a bright color. ( ST, Part I, Q. 39, Art. 8c) Firstly, “due proportion” can be said to correspond to the first three propositions of beauty in the Antiquity mentioned above.. The beauty of a thing consists in the. proportions of its parts, and the appropriateness of the arrangement of the parts suits the moral end.. Furthermore, the notion of proportion emphasizes the objective. property of beautiful things.. Secondly, “clarity” in St. Thomas’s philosophical. system includes both physical beauty and spiritual beauty: he uses these two characteristics to describe the beauty of human beings.. Lastly, “integrity” refers to. the completeness of a thing, namely, perfection. These three criteria are in fact “various modalities of proportion,” and we can conclude that they are “criteria of the perfection of a thing—perfection in the sense of goodness, but also, by implication, in the sense of beauty—and that they are conditions and aspects of the substantial form of the thing” (Eco 1988:67). 17. In terms of the definition of beauty, St. Thomas. Feliks Jaroński distinguishes “definition” from “theory” by giving the following example.. When air is said as “the gas surrounding the earth,” this is a definition, while when air is explained as “a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen,” this is theory (O filozofii [On Philosophy], 1812), qtd. in Tatarkiewicz 1980:9. Based on this notion, Tatarkiewicz distinguishes St. Thomas’s theory of beauty from his definition of beauty..

(20) Kuo 15. attributes a psychological aspect to beauty and defines it as the following: “beautiful things are those which please when seen” (ST, Part I, Q. 5, Art. 4 ad 1) and “the ‘beautiful’ is something pleasant to apprehend” (ST, Part I [Second Part], Q. 27, Art. 1 ad 3). The first proposition reflects on the faculty of seeing and its relationship to aesthetic pleasure, whereas the second proposition focuses on the faculty of apprehension. These two propositions may seem different at first glance. Yet St. Thomas extends the faculty of “sight” to all the other senses and even to the inner apprehension, hence the two propositions are actually two in one (ST, Part I, Q. 67, Art. 1c). Moreover, St. Thomas also brings up his view of art.. He defines art as the. “right order of the mind” (ST, Part I [Second Part], Q. 57, Art. 5 ad 1), a brief phrase that reminds us of the rules in the process of artistic production. He also attaches reason to the practice of arts—art is the “right reason about things to be made.”18 This proposition suggests that artists require fixed rules to enable the production of objects, thus reducing individual creativity and expression during the making process. Elsewhere St. Thomas remarks that art imitates nature.19. All of his observations. correspond to the aforementioned four propositions of the theory of art.. Thesis statement On the basis of the above preliminaries, this thesis attempts to interpret the marriages portrayed in Chaucer’s Tales in terms of St. Thomas’s aesthetic theory and to explore how the beauty and art in different types of marriage Chaucer describes reflect the contemporary aesthetics. Chaucer, being a late medieval poet, absorb s the cultural heritage into his final literary creation, the Tales, and it is logically assumed that he consciously or unconsciously reveals traces of contemporary aesthetics.. This. study therefore aims to examine the practices of the concepts of beauty and art in marriage in light of St. Thomas’s aesthetic theory.. Firstly, marriage is taken as an. object of beauty, and its various forms and contents portrayed in different tales will be 18 19. St. Thomas, ST, Part II (First Part), Q. 57, Art. 5 ad 1. St. Thomas, Physics, II, 4 (Leonina, vol. II, 65), qtd. in Tatarkiewicz 1970:262..

(21) Kuo 16. analyzed so as to see to what extent they reflect and diverge from medieval aesthetic sensitivity.. Chaucer’s tales are grouped under three dialogic bodies.. One group. includes the nobility as portrayed in “The Clerk’s Tale,” “The Man of Law’s Tale” and “The Second Nun’s Tale”; the second group the knights as represented in “The Franklin’s Tale,” “The Merchant’s Tale” and “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”; and the third group the commoners20 as portrayed in “The Miller’s Tale” and “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue.” Secondly, a wife will also be regarded as an object of beauty.. I shall. discuss how a husband’s “aesthetic experience” drawn from his spouse’s physical and spiritual beauty embodies medieval aesthetic attitudes.. The objectivity and. subjectivity of aesthetics reflected in medieval marriage will serve as the structural framework of this inquiry to analyze the various aesthetics of marriage celebrated among the nobility, knights and the common folks in the various tales.. After dealing. with the elements that make a medieval marriage beautiful, I shall proceed to inquire the relationship between the concept of art and the procreative and productive nature of marriage. 20. Briefly, what motivates the research of this paper is the intention to. The traditional hierarchy of the medieval feudalism consists of three main strata of people: knights, clergy and peasants. At the very beginning of the Tales, Chaucer warns his readers not to take him too seriously and excuses himself from being accused of inaccuracy: “Also I prey yow to foryeve it me,/ Al have I nat set folk in hir degree/ Heere in this tale, as that they sholde stonde./ My wit is short, ye may wel understonde” (I 743-46). The poet explicitly confesses that he does not intend to reflect the social reality of that period for some reasons. The implicit rebellious spirit in modifying the traditional tripartite structure of the feudal society seems to suggest the necessity to incorporate more sub classes, such as people of professional trades, because a person’s work determines the estate to which he belongs. In addition, in Jill Mann’s list of the order in which the estates are presented in the “General Prologue,” the commoners, especially people of professional trades, occupy a large part. Her lists is as follows: “Knight: Squire: Yeoman: Prioress: Second Nun and three Priests: Monk: Friar: Merchant: Clerk: Sergeant of Law: Franklin: Guildsmen—Haberdasher, Carpenter, Weaver, Dyer, Tapicer: Cook: Shipman: Doctor of Physic: Wife of Bath: Parson: Ploughman: Miller: Manciple: Reeve: Summoner: Pardoner” (206). On such an order, Mann comments that the “higher echelons of both clergy and laity are unrepresented, but … the third estate is represented in the Prologue with an unusual richness” (5). That is to say, Chaucer pays lots of attention to the experiences of the commoners, a term that allows a generalized application in designating people’s estates. It is necessary to clarify my working definition of the term “commoners” in this thesis: it refers to the sub class of the occupational trades who possess wealth, and thus excludes tenant farmers or peasants..

(22) Kuo 17. inquire to what extent the marriages described in the aforementioned tales reflect medieval aesthetic theory, and how aesthetic theory can be adopted to interpret marriage.. By juxtaposing medieval aesthetics and marriage, I shall aim to discover. meaningful interrelations between these two cultural aspects. Among other things, an aesthetic debate on spiritual beauty versus physical beauty in a wife is launched among the pilgrims.. I shall demonstrate that the pilgrim-tellers on their way to. Canterbury conduct a dialogue on the form and contents of marriage. The intended goal is to find out whether or not the stereotype of the binary opposition of physical beauty versus spiritual beauty is resolved and to explicate Chaucer’s attitude toward different types of aesthetics of marriage in his Tales. The historical range of this thesis will cover the times from St. Thomas to Chaucer, which constitutes the years from late thirteenth to the end of the fourteenth centuries.. The reason to start with St. Thomas is self-evident: as a scholar,. philosopher and theologian, St. Thomas had been able to conduct academic and profound research on theological and philosophical bases. The effort throughout this thesis is to reflect some fundamental aesthetic concepts of the Middle Ages, yet one major difficulty faces the construction of this thesis.. This is basically a. methodological problem since St. Thomas does not compose a systematic aesthetic theory, hence I shall rely on his three elements of beauty and treat them as the components of his theory of beauty.. Huizinga states that Denis the Carthusian21 in. the fifteenth century tried to apply St. Thomas’s three elements of beauty, yet he hardly succeeded because applied aesthetics is seldom successful: “When the idea of beauty is so highly intellectualized, it is not surprising that the mind passes at once from earthly beauty to that of the angels and of the empyrean or to that of abstract conceptions” (Huizinga 267). We do not actually know how Denis the Carthusian. 21. One of the distinguished Carthusians, Denis the Carthusian (1402/1043-1471) is a theologian and mystical writer and called the Ecstatic Doctor (Doctor Ecstatims) (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03388a.htm). Carthusian order was a Roman Catholic order founded by St. Bruno in 1084 at Chartreuse, near Grenoble, France. The Carthusians live chiefly in silence and support themselves by their own labors (New Catholic Encyclopedia, v. 4, 764-65)..

(23) Kuo 18. applied St. Thomas’s aesthetic theory. Yet, even though St. Thomas’s idea of beauty is said to be highly intellectualized, it is fundamentally based on concrete objects or imagery.. Eco observes that St. Thomas employs the example of the beauty of human. body to illustrate abstract conceptions such as proportion and clarity (1988:125). This implies that the foundation of St. Thomas’s aesthetic abstraction lies in concreteness. The aesthetic polemics in marriage that I shall bring up is realistic and practical; therefore, they can be analogously interpreted from St. Thomas’s aesthetic theory.. Methodology St. Thomas’s theory and definition of beauty as well as theory of art will serve as the framework to examine the practice of aesthetics in medieval marriages portrayed in Chaucer’s Tales.22. The analysis of the richness of the three elements of beauty,. i.e., proportion, clarity and integrity, will respectively appear in the subsequent three chapters.. Beardsley observes that each of these three properties is not univocal. because there is “not a single beauty common to all beautiful things, but a whole family of qualities, each to be prized wherever it is found” (1975:105).. These three. elements are analogical and “constitute beauty in each of its endlessly varied forms” (1975:105).. I shall hence attempt to analogously interpret the beauty and art of. marriage via these three aesthetic elements.. Based on the tripartite theoretical. structure, each of the three elements is assigned to a chapter.. Moreover, the. discussion of the definition of beauty will be merged with the theory of beauty in Chapter Two, while St. Thomas’s theory of art will be explored along with the concept of integrity in Chapter Three.. To look at the framework from an. encompassing perspective, the form of marriage will be approached from the notion of proportion, while the contents of marriage from the notions of clarity and integrity. In the Middle Ages, the term “aesthetics” is not discovered, and it may not be. 22. References to the concept of beauty and of art in the Summa Theologica reflect St. Thomas’s mature aesthetic views (Tatarkiewicz 1970:247) hence I shall frequently refer to the work..

(24) Kuo 19. appropriate to apply the modern conception of the term in the medieval context. Yet, the term “aesthetics” is chosen on purpose to include not only the concept of beauty but also that of art; “aesthetics” is not taken as an academic subject, but as a general concept that permeates through medieval marriage.. In other words, aesthetics in the. present study means a particular theory of beauty and art in the domain of marriage. The beauty of the fine arts will not be the focus of this thesis, yet the reflection on art and beauty can provide a gateway for interpreting medieval marriage.. The division. of beauty and art which aesthetics designates is expected to serve as a suitable approach to realize the aesthetic attitude of Chaucer’s pilgrims. Marriage will be taken as an object of beauty that is specifically regarded from the aesthetic point of view.. In a broad historical sense, the concept of marriage. under different contexts may mean (1) a momentary ceremony at which the act of marrying is done, (2) an act of marrying someone, (3) a duration wherein husband and wife stay and live together, (4) a life-time commitment and (5) a pledge between husband and wife and between man and God.. In addition, the criteria of a potential. spouse’s physiological, social and religious backgrounds will also be taken into account.. These considerations are not included in the above-mentioned five. meanings of marriage, yet they can definitely decide the quality of marriage as a whole.. During the time the couple stay together, they are required to accomplish the. obligation of procreation, which also contributes to the significance of marriage. On the other hand, a wife’s virtues in the Middle Ages are always examined with a magnifying glass.. All of these conditions contribute to the form and contents of. marriage, and they assert importance before, during and after the wedding ceremony. For a woman, to center upon marriage and the aesthetic polemics growing out of it is only natural since “the most important relationship women entered into was the marital one,” asserts Margaret A. Gist (11). The definition of “aesthetic experience” in this thesis will not range over what Beardsley calls “artkind instance,” which covers poetry, painting, sculpture, music or dance (1982:285).. Terms such as aesthetic experience, aesthetic judgment and. pleasure are used to refer to an intellectual activity in appreciating the beauty of.

(25) Kuo 20. human beings.. Experiences of an aesthetic character need not be universally. associated with objects that belong to artistic categories, i.e., artkind categories. This is no intention to challenge an established academic significance that has been acknowledged for a long time. Rather, I think it worthwhile to put the appreciation of the mankind’s beauty under the aesthetic category because experiences of beauty as such touch upon a fundamental sensitivity found in the breath and values of life.. If. man can perceive the beauty of the order in works of art, can they not respond similarly to human beauty if taking human beings as works of art?. Based on a. “mixed” aesthetic judgment observed both by St. Thomas and Kant, my definitions of “aesthetic judgment” and “aesthetic pleasure” are placed in between purely sensory or sensual pleasure and purely cognitive or intellectual one. D. W. Robertson in A Preface to Chaucer has done an in-depth research on medieval aesthetics, such as the important contributions of St. Augustine to aesthetic theory and the continuing relevance of his thought to the late Middle Ages, figurative expression, the distinction of the use of beauty and abuse of beauty in Chaucer’s works. Reading Chaucer’s Tales exegetically, Robertson contextualizes the work within the frame of medieval aesthetics and the rubric of medieval religious tradition. Francis K. H. So comes up with a succinct summary of the Robertsonian criticism: Robertson holds that in order to understand Chaucer, one has to first understand medieval aesthetics, and in order to apprehend medieval aesthetics, one has to primarily apprehend religious arts and biblical exhortations of that age (1997:3). So continues that Robertson’s exegetics employed in his book almost becomes a synonym of historicism (3).. Robertson is able to bring out philosophical hypotheses. from his research because he puts Chaucer and his work in the historical context even though Robertson’s exegetical discourse tends to be circuitous and verbose (So 1997:3).. The way I deal with Chaucer’s Tales and medieval aesthetics will be. different from Robertson’s exegetical interpretation of the work.. One major. difference lies in the fact that I shall not aim at providing historical facts as Robertson does; rather, only occasional references with historical background will be made in the process of inquiry since my intended goal is to explore the literary representation.

(26) Kuo 21. of the aesthetics of marriage in Chaucer’s Tales, instead of the social reality of marriage in the Middle Ages. In Chapter One of this thesis, the theory of “proportion” is applied to the various forms of marriage depicted in the Tales to explore to what extent the marriage of the nobility portrayed in the tales of the Clerk, the Man of Law and the Second Nun, that of the knights described in the tales of the Franklin, the Merchant and the Wife of Bath as well as that of the commoners portrayed in the Miller’s tale and the Wife of Bath’s prologue, correspond to this element of beauty. Chapter Two examines the roles the variants of “clarity,” that is, physical and spiritual beauty, play in marriage, and a debate on the coexistence and non-coexistence of physical and spiritual beauty of a wife among the pilgrim-tellers will be demonstrated.. Furthermore, in Chapter. Three I shall extend the medieval concept of art to that of the “procreative art” in marriage, and explore the relationship between the procreative art and the “integrity” of marriage in the aforementioned tales..

(27) Chapter One The “Great Theory” as Evidenced in the Marriages in the Tales. At first glance the association between medieval marriage and the medieval concept of beauty is not self-evident because while one belongs to an aspect of social reality, the other to a concept of philosophy. Yet, if one takes beauty as a concept, and at the same time uses analogy as the inquiring method to examine and construct the imaginary domain between the values of beauty and marriage, there is an implied language of intercommunication between the two subjects. This chapter addresses the relation between the form of medieval marriage and the first element of beauty in St. Thomas Aquinas’s aesthetic theory, namely, the notion of proportion.. I shall begin with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales [henceforth. called the Tales], by exploring the extent to which an aesthetic perspective is embodied in the various marriages portrayed in the work. The intended goal is to examine whether the marriage of the nobility, of the knights and of the commoners in various tales reveal an ideal or misfit marriage based on the theory of proportion. If we can decide the beauty of an object, by way of analogy we shall be able to do the same with reference to the entity of marriage. By weaving together the notions of medieval marriage and medieval concept of beauty, one will not only see the conceptual correspondence but also the polemics between the theory of what ought to be beautiful and what is contradicted in life.. Just as there is. commensurability between visual beauty of concrete objects and intellectual beauty in abstract entities, likewise the analogy between a beautiful object and a beautiful marriage is also logically sound. To understand the relationship between medieval aesthetics as well as the marriages portrayed in “The Clerk’s Tale,” “The Man of Law’s Tale,” “The Second Nun’s Tale,” “The Franklin’s Tale,” “The Merchant’s Tale,” “The Miller’s Tale,” “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” and her tale, the representations of marriage will be explicated to fit into St. Thomas’s aesthetic theory and vice versa..

(28) Kuo 23. I. Theory of “proportion”: the “Great Theory” St. Thomas inherits from the Antiquity the concept of proportion and renders it the quintessence of his aesthetic theory. He considers an object to be beautiful when it satisfies three formal criteria: proportion, clarity and integrity. 1. Tatarkiewicz. observes that such a definition is St. Thomas’s own (1970:247). Among these three criteria, the notion of proportion is the only one to be accepted and understood universally despite the richness of its variant meanings (Eco 1988:71). Tatarkiewicz dubs the concept of proportion the “Great Theory” of European aesthetics (1972:167). Its aesthetic importance cannot be emphasized enough because it is discovered, learned and practiced since the ancient period.. St. Thomas’s three elements of. beauty share a common essential feature, which is the perfection or completeness of an object.. That is, whenever a harmonious form characterizes an object, it is. considered beautiful. Of the three elements, St. Thomas does not seem to impose on them a definite hierarchy—they are arranged in different order under different occasions.2. Yet, the inversion of order hardly affects their validity because they have. reciprocal connections, and one cannot once and for all decide which is the cause and. 1. St. Thomas, ST, Part I, Q. 39, Art. 8c; please cf. page 14 in the introduction of this thesis for the original quote. 2 For example, the arrangement of these three elements in ST, Part I, Q. 39, Art. 8c and that in Part II (Second Part), Q. 145, Art. 2c shows a different order. In the former, St. Thomas says that “beauty includes three conditions, ‘integrity’ or ‘perfection’…; due ‘proportion’ or ‘harmony’; and lastly, ‘brightness’ or ‘clarity’ ...,” while in the latter, he writes that “beauty or comeliness results from the concurrence of clarity and due proportion.” The omission of “integrity” in Part II (Second Part), Q. 145, Art. 2c should not impede our understanding of St. Thomas’s viewpoint because he never provides a single systematic treatise on beauty. Eco explains that the subject of beauty had long been internalized in St. Thomas, who “never took a specific interest in the problems of beauty for their own sake, [and] he never wrote a treatise, or even an article, about it. He never felt the need to put his ideas on aesthetics into systematic form. He always mentioned the problem of beauty as if by chance, and his remarks about it were always parenthetic. But this was not because he had no interest in aesthetics. The reason was rather the opposite: it came naturally to him to see the world in terms of its beauty; it was something spontaneous, effortless, and habitual.... It was a natural and everyday fact of life that the world was conceived of aesthetically” (1988:115-16, emphasis mine)..

(29) Kuo 24. which is the effect. Yet, to a fundamental extent, the idea of proportion is the denominator of the three elements—when an object has a harmonious proportion in the arrangement of its parts, the form brings clarity and integrity to the object.. For. this reason, the “Great Theory” is not only an element of beauty to St. Thomas: it actually operates as head among these three elements of beauty. The notion of “due proportion” to St. Thomas is equated with “harmony,” both of which bring forth the importance of a good and proper arrangement of parts. The theory of proportion can serve as a measure to judge the aesthetic value not only of a concrete object but of an abstract entity. St. Thomas further explains the nature of beauty as follows: Beauty or comeliness results from the concurrence of clarity and due proportion. For … God is said to be beautiful, as being “the cause of the harmony and clarity of the universe.” Hence the beauty of the body consists in a man having his bodily limbs well proportioned, together with a certain clarity of color. (ST, Part II [Second Part], Q. 145, Art. 2c) In order to explicate an abstract concept such as beauty, St. Thomas uses the well-arranged limbs of mankind as a concrete example to demonstrate the aesthetics of proportion, keeping in mind that God is the exemplary cause of all kinds of beauty in the universe.. Eco points out the practicality of St. Thomas’s “highly. intellectualized idea of beauty”: 3 when St. Thomas decides to give a concrete example of beauty or explain what is meant by proportion and clarity, he “invariably has recourse to the human body” because man is “one of the most perfect and complete of organisms, in which spiritual and material elements combine, grounded in a wide range of proportional relations” (1988:125). St. Thomas’s concept of proportion, though not a new aesthetic idea, is wider than that of the classical Greeks.. For instance, Pythagoras finds proportion only in. material things, so that his understanding of proportion is limited to quantitative and mathematical terms (Tatarkiewicz 1970:251).. For St. Thomas, proportion includes. not only quantitative but also qualitative relations. 3. The quotation is from Huizinga 267.. He says,.

(30) Kuo 25. Proportion is twofold. In one sense it means a certain relation of one quantity to another, according as double, treble and equal are species of proportion. In another sense every relation of one thing to another is called proportion. And in this sense there can be a proportion of the creature to God, inasmuch as it is related to Him as the effect of its cause, and as potentiality to its act; and in this way the created intellect can be proportioned to know God. ( ST, Part I, Q. 12, Art. 1 ad 4, emphasis mine) Hence, proportion is a numerical as well as a relational concept, a concrete as well as an abstract notion. Eco terms the first of these a mathematical and quantitative kind of proportion and the second a qualitative kind of proportion (1988:82).. Quantitative. proportion is understood as a sensible relation, while qualitative proportion as a purely intellectual relation.. Indeed, the idea of proportion in St. Thomas has a very. complex connotation. There are various types of proportion, as summarized by Eco. Proportion can be conceived of as a relation of one thing to another, as process, as a relation of fitness between a thing’s essence and its act of existence, as logical relation between things and as the fit between an object and its function (Eco 1988:83-98). The above quotation from ST about the twofold meanings of proportion has covered the mathematical and relational characteristics of the concept of proportion, and these two aspects shall be our concern. Proportion as a sensible relation is not a difficult idea to understand, yet proportion as a purely intellectual notion needs more explanation. St. Thomas explicates elsewhere what he means by a qualitative kind of proportion: There is a proportion between a created intelligence and God as an object of understanding, not a proportion implying any commensurateness of being, but a proportion implying a reference of one to the other, as matter is referred to form, or cause to effect. Thus there may well be a proportion between the creature and God, as the understanding is referred to the understood, or the effect to the cause. ( Summa contra Gentiles 3.54) This passage helps to clarify the question of beauty as a transcendental. The relation between the creatures and God, the effect and the cause, is not concrete; instead, it is abstract yet perceivable.. St. Thomas’s way of understanding the relation between. man and God clearly places beauty on a metaphysical level.. Proportion thus.

(31) Kuo 26. includes the relations of the natural world as well as “relations in the ontological structure of things, such as the relation of form to matter; and even the relation of a thing to itself: namely, its inward harmony, the fact that it is as it should be” (Tatarkiewicz 1970:251). The harmony of a sequence of thought and the proportion of thought to the laws of thought also explain proportion as a purely intellectual notion.. In addition to the relation of a thing to itself, proportion also pertains to a. relation between one item and another, or the relation of three, four, “an infinity of things, proportionate among themselves and proportioned also in respect of some unifying whole” (Eco 1988:89).. If we take two objects for instance, when they are. related in the same space-time, the act of joining involves a proportion and a concordance. One may summarize that when two objects or thoughts are connected, the act of relating necessarily involves a mathematical and/or relational proportion.. II. The relationship between the form of marriage and the theory of proportion Since the theory of proportion is the most widespread aesthetic concept in the Middle Ages, it is supposed that one may find aesthetic correspondence in everyday experiences. Marriage, in fact, will be such an entity that reflects the medieval aesthetic theory of proportion. Just like an object that has its form and contents, marriage, composed of husband and wife as the elementary unit, also has its form and contents. Marriage analogically possesses physical as well as spiritual beauty by its own right.. It is an existence that is both concrete and invisible: it is perceptible. because it consists of a couple who in turns construct an imaginary space, and simultaneously it is also imperceptible since it is a conceptualized institution that is manifested through concrete entities, like marriage certificate, household or legitimate children. What exactly relates beauty to marriage in the Middle Ages?. One brief remark. about the relationship of beauty to marriage can be found in Master Peter Lombard (c. 1100-1160/64), who was an Italian Scholastic teaching theology in Notre Dame. As Frances and Joseph Gies assert, Lombard attributes beauty to marriage as one of the legitimate reasons for matrimony, in addition to procreation and avoidance of.

(32) Kuo 27. fornication (1978:34).. They state that Lombard lists three “decent” motives for. matrimony: “the political one of reconciliation of enemies; money; and—the nearest to a mention of love—beauty” (34, emphasis mine). Although the Gieses only make a brief mentioning of beauty in marriage and even leave out the bibliographical details concerning Lombard’s writing, one cannot fail to relate the existence of beauty to the concept of marriage.. On the other hand, a more secular idea of the relationship. between beauty and marriage holds that the desire for the intended’s beauty is also one of the motives for marrying (Kelly 247).. L. B. Alberti agrees: “To take a wife is. to search for beauty, kindred and riches” (qtd. in de La Roncière 292). Yet, John Gower warns against marrying only for beauty or delight. 4. What Lombard. understands the relationship between beauty and marriage apparently differs from the secular view propounded by Gower.. The positive and negative attitudes toward the. relationship between beauty and marriage as such, however, make explicit that the idea of beauty is closely related to the realm of marriage.. A. Mathematical aesthetics in the form of marriage Matrimony in the medieval period carries a theological as well as an aesthetic significance. St. Augustine, in Concerning the City of God, remarks that a sacrament is “a sign of a sacred thing” (X, 5).. Lombard approves of St. Augustine’s assertion. and adds that a sacrament is “the visible form of an invisible grace” and is a great sign of the grace of God.5. The sign of sacredness depends on the mind of the Creator. which is thought to be rationally ordered. numbers.6 4. In other words, God is the ruler of. According to St. Augustine, numbers signify rational order, equality,. Gower, Mirour de l’omme, 17413ff., qtd. in Kelly 275. The Fourth Book of Sentences, “On The Doctrine of Signs,” Distinction 1, ch. 2 and ch. 4. The book of Sentences (Quatuor libri Sententiarum) makes Lombard an important name for the later Middle Ages. By the thirteenth century, the Sentences had become the principal theological text in the universities and brought some Scholastics’ attentions (New Catholic Encyclopedia, v. 11, 221-22). 6 F. J. Thonnard in the notes to the edition of the De musica in the “Bibliothèque Augustinienne” (Paris, 1947) points out that the word “number” is used in four ways. Except the common understanding of the ordinary mathematical sense, number can mean (1) 5.