"The Book" Part One

It just so happens that I am in the process of writing a (as I call it) 'book' on Musical Aesthetics (by no means the only subject of this blog, by the way). I shall present it in parts. If there is anything that you do not understand or that you think is a fallacy, a falsehood, or anything you just disagree with, please let me know by posting a comment. We can have all sorts of friendly arguments in the comments box.

p.s. It's very boring, becasue I wrote it in Aristotle's style, which is very efficient but rhetorically flawed.

The Incompleat Book of Musical Aesthetics

Did you know that the phenomenon called language can actually get ideas from one mind to another? I am no linguist, I will not bore you with amateur accounts of how it is done. One thing is certain, however. To carry meaning, the words of the language must carry the same ideas to both minds. Only a politician would try to talk about something without first finding out what that something really was!
As Christians, we know that God, as the Infinite Being, has all perfections without limit, except those material perfections that are not proper to spiritual beings, such as color, size, or taste. Beauty cannot be merely a material perfection. Aquinas lists Beauty, along with Truth and Goodness, to be one of the three Divine Transcendental Attributes. God has no size, color, or taste because he is beyond and better than size, color or taste. Size, color, and taste are limitations; if something has color, for example, it cannot have the other colors in the same place at the same time. Matter is limitation, but the only thing that beauty limits is a thing’s capacity to have no beauty, which is not really a limitation. Therefore, beauty is a spiritual attribute and God can have it without limit. Because God is good, His Beauty must also be good, for God cannot have any evil in Him.
Aquinas also states that God is utterly simple, having no parts or divisions. In God, Beauty, Truth, Goodness, and Divine Life are one and the same. This is very difficult for us to visualize. The beauty of simplicity, called elegance, seems opposed to the complex and part-filled beauty of life, called fecundity. A Japanese crystal sphere, which exists to be simple, cannot exist also as a Charles Dickens novel, which, like physical and spiritual creation, has so many pieces that it could only come from the “life-giving” powers of an author who was so enchanted with the process of creating that he simply would not stop. In God, Who is Life Itself, there is no contradiction between Life and Simplicity, but creation is not large enough to transcend both options.
God’s beauty, therefore, can be demonstrated to be one way of referring to the Totality of His Divine Nature. Because He is utterly simple, His Beauty is His Whole Self. As nothing can be more beautiful than God, He, not anything else, whether concrete or abstract, is the Ideal of Beauty for all art and life. While we know relatively little about God and almost nothing about beauty, this is the first step in our learning.
The second step ought to be rather simple. We know what beauty is: God. This does not prevent beauty from existing in lower things. It is obvious that goodness and truth, other Divine Attributes, exist in things not merely as imitations, but as actual qualities. Food is good, not merely like good. 2+2=4 is true, not merely like truth.