1. Wonder as the source of truth and beauty
Laura Militello
August 17, 2014
In the 13th century AD, unlike the catholic Church, a dominican friar reconsidered
the importance of Aristotle’s doctrine. Not only was Saint Thomas Aquinas able to
show the value of his predecessor’s thoughts, but he also found a way to reconcile the
pagan and the christian traditions. Although some believe that his approach to pagan
philosophy was a mistake, we cannot but affirm that Thomism is a great synthesis of
both philosophies. As a consequence Aristotelian philosophy became fundamental for the
foundation of Christian philosophy from the 13th to the 16th century.
This is a great example of the attitude that characterized the Romans: the words
of Horace “Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio” (conquered
Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought her arts into rustic Latium)1
,
although referred to the conquest of Greece by Octavius in year 27 BC, express the
Roman conception of keeping anything that is worth keeping - literature, philosophy,
institutions...-, even if it comes from a different culture. In this way we can say that
both Greece and Rome were “conquered”, since they gave one another what the other
civilization was lacking at the time. The same thing happens when we live in a foreign
country for a while: when we are immersed in the new culture we learn the habits and
customs of that people, but at the same time we teach ours to those around us. As Kate
Gardner says “There’s no such thing as one-way communication”2
, but a balance between
giving and receiving.
Even though the 13th century is considered as part of the High and not of the Late
Middle Ages, it should be seen as a period of transition between the two, because in
the person of Saint Thomas Aquinas we see the spark of the Italian Renaissance and
humanism that will develop later on in the 14th and 15th century. He was one of those
early humanist scholars who saw no conflict between reason and Christian faith and looked
back on the so called “classics”. Moving away from Plato and Augustine, he preferred the
doctrine of Aristotle, whose works were found in Byzantine and Muslim libraries. The
“Doctor of the Church” didn’t support Plato’s theory of the pre-existence of the soul - the
belief that our soul existed somewhere in the heavens before we were born - but, on the
contrary, emphasized the concept of “tabula rasa” elaborated by Aristotle, which implies
that every human being is born without any pre-existent knowledge and highlights the
importance of education to reach knowledge.
The arrival of the Aristotelian corpus in the western world causes questions about the
relation and apparent opposition between reason and faith. Thomas Aquinas is the one
who defended Aristotle’s position and yet received regular approbation from the Catholic
Church for contributing to the teaching of the Christian revelation and for his commen-
taries on Aristotle’s works, which helped to clarify some difficult pages that otherwise
would have been obscure to the readers of that time. His theology and philosophy are
shaped by the ones of his precursor, even though he was influenced by other philosophers,
1Horace, Epistles, Book II, Epistle I, 156-157
2K. Gardner, Landscapes, Book I: California - Chapter fifteen
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2. even some non-aristotelian sources. Nevertheless Aristotle is for Aquinas “The Philoso-
pher”, from whom he adopts many features, for example the proof of the prime mover, his
view of time and motion and of cosmology. Everything he adopts from other sources has
to be compatible with Aristotle’s thought, which is the mirror of Aquinas’ own thought.
The diffusion of Aristotle’s works in the west in the Late Middle Ages causes the ap-
preciation of poetry, grammar and rhetoric as a necessary tool in the liberal arts Bildung.
While he is describing the characteristics of the early Italian humanism, P.O. Kristeller
stresses the importance of poetry: “The studia humanitatis excluded logic, but they added
to the traditional grammar and rhetoric not only history, Greek, and moral philosophy,
but also made poetry, once a sequel of grammar and rhetoric, the most important member
of the whole group”.3
One of the themes in his Metaphysics is of wonder: a man that is struck by the
reality that surrounds him starts to wonder about it and, as a consequence, begins to
philosophize. Aristotle believed that every man originally has the desire to escape from
ignorance and to fill the emptiness with knowledge. He also describes the path that the
men from the ancient world followed, from small to great matters: “...they wondered
originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties
about the greater matters, e.g. about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun
and of the stars, and about the genesis of the universe”4
.
Furthermore he creates a connection between philosophy and poetry, saying that both
the philosopher and the poet, who writes myths, have the same starting point, wonder:
“And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover
of myth is in a sense a lover of Wisdom, for the myth is composed of wonders).”5
The
common origin of these two fields can be defined as “sich in der Welt zu orientiren”, to find
one’s way in the world. Finding one’s place in the world consists of trying to interpret
the reality around us and looking for its meaning. Saying that they have the same poetic
instinct as their origin means that they are an answer to the necessity of truth that
characterizes every human being. This also implies the human capacity to consider the
universe as a whole and oneself as part of it, as it is affirmed by John Donne in No man
is an island.
The separation between them happens when the wonder originates two different po-
sitions: the first one, consisting of an explanation of the events, for example the change
of the seasons, is mythopoiesis or the creation of myths; the second one is philosophy,
the love of wisdom. Aristotle also states that this search for knowledge and for truth is
not “for the sake of any other advantage”, but “for its own sake”6
. The non-pragmatic
component - the need of knowledge and the amazement in front of the reality - plays
the most important role when it comes to philosophy and poetry. In the same book he
points out that the main reason of our amazement and surprise and what makes one thing
wonderful is the consciousness that we will never be able to know everything about it,
there will always be something that the human nature will not manage to see or measure.
On the contrary, Plato believes that “There is an old quarrel between philosophy and
poetry”.7
The ideal city described in The Republic is the place where everyone would be
happy: one of the reasons is the fact that the city will contain no art. Art, being simply an
“imitation”, corrupts and deceives: it makes us desire the wrong things; depicts the gods
as immoral entities and humans as if they were admirable; it conveys the wrong values;
its influence is often harmful and its premises about nature and the gods are wrong...
One could say that he wants to remove and ban art from the city, in order to preserve
3Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts, page 178.
4Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I, part 2
5ibid.
6ibid.
7Plato, The Republic, 607b 5-6
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3. the future leaders from being perverted by art in their upbringing.
Although he seems to want to dash artists8
, he is aware of their essential role in
his project: he needs people capable of creating beautiful things, all of which would be
legislated by the “king”: in all practices of art - poetry, painting, architecture, embroidery,
furniture and in music - he would recommend which are the right things to depict and
the right way to depict them.
The influence of Aristotle concerns the 13th and 14th century, whereas the one of
Plato becomes central in the 15th and 16th century and leads to a different approach
to poetry: Pietro Bembo in Le prose della volgar lingua recommends the two perfect
models of italian poetry and prose - Petrarch and Boccaccio -. Although at the present
time we see the Divina Commedia as the work that has influenced the literature and, in
general, the culture that came after it, Brembo rejects Dante because “He exaggerated in
the vastness of his ambition to say everything”, whereas Petrarch “establishes the middle
ground, the proper range of poetry that should not be overstepped”.9
Everytime we
read Dante’s works we are struck by the variety of styles that he combines and yet are
organized to create a consistent and homogeneous text. He does so to better convey a
particular message or because a certain episode requires a certain style (the concept of
aptum or convenientia10
).
When Thomas Aquinas affirms “The reason... why the philosopher may be likened to
the poet is this: both are concerned with the marvellous”11
he points out the common
starting point of philosophy and poetry, yet it also expresses a sort of doubt that we see
in the choice of the verb “may”. Did he believe that Aristotle was not completely right,
but was trying to persuade the readers that he was anyway? Or did he find some truth in
the opposition proposed in the Republic? Another possibility would be the one proposed
by Albert Einstein: the contemplation of the marvelous without expecting to understand
it fully: “It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating
itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which
we can dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of
the intelligence manifested in nature.”12
Aquinas’ words will remain enigmatic for us, but what I can affirm without any doubt
is that wonder is to be considered as the origin of everything: science, art, philosophy,
poetry. It is the driving force that makes us want to research and to study, to reach
knowledge and to share it with the others. Albert Einstein expresses this thought better
than anyone else in his Living Philosophies, in which he places wonder at the centre of
human life, because it is the source of everything that is beautiful and true: “The most
beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and
science.” 13
8“It seems, then, that if a man, who through clever training can become anything and imitate anything,
should arrive in our city, wanting to give a performance of his poems, we should bow down before him as
someone holy, wonderful, and pleasing, but we should tell him that there is no one like him in our city
and that it isn’t lawful for there to be. We should pour myrrh on his head, crown him with wreaths, and
send him away to another city.” Plato, The Republic, Book III, 398a
9AA.VV, Dante: The critical heritage, page 24
10G. Ledda, Impossible convenientia: the topos of ineffability and the rhetorical precept of aptum in
Dante
11Thomas Aquinas, Metaphysics, Book I, Lesson 3, 55
12A. Einstein, Living Philosophies
13ibid.
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