ESTHER (Heb. 'Estēr'; Vulg. Esther). – Jewish heroine to whom is titled the 8th book of the Hagiographa, in the Hebrew Bible the 50th of the *mĕgillōth* or ‘scrolls’ used in liturgy. Ahasuerus (v.), having repudiated Vashti, raised Esther to the rank of queen in the 7th year of his reign. When Haman, the grand vizier, obtained, in hatred of Mordecai, Esther’s cousin, the edict of death against the Jews of the Empire, fixing by the casting of lots (*pûrîm*) the date of their extermination, Esther courageously revealed to the king her race, accused Haman and obtained the salvation of her people. Interwoven with Esther’s intervention is the providential triumph of Mordecai, who had once saved the king’s life by revealing to him the conspiracy of two courtiers. Haman is killed, Mordecai takes his place; the king issues a decree ordering the Jews to defend themselves and destroy their enemies, which they do on the day fixed by Haman. Thus originated the annual Jewish feast, joyous and most popular, of Purim, on the 14th–15th of *Adar*, i.e. February–March, recalled by 2 Macc. 15:36 as ‘the day of Mordecai’.
To this narrative, complete in itself, of the Hebrew text, the Greek translation adds, here and there, 7 chapters (the ‘deuterocanonical’ parts), which St Jerome groups at the end of his translation from the Hebrew (chapters 11–16): the dream of Mordecai; the edict of death against the Jews; the prayers of Mordecai and Esther before the king; the edict in favour of the Jews; the explanation of Mordecai’s dream.
These parts, not belonging to the present Hebrew Bible, are equally inspired (cf. already St Clement of Rome, 1 Cor. 55; Clement of Alexandria, *Stromata*, 4.19, and the Council of Trent). The Greek text reached us in two recensions: one, which will be called the normal, in the mass of manuscripts (A. Rahlfs); the other shortened, in codices 19, 93, 108 (attributed to Lucian). According to the careful study of Schildenberger, the primitive Greek was a reworking rather than a free translation of the original Hebrew, composed by another inspired writer; it is preserved in the ancient Latin version; the normal recension was the work of Lysimachus (50 B.C.), who substituted his own translation from the Hebrew for the corresponding sections of the primitive Greek.
Critical scholarship outside the Church generally disputes the historicity of the Book of Esther and seeks elsewhere the origin and meaning of the feast of Purim. It considers it unlikely that 70,000 Persians were killed by the scattered Jewish minority throughout the Empire; likewise unlikely is the tenor of the relevant edict and the ease with which it was issued. Herodotus, IX.108–113, knows only Amestris, wife of Xerxes I, of royal blood and queen. One would therefore be faced with a fable (L. B. Patton, H. Gunkel), an Egyptian myth (H. Willrich) or a Babylonian myth (H. Zimmern, F. Jensen and others): Mordecai–Marduk, Esther–Ishtar etc.; Purim would be the feast of the beginning of the Babylonian year; to justify its celebration in Judea the Book of Esther was written in the 2nd century B.C.
Modern Catholic exegetes (Nikel, Fischer, Schildenberger) assign both the original Hebrew and the reworking of the primitive Greek to the literary genre of free narrative, or freely embellished historical account, agreeing with many non-Catholics who admit a historical core in the Book of Esther.
Ahasuerus (v.), Hebrew *’Aḥašweroš*, is undoubtedly Xerxes I (485–465 B.C.), who had his capital at Susa (Esth. 2). The historical-geographical indications and the character of Xerxes as they emerge from our book tally with what Herodotus writes in Books VII–IX. In 483 (3rd year of his reign), he was preparing for the war against Greece (1.3 ff.; Herodotus, VII.8–19); Esther in the king’s harem (2.8); campaign against Greece and defeat (480–479); Esther is raised to queen (479); after the defeat the king turns to his harem (Herodotus, IX.109 ff.). Slaughter of the Persians 113 to 14 of Adar 473. Esther is called queen; yet to enter the king’s presence she must await his summons (2.14; 4.11; 5.2) and dwells with others in the harem (2.11, 14); she may well be described as a queen of the second rank or favourite, in the same way as Vashti (cf. similar cases in Herodotus, III.31, 67–69, 88; VII.2, 7, 64). Above all, the literary genre of the book must be noted. This applies also to the slaughter; even the number in the Hebrew text is not critically certain: the Greek (9.16) has only 15,000; one may think again of similar episodes in the ancient East: Herodotus, III.76, 79; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, IV.46. The Jews moreover, by the royal edict, had the support of the local authorities. No explanation attempted so far (apart from that offered by the biblical text) of the origin of the Jewish feast of Purim can be considered satisfactory, as L. Gauthier admits. The feast celebrated on the 14th–15th of Adar has nothing to do with the Babylonian feast of the beginning of the year.
Estes - E. condotta ad Assuero. Painting by Paolo Veronese (1336). Venice, church of S. Sebastiano, ceiling.
That there exists a philosophy of the Greeks is evident, because there is one, at least implicitly, wherever there is a philosophy. A concept of being cannot arise without including within it a particular evaluation of a fact that plays such a significant role in human experience, namely, the aesthetic fact. Even aesthetic silences condition the philosophical systematization, due to the precariousness of conceptual syntheses that are formed without taking into account such a fundamental experience. When a history of aesthetics is written as a history of philosophy from an aesthetic perspective, it will become clear that the first Greek speculation is conditioned by the necessity of justifying that "spurious" reality, mixed with being and non-being, which is the artistic image. Artistic illusion assumes cosmic value in Gorgias, due to the irrationality of the function it is meant to reveal.
But, to confine ourselves here to elementary observations, we recall that the highest page of classical aesthetics is that of Plato’s Phaedrus, where the condition of Eros is described as being fertilized by the yearning for objective beauty, which is absolute, and thus becomes capable of generating and procreating in the beautiful (τῆς γεννήσεως καὶ τοῦ τόκου ἐν τῷ καλῷ: 206 e). In the being that is pregnant and swollen, the amorous impulse toward the beautiful is generated (206 d); when one already desires to generate and procreate, only then does one set out in search of the beautiful (206 b), and having found it, one generates and procreates what one has long carried within (206 c). Poetry is this spiritual procreation, for which no particular requirement is demanded of good poets, except that they be generators and creators (γεννήσεις, εὐπλασίαι: 206 a). This is the highest page of classical aesthetics because it engages expression from within in artistic reproduction and brings the act of art close to the objective contemplation of the beautiful, almost to the point of making the two dispositions coincide—those which the Greeks mostly loved to distinguish, and sometimes oppose. The credit usually attributed to Plotinus for having made beauty intrinsic to artistic production must be traced back to the Phaedrus. Other aesthetic concepts that will go on to fertilize the entire philosophical tradition also originate from this dialogue. They extend as far as Romanticism, as far as Hegel, and the Platonic concept that beauty is an idea that translates into corporeality (τὰς σώματος ἰδέας: Phaedrus, 251 a) has not yet been exhausted in our own day. Beauty is the only idea that was granted the privilege of becoming visible to mortals and of being ardently loved by them (256 d). That poetry constitutes an exceptional, alogical knowledge, similar to that of inspired priestesses and seers; that the passionate rapture by which it is seized has the character of the madness of frenzy: this is reiterated by Plato, especially in the Ion and the Phaedrus, and this sometimes leads to the exaltation, and at other times to the devaluation, of poetry because of the dark and passionate element it summons in man. Even Plato’s theory of artistic mimesis has a dual outcome, both pessimistic and optimistic. As an imitation of the sensible, art distances us by three degrees from the idea, from which the sensible is already removed, and for this reason art must be banished from the ideal republic. But insofar as artistic mimesis can be ascendant—that is, insofar as it can anticipate in sensible harmonies the ideal rhythms, as notably occurs in music (Republic, III, 401 d–402 a)—it is supremely educational, and it is precisely in music that the defenders of the city must establish their stronghold.
Aristotle’s Poetics offers an original consideration of the poetic genre that is tragedy, in connection with which he develops an acute analysis in a work that does not gain much ground against the Platonic aesthetic spectrum. For Aristotle too, art is imitation, although it is easier for him than for Plato to grasp the intrinsic ideality of a sensible representation and thus to evaluate artistic imitation positively. Plato in the Sophist had distinguished a τυραννική μάχη from a δοξαστική (267 d, e): and on this basis Aristotle’s distinction arises between history, which is
the description of things that have happened, and poetry, which represents things that may happen. With this, poetry is brought close to the universal and necessary of scientific knowledge, and it is not clear how it can be distinguished from it except by that concept of verisimilitude (κατὰ τὸ εἰκός; Poet., IX, 1457 b), which is also borrowed from Plato. The latter had spoken in the Phaedrus of the liberating release (ἀπόλυσις: 206 e) that follows the painful effort of spiritual gestation, foreshadowing the understanding of the liberating virtue of art. The Aristotelian reference to tragic catharsis, that is, the purification of the passions of terror and pity obtained through their scenic representation (Poet., VI, 1449 b), develops its aesthetic meaning through a backward reading that allows the Aristotelian catharsis to be interpreted on the basis of the Platonic eros-mania.
In the aesthetics of late antiquity, in addition to Neoplatonism—which elaborates the concepts of the Platonic dialogues with a markedly mystical tone—there is a tension between epic poets and historians, the former aiming to valorize the hedonistic side, the latter the didactic side of poetry. The latter make extensive use of allegory to extract doctrinal meanings from poetic fables. In Horace’s Epistle to the Pisos, the two tendencies are reconciled by making poetic delight serve moral and intellectual utility: “omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci.”
The contribution of Christian philosophy to the history of aesthetics goes beyond the sporadic remarks on art and beauty—mostly inspired by Neoplatonism—that recur in the Fathers and Doctors (v. ARTE) and far beyond the allegorism that informs, for example, Dante’s aesthetics. The actual and essential contribution is indirect: it consists in the new theological conception destined to reform, by reflection, the concept of man. The Platonic Demiurge, who gazes upon the Ideas and shapes formless matter in their intellectual image, could not but condition an intellectualistic, mimetic aesthetics. But the Christian God, who inwardly generates His consubstantial Word in which He recognizes and loves Himself, and through which He creates being outside Himself, could not but condition an aesthetics of expression and creativity, such as would indeed emerge in later times. The beauty of things, for St. Augustine and St. Thomas, continues to reveal itself in unity, harmony, proportion, and the fittingness of parts, but it is always implied that these qualities of creation are due to the things’ belonging to their spiritual matrix, that is, to the creative Principle. Nothing would be beautiful unless it came from God; this is the motif recurring from the *Confessions* of St. Augustine to the *Itinerarium* of St. Bonaventure. It is still a matter of divine art rather than human art; it is a cosmology rather than a psychology. Yet the motif of this cosmology, to which the Christian optimism is largely due, was destined to bear fruit also in the conception of human art, which, rather than imitation of nature, would have to result in imitation of the act by which God creates nature.
When a history of aesthetics is written from this perspective, it will appear that St. Augustine’s contribution to the aesthetics of modern times lies more in the *De Trinitate* than in the *De Musica*, for while in the latter work the Neoplatonic schema is reaffirmed, in the former he draws upon the likeness between the human word and the divine Word to illustrate the generative act by which the word detaches itself from the soul as an inner expression, warm with the love that binds it to the begetter: *“Conceptum rerum veracem notitiam, tamquam verbum apud nos habemus, et dicco intus gignimus”* (*De Trinit.*, IX, 7). In expressing itself to itself, the mind loves and loves its own inner word: *“Cum itaque se mens novit et amat, iungitur ei amore verbum eius. Et quoniam amat notitiam et novit amorem, et verbum in amore est, et amor in verbo, et utrumque in amante atque dicente”* (IX, 10). Poems originate in this inner expression, which is the reason for every outwardly prophetic word: *“Omnia... sonantium verba linguarum etiam in silentio cogitantur, et carmina praecurrunt animo, tacente ore corporis”* (XV, 11). Here is the first page of modern linguistics and poetics; here lies the measure of the innovating force of Christian thought within the framework of Western culture.
The subsequent advances of aesthetics are measured by the slow affirmation of the expressive powers of the spirit, in contrast to the resurgent intellectualism and hedonism of classical aesthetics. The many treatises on aesthetics of the 16th century—on beauty, love, and poetic fury (Ficino, Equicola, Benbo, Leone Ebreo, Bruno)—link the aesthetic to the emotional and the passionate, offering some hints at the inner, spiritual sources of beauty. They retard the progress of aesthetics less than does the renewed cult of Aristotle’s *Poetics* (Fracastoro, Castelvetro, Scaligero, Piccolomini, Patrizi), which restores reflection on poetry to the channel of classical intellectualism, paving the way for the rationalism of Cartesian aesthetics, which would find its faithful aesthetic expression in Boileau’s *Art poétique* (1674). Indeed, Aristotle’s “verisimilar” did not coincide exactly with the true, but left a margin for the poet’s activity in that “likeness” which denotes at once proximity and distance. By widening this margin, the poetics of the 16th century could make room for concepts such as “ingegno,” “argutezza,” “gusto,” “stile,” “immaginazione,” and “fantasia,” through which poetic reality gradually disengaged itself from an objective and intellectual model, drawing nearer in some way to the free productivity of the subject. The detachment became more pronounced in those sensistic poetics that, no longer concerned with making artistic delight serve as a corrective to the harshness of truth, took sensuous pleasure as an end in itself and the sole purpose of art.
Sensual and hedonistic aesthetics excluded poetry from the ranks of serious spiritual activities. In the first half of the 18th century, a movement arose aimed at reclaiming art as a form of knowledge, assigning it—even in its sensible constitution—a function that would herald the clear and distinct ideas perceived by the intellect. In this movement, which, as noted at the outset, has its origin in Germany with Leibniz and Baumgarten, we may also recall the aesthetic contribution of G. B. Vico, who saw in “poetic wisdom” the morning phase of that “reflection with pure mind” which marks the stage of intellectual maturity in individuals and peoples. Yet Vico’s thought contains far more than the artistic subjectivism that aligns him with the theories of his time. In Leibniz and the Leibnizians, the aesthetic fact remains a *perceptio*; in Vico, it is a *productio*. Nourished by Augustinian and Platonic studies, he brings to light what was implicit in Plato’s *tokos* and St. Augustine’s *verbum mentis* for explaining the true nature of beauty. Vico’s “fantasia” is now the expressive virtue of the human spirit, fulfilled in the “corpulent” image, a synthesis of formed matter issuing forth from the incandescent life of feeling: *“The first men of the gentile nations, like children of the nascent human race... derived their ideas of things, but with an infinite difference from the way in which God creates. For God, in His pure understanding, knows and creates things; they, in their robust ignorance, make them by dint of a corpulent fantasy. And because it was most corpulent, they made them with a marvelous sublimity, to such an extent that it overwhelmed them exceedingly, so that in imagining them they were beside themselves, whence they were called ‘poets,’ which in Greek means ‘creators’”* (*Seconda Scienza Nuova* [1731], I. II). In the vast forest of Vichian thought, where not everything is clear and disentangled, there opens, vigorously and far-reachingly, the breath of the new aesthetics.
The creative powers of the human spirit that Vico had confined within the orbit of poetic fantasy, the human productivity that he had traced in history, with German Romanticism exceed these limits and invest the whole of reality, touching the borders of the absolute. The history of the human becomes the history of being. “Genius” is the new Romantic idol that bends rebellious forces, restores unity of form to nature and spirit, thought and extension, the infinite and the finite, revealing the ultimate meaning of all. Already in the *Critique of Judgment* (1790), Immanuel Kant had foreshadowed this outcome, attributing to beauty the virtue of establishing the point of reconciliation between sensibility and intellect, between the necessity of nature and the freedom of the spirit—the very terms, indeed, between which the other two *Critiques* had discerned an immense rift. Kant had also intimated that the foundation of this unity should be concretized in the idea of an Intellect that would not be the intellect of man and by virtue of which the joining of what human reason sunders and opposes might be effected (*Kritik der Urteilskraft*, Berlin 1922, pp. 244, 249). In Schelling’s *System of Transcendental Idealism* (1800), however, this supersensible Intellect resolves internally into the genius of the artist, who, as the organ of the absolute, glimpses its intimate essence as the indissoluble union of ideal and sensible, thought and extension, unreflective spontaneity and consciousness.
L’esthetic interest seems foreign to Fichte’s Doctrine of Science (1794); yet the absolute power of the transcendent Ego, which creates the non-Eu to express its moral freedom, translates into the magic of Novalis’s poetic expiation, into the creative freedom of the artist who, in F. Schlegel and Tieck, projects worlds from himself only to annihilate them in disdain and surmount ironically the finitude of every work with a proud affirmation of the infinite. Kant’s thing-in-itself is the veiled goddess whose mystery is revealed in the embrace of beauty. Romanticism, both as philosophy and literature, proceeds under the sign of the primacy of the esthetic. Indeed, in Hegel art is not the last moment in the dialectic of the absolute spirit, but, as “sensuous ideality” or “formed spirituality,” it imperfectly prefigures the definitive moment in which the absolute is possessed in the purity of philosophical concept. Yet the Hegelian logos, in which art is destined to dissolve and die, itself realizes the Romantic-esthetic design, because it confines within the limits of the human and historical dialectic the sense of the absolute, which, on the contrary, overflows everywhere.
Hegel’s system, according to V. Gioberti’s remark, possesses as much of the beauty of a work of art as it lacks the truth that the philosopher seeks. Romanticism is a crucial point in modern art because it recognizes and exalts the creative powers of the human spirit, vindicating poetic magic; yet it leaves unresolved the problem of an excess of reality and truth—of the logical, the moral, the metaphysical—beyond the boundaries of the esthetic. Many Romantic souls lived this problem tormentedly and dramatically.
The subsequent “e” marks a decomposition of art into its formal values, on the one hand, and, on the other, its psychological-historical values. In extreme synthesis, the first category (Gestaltästhetik) can be contrasted with Gehaltsästhetik (or Gehaltsästhetik of the rationalist school), a current descending from Herbart, whose historical point of departure is Zimmermann, and which, up to a point, comprehends the high critical contribution of F. De Sanctis, flowing down to us through the elaborations of Hanslick, Fiedler, Semper, Wölfflin, and the early Berenson. On the side of historical-psychological values stand movements of varied inspiration, among them art as a problem of psychological mechanics, tied to the three concurrent factors of race, milieu, and moment; the philological-biographical criticism that lingers over erudite researches to reconstruct interpretive texts, ascertain dates and attributions, reveal the psychological environment of authors; the historicism of Dilthey’s epigones, who use art especially to individuate and qualify historical epochs and spheres or cycles of civilization, or, with Max Dvořák, identify the history of art with the history of culture (Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte); and so forth.
Inspiration and execution, feeling and form, psychological factors and stylistic factors are complementary elements that are valid for the understanding of art only insofar as they integrate one another. To save art from the unilateral ideology of their respective attitudes, Benedetto Croce’s esthetic synthesis has, from the first decades of our century, imposed itself upon contemporary thought. Croce’s creativity, through the Romantic-idealist experience, yields the Croceian concept of art as expression, the externalization of the interior, the immediate apprehension of the sensible image in which matter and form fuse into an indissoluble reality. The fantastic intuition-expression, the first degree of the activity of the absolute spirit, is bound to the individual concreteness of the image, distinguishing itself from logical conception, which, at a further degree of spiritual activity, apprehends the universal, and from the collateral forms—economic and moral—of practical activity. In the psychological writings of the *Estetica* (Bari 1902), with the concept of the “circularity” of the forms of the spirit, the exigency of unity is satisfied, correcting whatever might have been too rigid or mechanical in the doctrine of the great systems and of the autonomy of the initial degree with respect to the subsequent one; with the concept of “lyricism,” the color and warmth of the spiritual act are introduced into artistic expression, integrating its theoretical and cognitive aspect with feeling; with the concept of “cosmicity,” the particular concreteness of esthetic intuition is diffused into universal and cosmic value. At the same time, in the development of the system in relation to the other forms of spiritual activity, Croce was defining the character of philosophy as the methodology of historiography, specifying the individual character of the concrete-concrete and of historical judgment, now identified without residue with philosophical judgment. While the particular of intuition was opening onto a value of universality, the universality of philosophical judgment was concretizing itself in the individuality of historical intuition, with the difficulty of marking a difference between artistic theory and historical-philosophical theory. In the earlier writings the autonomy of art and the distinction of degrees were established at the expense of the idealistic presupposition of the unity and absoluteness of spirit in every moment and act; in the later writings the unity of absolute spirit is reestablished at the expense of the autonomy of the forms of cognitive activity, which seems able to realize itself only in the cosmic concreteness of artistic intuition, so that, as Croce had done in one of his early essays, history and philosophy are reduced to the general concept of art (*Storia ridotta al concetto generale dell’arte*, 1893). The legacy of Romantic idealism remains, in Croce too, an unresolved problem.
Not very different is the epilogue of art in G. Gentile (*Filosofia dell’arte*, Florence 1931), although he intends from the outset not to create watertight compartments among spiritual activities and in art sees nothing other than the aspect or moment of subjectivity that draws the object to itself, born of its creative power, to burn in the flame of the generative feeling. Just as the pure act of the subject resolves within itself every reality, so the other moments in which the dialectic of spirit is accomplished—the religious and the philosophical—remain invested by the form of art, in which, in turn, the other practical, theoretical, and religious elements that constitute our entire humanity circulate and incessantly feed the flame of art. But if the subject in its actuality constructs the totality of being, for what reason must spirit transcend the moment of subjectivity—which is the moment of art—and conquer, through religious objectification, in philosophical self-consciousness? Gentile replies that here lies the true actuality of consciousness, and that the esthetic and religious moments are inactual, because consciousness mediates and resolves the opposition of subject and object in the clear awareness of the object’s belonging to the creative power of subjectivity. To this one seems obliged to reply that philosophical self-consciousness, in order to distinguish itself in any way from esthetic activity, must
that warmth of emotional fervor which distinguishes art, and in such a case one attains the theoretical and the philosophical of instruction. The aesthetic, or self-consciousness, as it would seem necessary, preserves in the purity and fullness of the act the living actuality of pure feeling, and in this case philosophy is entirely consumed in art. In the frameworks of idealism or actualism, that is, of a doctrine which contains the absolute within the creative powers of the human spirit, life cannot be conceived except as art, and the other activities of the human spirit are in no way justified.
III. THE PROBLEMS OF THE AESTHETIC
The conclusion of the preceding historical synthesis brings to light the first and most urgent problem: that of the relations between art and the other activities of the spirit. Modern philosophy, developing the intimacy of Augustine’s *verbum mentis* and Vico’s creativity, has been able to exalt the expressive activity of the human spirit and to profit from a one-sided understanding of existence. In the ancient world, with intellectualism, didacticism, and allegorism, the sense of art’s autonomy had been lost; in the modern and contemporary world, an absorbing autonomy is reclaimed for art, one that contends with the autonomy of other spiritual activities. Aestheticism (v.) is a note to which much of the philosophy, culture, and customs of our day can be reduced. Yet the limits of the human are also the limits of the aesthetic. However essential expression may be to the act of the spirit—if man recognizes nothing beyond what he expresses from himself—it must also be recognized that he is bound to express his integral being from himself, with his constant and metaphysical roots: rooted in the absolute that makes him exist, man cannot constitute the absolute in his act, cannot create or make, but can only signify in his expressive act the absolute to whose infinite transcendence his being is suspended. Reason, mind, by giving the immediacy of intuition, secures existence itself and, reducing it to coherence and unity, reveals its limits to it, opening beyond the enchanting abyss of beauty the arduous path of truth. Art splendidly isolates the intuitive moment of expression, closes the image within itself as the term of contemplative ecstasy, in a state which the aestheticians call enchantment, spell, dream, or rapture. This condition, however lofty, cannot be consolidated into a permanent and realistic state: it cannot be extended to all existence without falsifying it with a presumption of infinity and divine sufficiency. Conceptual thought reveals the incompleteness of existence, restores transparency to the human act, so that man may recognize in himself what he is not from himself, disposing him beyond recognition to adoration.The solution to the problem of the relations between art and language follows the lyrical-expressive nature of art. But for the coincidence between art and language, between art and linguistics, to be perfect, reaching the point of identity, man would have to express himself only when he creates imagination and not also when he thinks, conceives, or calculates. Instead, both art and science belong to human expression: the human act, while always remaining expression, is at once constitutive and significative, image and sign, term and medium; thus the word of man sums up the two qualities that render it capable of sustaining both feeling and idea, music and thought (Schleiermacher), poetry and prose (W. V. Humboldt). Therefore, the scope of language extends beyond that of art: the aesthetic and linguistics remain concentric, but not coextensive.
The question arises concerning the relations between the aesthetic and the artistic, and, as was said at the outset, an effort is made to distinguish one from the other, because beauty would be the object of pure observation or contemplation, while art engages human productivity. This naive distinction is overcome by the deeper concept of beauty, which is not a property of things except through their belonging to the generative act of the spirit that recognizes and loves itself in them; so that in every vision of beauty the expressive act is engaged, and, reciprocally, there is no artistic expression until the beautiful image is seen or contemplated in its realized objectivity.
As for the classical concept of mimesis, it is observed that art is always the execution of the interior, not the imitation of the exterior. Art does not copy nature but creates its own nature. Even when artistic representation seems to adhere to a perceptual model, what counts as art in it is not the figurative element as such, but the tone, the style, the *how* of the figuration. Therefore, even the most realistic art, if it succeeds as art, is always transfiguration, is always pure art, however much one may wish to denote by such an adjective an art that repudiates every realistic trace of emotion or representation. Yet, however pure, art cannot be “empty”: it must be executed within a coherent cosmos, organized in its own internal rhythms, and in this sense a certain artistic realism is always essential to any successful execution, for this structure and transfiguration. Classicism and romanticism, objectivism and subjectivism, realistic execution and intimacy, mark a note that intensifies, not a substance indivisible and broken in two. Art which knows only how to offend sensibility by its extravagance and irrationality is failed art because it has not succeeded in creating its own cosmos.
The preceding problem implies another: that of the relations between form and content. If the analogy with divine creation holds, artistic expression is not superficial, epidermal: it too is a “producing a subsistent thing as a whole, not merely an inhering thing, namely form in matter” (C. Gent., II, 16). The so-called content is invested and resolved into full form, so that in it no element persists that weighs by its foreignness. Yet the resolution of content into form does not exclude what we might call the “container.” Form lives not for what it signifies but for the spirituality that is signified in it, and thus it is not possible to relive the beautiful work without rediscovering in it the “spiritual motive,” the “fontal principle,” the “generative nucleus,” which is constituted by the personality of the artist and the feeling that inspires him in the act of creation. The spiritual motive is, in place of the so-called content, the ideality that governs the physicality of form, transfiguring it into beauty.
A solution to the problem of feeling in art may be suggested by distinguishing the specific feeling of art from the other domestic feelings in everyday life. The specific feeling of art is the hue of the generative act, the joy of creating, Augustine’s *amor in verbo*. All the other feelings of our daily life are measured by passivity, by suffering: only this one is “pure,” “innocent,” as Plato saw, because it controls the perfection of activity. Through it, art is catharsis, that is, liberation from the internal weight and burden of impression in expression. As for the other domestic feelings, they do not enter art directly, because they are of opposite sign to it, but indirectly, through the personality of the artist who, in them and for them—that is, through a life realistically experienced and suffered—tempers the vigor that will render him capable of the sovereign gesture of art. Thus art is not outpouring, anger, invective, or confession: but all that seethes in our mediocre humanity, through the metamorphosis of the generative feeling, becomes tone or touch of the beautiful work. Art can never dehumanize itself, though it envelops all that is human in its light that quickens and purifies.
The problem of the historicity of art can find an analogous solution. Art is exception, miracle, and yet lives within history, of which it bears the most faithful testimony. It lives in history not as an event in a conditioning succession of causes and effects, but as the singular and unrepeatable expression of a man who, on the terrain of history, sinks the roots of his experience and passion. Through this process of osmosis, the customs of a people and its political, moral, and religious ideals filter into the autonomous substance of art and are transfigured into beauty. To educate art toward the good, one must not sever the branches or pluck the flowers, but sow fertilizing substances into the humus of history, in order to rediscover them in the renewed blossoming. Even the meditations of philosophers and the torments of thought are susceptible to artistic palingenesis. Art is the childhood of the spirit not in that it lingers in the naive or becomes wild in the primitive, but in that it can rejuvenate every fruit, even the most mature and consumed, of existence.
The problem of technique arises from the collision between the absolute spontaneity of creation and the complex of conditions to which the artistic execution seems subject: the cost of materials, the resistance of substances, the laws governing the birth of colors, the balance of masses, the counterpoint of music. But all that lies outside art conditions art, not the artist; it pertains to the workshop, not Olympus. Through the ordeal of technique, creation is not conditioned but progressively freed from the obstacles and impediments that must be set aside as exclusive laws of its operation. When the act of art is accomplished, every external difficulty disappears, overwhelmed by the divine ease of creation. If the initial effort persists, if the acquired skill is displayed, then skillfulness, virtuosity, and mannerism emerge: industry replaces art.
The problem of art criticism (v.) arises from the difficulty of understanding how what is intimate, singular, or inexpressible in other words can be interpreted, judged, or translated into another language. Criticism cannot extricate itself from this impasse unless it recognizes a circumscribed function: to approach the core of the work without presuming to coincide with that core or to render an equivalent of the aesthetic emotion. The space in which criticism moves lies between inspiration and execution, between feeling and form, between the artist and the work, in order to penetrate the spiritual motive that permeates the sensible and to identify the stylistic elements that obey an inner necessity, avoiding the one-sided fixation either on pure biographism or on pure sensibility or pure visibility. Another problem is the relationship between judgment and taste in art criticism: on the one hand, the mere judgment that, through the application of aesthetic categories to a given subject, issues only praise or condemnation (poetry or not poetry), appears too rigid, mechanical, and unsuited to the delicate nature of art; on the other hand, mere taste, that is, the mere emotional reliving of the work, is too subjective and open to arbitrary appreciation unless disciplined by an aesthetic category, that is, by a precise concept of what art is. The difficulty is resolved on the basis of an aesthetic category that recognizes art as singular and absolute expression, so that the critic, precisely by obeying the discipline of the aesthetic concept and by pronouncing an informed judgment, cannot but employ as a measure his own sensibility, which confronts the work and relives it congenially, reproducing what is valuable precisely because of the singularity of the expression. The aesthetic universal stands at the apex of individuality: it is therefore the aesthetic category, which governs informed criticism, that is the critic’s taste.