JERUSALEM, Israel - For the ancients, mortals were mere copyists of archetypes. As in "Ion," creative genius was taken as a form of madness, as the Greek mind was bent upon mimesis, or copying. For better or worse, sane and competent humans copy, and that is all. Plato famously propounded that there must be a realm of ideal Forms or Ideas that are all perfect, eternal, and unchanging. These Forms comprise true reality, and our world of sensory experience is merely an imperfect, gaunt shadow of this higher reality. According to Plato, beauty is itself one of these Forms, and it is closely related to the Forms of truth and goodness. For him, beautiful things are those that participate in the Form of beauty, and they are beautiful precisely because they embody or represent this higher reality. In this sense, beauty is not just a matter of personal taste or preference, but rather an objective quality that reveals something about the true nature of reality. Aristotle also believed that there is a close relationship between beauty and truth, but his view of this relationship differed from that of Plato with respect to the Forms involved. In contrast to Plato, Aristotle did not see beauty as a route to a higher reality or a distant realm of Forms. He believed that the study of beauty is a study of the most ideal examples of categories. Forms inhere in objects themselves and allow them to be distinguished in matters of quality. The criterion for the beauty of each category necessarily varies.

Aristotle believed that beauty is a subjective quality that arises from the interaction between the object and the perceiver; thus, beauty is not a separate realm or Form, but rather a property of genera of objects in the world. The tremulous strain of genius - that is, of making anew - was only possible in light of the Neoplatonic revolution and its subsequent synthesis into Thomism (Aquinas and his successors). Contra Aristotle, Forms did not inhere in things-in-themselves; Contra Plato, the realm of Forms was not independent of intellect but rather reflective of a supreme theistic intellect. The Thomistic tradition follows Aristotle with respect to causes but not with respect to Forms. Beauty is consequently divisible into two different flavors - one for Forms and the other for principles. "Lowercase b" beauty is a quality of created forms instantiated through human or natural agency and is present in conformity to principles of proportion, harmony, and perspicuity. The human genius of "ars," or "art," is in the exercise of creative agency in the fashioning of the physical. More abstract Beauty resides in the relations of principles that order Forms and their causes. This "capital B" Beauty is that of predictable physical and metaphysical laws - of systematization, rationalism, and generality. Beauty is in the syllogism (deduction) just as it is in the abstraction of things observed or known via the faculty of revelation (either induction or Divine proof).

Plato found a single beauty in the Form of that name; for Aristotle, there were a multiplicity of beauties for admissible categories; for Aquinas, there were two beauties ultimately united in the essence of Divinity, the Second Man. Aquinas held that beauties of both sorts reflect the Divine order that governs the universe, and that it is always related to the goodness and truth that exist in God. Similarly, for Aquinas, truth is not just a matter of factual accuracy, but rather a property of things that are in harmony with the Divine order. The physical construction of Divine archetypes is possible only through "opus dei" - the work by which the human soul is "godlike" in its creative agency. There can be no goodness without beauty or truth, since all of these are aspects of a single person (Christ) and a single Godhead. The Enlightenment Empiricist rejection of inherent ideas and revelation lent itself inexorably to subjectivism. For example, Locke's philosophy of beauty can be characterized as a subjective and relativistic view of aesthetics. He saw beauty as a constantly evolving and changing concept influenced by culture, education, and personal experience. Hume went even further in his relativizing program and rejected the notion of necessary connections between events and objects. Hume's philosophy of logic, just as his philosophy of beauty, can be characterized as a rejection of traditional notions of necessary connections, innate ideas, and logical positivism all at once. Without a basis in formal causes or revelation, Hume could only argue that logical reasoning is but a peculiarly effective tool for organizing and clarifying our thoughts. It cannot give us any knowledge of the world beyond our immediate experience. Therefore, any knowledge we have about the world, including that concerning beauty, must be based on evidence and observation or the mere whimsy of taste. Aesthetics is constrained to subjectivism by the relegation of logical laws to the domain of those claims that could, in principle, be empirically refuted...