One of the rituals peculiar to commencement ceremonies at conservative liberal arts institutions is the exhortation to promote “the good, the true, and the beautiful.” Most of the graduates will have some idea what the good and the true are and will be able to recognize them in practice, but few would be able to define the beautiful, and fewer still would recognize it. Being able to name the attributes of the beautiful mentioned by Thomas Aquinas—unity, proportion, and clarity—will at least clarify that modern art is ugly, but it won’t help much in distinguishing the sublimity of Raphael from the paltriness of Bouguereau, or in demonstrating that the Laocoön is more beautiful than a cube. “It definitely lacks clarity,” one of my students declared about the Hellenistic masterpiece; “there’s too much going on.”
Formation in beauty requires theoretical study, but also immersion in beautiful things. For this, one needs guides who not only recognize that beauty is important, but who also have good taste. This quality—partly a gift, partly cultivated—is very much on display in the Aesthetics of Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889–1977), the second volume of which was published for the first time in English earlier this year by the Hildebrand Project.
Taken together, the two volumes of Hildebrand’s Aesthetics are a treasury of art and nature criticism. He describes, for instance, the sublime valediction of certain early evenings: “Those moments when the full light of the sun … is followed by a more delicate and spiritualized light that bestows on the phenomenon of evening a wholly special quality that lasts until sunset, a transfigured note that has an element of farewell about it” (I, 301). There are reminiscences of “classic human activities” that have passed away from the modern world, as “when all the upper classes drove in beautiful carriages drawn by noble horses along the Corso in Rome at one particular hour of the day” (I, 352). He contrasts the beauty of older dances like the minuet with the mere elegance of the waltz, the polka, and the mazurka (I, 401), and regrets the introduction of the “prosaic” long trousers for men (I, 400, n. 1).
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