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1 - An Eye for Truth and Beauty: A Metaphysical Preface to Middle English Literature of Love and Knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2012

Norman Klassen
Norman Klassen
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
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Summary

No caress is sweeter than your charity and no love is more rewarding than the love of your truth, which shines in beauty above all else.

(Augustine)

The parasite always plugs into the system; the parasite is always there; it is inevitable. The parasite is the third in a trivial model, the three-branched star. Here now is the relation that cannot be analyzed; that is to say, there is none simpler. Here then is the beginning of intembjectivity. The third is always there, god or demon, reason or noise.

(Michel Sms)

In the Confessions and throughout his writings Augustine persistently attempts to articulate, often with beautiful results, the ineffable relationship between love and knowledge. He recognizes, as the passage quoted above attests, the difficulty of ordering these categories, the sublime relationship between them which, with reference to the mystical union of the soul with God, verges on complete fusion of emotional and intellectual experience. And he intuitively understands the value of metaphors of seeing and light when attempting to grapple with these concepts. Vision provides a sense of immediacy; it can connote apprehension of truth and beauty; and it can be made to apply to the realm of the senses as well as to the realm of the numinous.

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Chaucer on Love, Knowledge and Sight , pp. 1 - 38
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 1995

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