Beauty as an Analogous Concept and Tolstoy on Beauty

The word beauty is not merely equivocal (i.e. used in completely different and unrelated senses), but it is also not univocal (used in exactly the same sense each time). The traditional answer, especially in the Thomistic and Platonic traditions, is that beauty is analogical.

 Equivocal, Univocal, or Analogical?

·        A term is equivocal when it has completely different meanings in different uses (e.g., bat as an animal and bat used in sports).

·        A term is univocal when it has exactly the same meaning in all uses (e.g., triangle always meaning a three-sided shape).

·        A term is analogical when it has meanings that are different but related, often by proportion, analogy, or participation in a common source (e.g., healthy food, healthy complexion, healthy person).

Aquinas applies this logic to many transcendental terms: being, goodness, truth, and beauty. These are not used equivocally (they don’t mean something totally different in each case), nor univocally (they don’t always mean exactly the same thing). Rather they are used analogically: they signify a reality that is shared in diverse modes. Consider:

·        A good knife

·        A good argument

·        A good philosophy book.

·        A good basketball game.

·        A good teacher.

·        A good war.

·        A good man.

·        A good person

When we say that something is “good,” we are not always saying exactly the same thing. A good knife is not good in the same way as a good teacher or a good person. But we are also not saying something entirely unrelated in each case. Instead, we are using the word good analogically: in each case, the term refers to something that fulfills its purpose, realizes its nature, or achieves excellence in its kind. This is the essence, the frame that holds all the diverse pictures of goodness together.

 

 

 

• A good knife

A good knife is one that cuts well. Its goodness lies in its functionality, in its ability to perform the task for which knives are made—cutting cleanly, efficiently, and safely. Its goodness is physical and instrumental.

 

• A good argument

A good argument is one that is valid, clear, and persuasive. It follows logical rules and brings the mind toward truth. Its goodness is intellectual, not physical. It fulfills the purpose of reasoning; it clarifies and conveys what is true.

 

• A good philosophy book

A good philosophy book presents deep questions, clear exposition, and sound reasoning. It may also provoke reflection and intellectual growth. Its goodness is a mixture of pedagogical, intellectual, and literary virtues.

 

• A good basketball game

A good game is fair, well-played, exciting, and competitive. It shows athletic skill, teamwork, and strategy. Its goodness lies in the flourishing of play, which itself has rules, drama, and aesthetic grace.

 

• A good teacher

A good teacher helps students to learn, grow, and become better people. This requires knowledge, clarity, empathy, and moral integrity. A teacher is not merely effective, but also caring and wise. The goodness here is moral and relational.

 

• A good war

This is perhaps the most complex. A good war is not good in itself, but just, limited, and fought for a morally serious reason, such as defense or protection of the innocent. Its goodness is prudential, tragic, and instrumental, tied to the lesser evil and the restoration of peace.

 

• A good man

A good man is one who lives with virtue, who fulfills the potential of his human nature through wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance. This goodness is moral and personal: not what he does, but who he is.

 

• A good person

This often means the same as a good man or woman, but the word person emphasizes dignity and individuality.

 

In each of these cases, good is said in relation to the nature or end of the thing. It is not a vague compliment. It means: this thing is what it is meant to be. So the term is neither univocal (same meaning every time) nor equivocal (completely unrelated). It is analogical: different but ordered meanings that point toward a shared structure of fulfillment. This is exactly how the classical tradition (especially Aristotle, Aquinas, and those influenced by them) understands goodness, being, truth, and beauty. These are transcendentals: they “transcend” categories and apply to all beings, but analogically, not univocally.

 

Beauty and the Analogy of Proportion and Participation

When we say that a landscape is beautiful, or that Wordsworth’s Daffodils is beautiful, or that Othello is beautiful, we are referring to different kinds of beauty: sensory, emotional, moral, or metaphysical. All of them, however, participate in what is traditionally called the radiance of form. Each case manifests clarity, harmony, unity, or fittingness in its own domain:

 

·        The landscape may exhibit beauty in the harmony of color, light, and spatial order.

 

·        Wordsworth’s poem may be beautiful in the contemplative tranquility it evokes and in its metrical and imagistic grace.

 

·        Shakespeare’s Othello, tragic and morally complex, is beautiful in the sense that it reveals deep human truths through powerful language and dramatic structure—beauty not as comfort, but as truth, form, and emotional intelligibility.

 

All these are different, but they all point to the same transcendental property of being: beauty as that which is pleasing when seen or apprehended, as Aquinas puts it (ST I, q. 5, a. 4, ad 1). They differ in mode, not in kind.

    My whole argument of understanding beauty as an essential spiritual good depends on this analogical understanding. If beauty were purely equivocal, then no universal claim about beauty could be made. But the analogical view allows you to say that “The Ugly Duckling,” a waterfall, a cathedral, a poem, and a sacrificial act of love can all be beautiful because they all participate in a common structure of being with each revealing, in its own way, the unity and radiance of form that draws the soul.

    This view is also anti-reductionist. It allows for pluralism in expression without collapsing into subjectivism. Beauty can be tragic, joyful, serene, or sublime because human experience and the created order are multiform. But beauty remains real, and the soul remains oriented toward it.

 

. . .

 

    Tolstoy’s critique of beauty in What is Art? is driven by a deep moral and spiritual seriousness. He rightly perceives that in modern culture, the word beauty has become hollow, reduced to subjective taste, emotional manipulation, or the aesthetic indulgences of a decadent elite. In response, he redefines art not by its beauty but by its moral and emotional power: true art is that which sincerely communicates morally elevating emotions and unites people in compassion and shared experience. Yet in doing so, Tolstoy seems to concede that beauty, as a standard, has no essential link to truth or goodness. He abandons the classical and theological understanding of beauty as a transcendental – what the soul perceives when it is rightly attuned to the form and meaning of things. In the tradition of Plato, Aquinas, and more recently Lewis and Scruton, beauty is not ornament or luxury but a window into reality, an analogue of love, and a path toward moral formation. In rejecting beauty outright, rather than reclaiming it from modern confusion, Tolstoy unintentionally severs art from its contemplative and metaphysical dimension. Though he upholds truth and goodness, he denies their radiance. And to deny that radiance is to deny what makes them lovable. On this point, I cannot follow Tolstoy. The task is not to reject beauty but to restore its meaning.

   This issue connects to the question of analogy, and the critique of Tolstoy can be strengthened and clarified by drawing on that insight.   

      In the classical tradition, beauty (like goodness and being) is analogical. That means it is not always the same in appearance or effect, but it is always ordered to the fulfillment of nature and the radiance of form. This allows beauty to appear across a wide range of domains: in nature, art, mathematics, character, suffering, even tragedy. So when we call The Iliad, a good man, a philosophy book, or a poem by Wordsworth beautiful, we’re not saying they please us in the same way. We are saying that each, in its own mode, reveals form, integrity, or harmony that elicits contemplative delight and draws us toward deeper understanding or love. This analogical understanding protects us from two extremes: from aestheticism, which isolates beauty from truth and goodness; and from moralism, which denies beauty where its form is unfamiliar or challenging.

 

        Tolstoy rejects the aesthetic conception of beauty in art (as do I) because he sees it as arbitrary, elitist, and disconnected from moral truth. But in doing so, he throws out the entire category – the baby with the bathwater. This rejection reveals that he is (perhaps unwittingly) operating under the modern assumption (Nominalism) that beauty must be univocal, that if it does not mean this, it must mean nothing. Had Tolstoy held to an analogical understanding, he might have said: yes, the opera, the court ballet, the decadent novel, and the sentimental painting may not be truly beautiful but that does not mean beauty has no place in art. It means we must recover a truer, deeper, more universal sense of beauty, a beauty that can include the humble, the suffering, the spiritual, and the morally serious.

     Instead, by accepting that the word beauty now refers only to aestheticized surface or elite taste, Tolstoy treats it as equivocal and abandons it. This is where my disagreement lies. I agree with his critique of modern art’s detachment from truth but not with his conclusion.

   I can’t help but wonder what Tolstoy would say to all of this. Tolstoy's fundamental concern was moral and spiritual clarity. Tolstoy wrote What is Art? in a period of radical religious and moral transformation in his life. He had come to see much of his earlier artistic work (including parts of Anna Karenina and War and Peace) as indulgent or morally corrupt because it delighted the senses but, in his view, did not uplift the soul. He was deeply disillusioned with what he saw as the idolatry of form in European art and culture: the idea that something was valuable because it was finely crafted, even if it communicated vanity, sensuality, or despair. What he wanted from art was what he had come to want from life: simplicity, truthfulness, moral clarity, and compassion, especially for the poor and the voiceless.

     He might not have rejected the analogical account of beauty but he did not articulate it. Tolstoy does not explicitly argue against beauty as a transcendental. Rather, he argues against the existing conception of beauty as defined by his culture, which he sees as subjective, elitist, and corrupted by aestheticism. Had someone presented him with a richer, analogical understanding of beauty, one that included humble beauty, tragic beauty, and moral beauty as genuine expressions of form, he may have paused. After all, he himself describes the beauty of authentic Christian art (such as the parables of Christ) as powerful and transformative. He praises art that is simple, moving, universal – not “beautiful” in the aristocratic sense, but in a deeper, spiritually luminous sense. That is beauty, though he refuses to call it that.

  So in a way Tolstoy already affirms beauty in analogical form, but without the language to claim it. His rejection of the word beauty is tactical and polemical, based on what he believes beauty has come to mean. If he could be shown that beauty, properly understood, does not compete with truth or goodness but radiates from them, he might have accepted the concept, if not the term.

   In the later stage of his life, his views became more ascetic and prophetic. I suppose there is an intrinsic tension between asceticism (Puritanism) and art /beauty. Beauty connects us to this world by connecting this world to a larger reality over the horizon, so to speak. But in his deepest concerns with clarity, sincerity, universality, and spiritual elevation, he was aiming at the very thing the classical tradition called beauty. If he could be convinced that beauty need not be decadent, elitist, or sensuous in the corrupting sense, he might have agreed that he had rejected a counterfeit, not the real thing.

. . .

     Much of the postmodern left’s suspicion of beauty, like Tolstoy’s, stems from the fact that beauty was cultivated, protected, and defined (in practice) by the aristocratic and clerical classes of pre-industrial Europe. Think of Versailles, the English country house, Italian opera, elite literary salons: beauty here was often entangled with exclusivity, refinement, and distance from material need. But this cultural history is not the same as the spiritual meaning of beauty. Beauty’s presence in aristocratic regimes does not mean it belongs to them any more than truth belongs to universities or goodness to monasteries. You have to disentangle the universal value from its historical embodiment and recover what was right and noble in those traditions without reinscribing the social exclusivity that distorted them – and with them, beuaty.

 Tolstoy saw the distortion but threw out the substance with the form. He rejected the aristocratic aesthetic regime, rightly seeing it as often morally hollow and self-serving. But in doing so, he seems to have assumed that beauty itself must be a tool of that regime. He criticizes Pushkin, Beethoven, and Shakespeare not because they failed as artists, but because he believed they produced works that were inaccessible to the masses and contaminated by elite taste. In place of beauty, he proposed sincerity and moral clarity, accessible to all.

      But in rejecting the elite aesthetic tradition, Tolstoy also rejected the idea that beauty could speak universally. Yet it was precisely the classical tradition – Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas – that argued that beauty belongs to all being, not to a class. The association of beauty with aristocracy is contingent. The identification of beauty with form, fittingness, radiance, and joy is essential. Beauty is rooted in being, not in status. The Thomistic-Platonic-Christian tradition affirms that beauty is ontological. It arises from the inner order of things, not from social judgments. A good man, a peasant's song, a child’s drawing, a sunset, or an act of forgiveness can all be beautiful –  not because they are cultivated by an elite but because they reflect form, harmony, and love. The tradition, rightly read, actually subverts elitism because it demands that the beautiful be true and good, and thus open to any heart attuned to it.     I would argue that the association of beauty with aristocracy is not essential but accidental. It arose in history but must be transcended. Beauty is not the property of a class; it is a property of being. What’s needed is not the rejection of beauty, but the democratization of beauty rightly understood.

    So in a way Tolstoy was trying to restore what I am trying to defend. He took one path – moral purification through rejection of form. I want another: namely, the redemption of form through reconnection with truth and goodness. Beauty is not a luxury but as love made visible