Another Transcendental?

Having produced evidence, albeit fragmentary, for maintaining that Scotus is among those who are sympathetic to classing goodness or the good as a transcendental, it behoves us to ask whether he and-or Hopkins accord the distinction of transcendentality to beauty or the beautiful. That they do derives direct support from the putative fact noted above that transcendentals are mutually penetrative. That Hopkins does is further supported by what some of his readers, including this one, will regard as a tiresomely excessive use of the words ‘beauty’ and ‘beautiful’. He sometimes uses the noun ‘beauty’ as another name for God or for one of the attributes of the Singular Origin of Singularity: prima species primaque pulchritudo. The Latin species can be synonymous with ‘beauty’. It can also be translated by ‘pattern’, ‘design’, so perhaps too by ‘inscape’. When we grant that inscape is instressed in the way described in chapter 2 and if we accept that readiness to sacrifice oneself for another is a prerequisite of truly agapeistic love, we may begin to understand that the most beautiful word for beauty may be ‘loveliness’, provided that the verbal force of this word’s first syllable is acknowledged and with it that the love of loveliness is practical, an expression of the will, not least when moral loveliness is what we mean. Would that Hopkins had taken to heart Ruskin’s lesson that the highest beauty is sublime, and the highest sublimity beautiful. He would have seen the relation between beauty and sublimity as one of formal distinction. Beauty and sublimity are conceptually quite distinct from each other independently of any operation of reason, but they are metaphysically, a parte rei, not separable, even by God.