The Study Of Augustine’s Aesthetic Thought

In St.Augustine’s system of thought,the "inner path" mainly refers to the "turning" of the mind(mens),that is,man’s return to the eternal God through contemplation of the mind itself,the essence of which is to free the mind from the indulgence and pursuit of external objects.This "turning" is also a personal experience of people’s pursuit of beauty.God created the eternal order from nothingness and created all beauty at the same time,so man’s search for beauty is man’s direct face to the eternal order in the earthly world.This means that the mind must turn to the eternal order,and the turn of the mind cannot be separated from the will to exert control over the mind.The human will leads the mind to the search for inner order,aware that inner order is the grace of God.In this way,man can find his place in the eternal order by the grace of God in the world.This "retrieval" realizes the "harmony" of order,and this personal process is the intuition of God’s eternal beauty,and man’s existence also has the eternal beauty of God in this process.Thus,the "inner path" is both God’s grace to man and the path of salvation for man’s inner beauty.In this context,this paper analyzes the relationship between Augustine’s aesthetic thought and the inner path,trying to show that the redemption of beauty is a path of inner order.This paper mainly discusses the following four chapters.The first chapter briefly addresses the relationship between beauty and evil in the context of creationism.This chapter analyzes Augustine’s "evil is the absence of good" to show that earthly evil comes from the deviation of things from form and order,not from God’s creation.The second chapter deals with the problems of the diachronic nature of eternal beauty.Starting from the concept that time is an extension of the mind,Augustine discussed the "trinity" structure of the mind,and then revealed the eternal beauty of existence as a diachronic existence.The Inner Trinity of the Heart is the Presence of God,which makes possible man’s self-redemption by graceThe third chapter mainly discusses how it is possible for man to pursue eternal beauty in time.By arguing the relationship between music and numbers,order,and beauty,Augustine clarified that man’s search for eternal order is his personal experience of eternal beauty.The basis of man’s ability to experience eternal beauty lies in the trinity of reason-wisdom-truth,on which man is able to achieve the harmony of the cosmic order.The harmony of the world order derives from the proper proportions of the numbers,while the harmonious movement of the universe is music,but only the movement of the inner harmony of the soul is the ultimate perfection of the cosmic order.Chapter four deals primarily with the relationship between the "inner path" and free will.Augustine believed that the search for eternal beauty of the mind requires the will to turn to the order of beauty,thereby exerting control over the mind,otherwise man will lose his form and fall into evil by deviating from the order.This chapter,which deals primarily with the question of good and evil,shows that only the will toward order can make the perfection of the inner path possible.The inner path,as God’s grace,does not conflict with man’s free will.As for evil,it stems from the nature of the human soul,and its root lies in the fact that the mind does not manage the soul.The inner path,then,as the path of beauty,is to face one’s own form and to face the Creator of form,the eternal God,and it is in this constant face that man completes the redemption of beauty.