It Is Said to Be Born from Darkness

Greetings,

Free-thinking, free-conscienced, beautiful people.

Continuing to look through the mirror of art…

What appears to us today through the mirror of art,

Is a pitch-black darkness,

A darkness that lasted nearly a thousand years,

Such a darkness,

Experienced as if it would never end…

But even so;

A darkness powerful enough to give birth to a light that never fades from within,

Can light be born from darkness?

I can almost hear you asking…

Of course it can, it can be born as surely as anything,

Human intellect, patience, productivity, and creativity are such an invincible force that no darkness has ever been able to stand before them throughout history. Do not lose hope…

A darkness where everything concerning human life was determined by dogmas, where time almost stood still, the Scholastic Age, that is, the Middle Ages,

A social structure woven with the reality of humanity, which had been branded with innate sinfulness by the Church for its ontological existence, and the religious-cultural atmosphere it produced,

In this period, as in the art understanding of the Ancient Age, ethics and aesthetics were intertwined, equated with the concept of the good and the beautiful.

Of course, do not be confused here,

What we should understand by the good,

Is the good that the Church tailored for itself, please do not misunderstand.

Again, according to the thinkers of this period, there is a predominantly instrumentalist aspect in aesthetic and art theories. For this reason, the field of art is not seen as an autonomous field. Art is valuable only to the extent that it produces what is good, beautiful, and useful for humans and institutions.

This is an age where there were no activities that we could define as art because it had not yet realized its own construction in its own autonomy,

An age where the human was defined as a passive being and the act of creation was castrated,

An age where minds were confused,

How so?

While Tertullianus, one of the founding fathers of Catholic Theology and one of the names who significantly determined the medieval way of thinking, interpreted the beautiful as a demonic thing that is a secret deception of worldly desires,

St. Augustinus, another prominent name in determining the artistic attitude of medieval scholastic thought, builds his theory of beauty on the concepts of unity, number, equality, proportion, and order. According to him, the primary form of all beauty is unity. The most perfect unity is God. All visible things are beautiful because they turn towards this perfect unity, and since they receive a share from the most perfect being, there is no subjectivity or relativity in beauty, he says.

While Tertullianus sees the demonic at the source of the beautiful, St. Augustinus sees the Divine.

Minds are confused, but this confusion is a confusion that should be interpreted as a good omen.

Because according to another medieval thinker, Aquinas, art does not contain beautiful action; it exists entirely in the faculty of cognition. The beautiful is determined by the cognitive structure that perceives it. What determines aesthetic taste is the objective properties of the object itself. For an object to be perceived as beautiful, it must possess four basic properties. These are; integrity, proportion, clarity, and splendor. In line with these views, we can say that Aquinas is the first example of the objectivist aesthetic judgment theory of modern aesthetics.

With this intellectual approach, which can be considered quite advanced for his age, Aquinas seems to have acted as a midwife for the birth of the Renaissance.

Darkness is destined to give birth to light.

You look and suddenly light is born,

But do not think it is born by itself.

Light is born because it does not succumb to darkness.

The Renaissance is such a birth.

Just as a human gives birth to their own light from their own darkness…

So, it means it is born from darkness.

As if a new light is about to be born,

A light we know.

May it be for the best…

Until our next meeting, goodbye for now, now and always, breathe with art, stay with art.