O belo enquanto congruentia partium: a harmonia na beleza sensível em Santo Agostinho

Abstract

A good part of the texts that speak about the beauty in Augustine has, as a background, the attacks on the beauty of the world developed by the Manichaeans. Thus, the thinker, aiming to defend the thesis of a beautiful cosmos, seeks to construct a definition of a very wide sensitive beauty, which may encompass creatures seemingly naked in beauty according to the human perspective. In this article, we will study the category of the beautiful of the congruentia partium, which our philosopher develops in a definition of sensible beauty, exposed in two texts, notably Epistle III and in On the City of God. In the mentioned texts, the thinker starts from the structure of the definition of beauty as symmetry presented by the philosopher Cicero in his work Tusculanae Disputationes, nevertheless, it uses it to theorize a concept of congruentia partium, a concept that is much broader than the symmetry, and therefore , More useful to the debate he faced.