JEMS 6 (2017), 2: 95–117

Theological Underpinnings of Joseph Addison’s Aesthetics

eduard Ghiţăuniversity of louisville

Abstract: Joseph addison’s Spectator papers on the imagination have been read as a landmark in the development of aesthetic disinterestedness (Stolnitz). But this is problematic in light of addison’s theological concerns, particularly as they bear on the final causes of aesthetic pleasures. This teleology of the aesthetic is far from a Kantian understanding, but rather part of a larger discourse of physico-theology. By drawing on the work of Zeitz and Mayhew, among others, this paper shows how addison’s theological underpinnings of the aesthetic raise the broader question of the role theology played in the emergence and evo-lution of philosophical aesthetics. in eighteenth-century Britain, the aesthetic belonged to a disciplinary matrix comprising a set of confluent discourses, one of which was theology. drawing on and expanding M.H. abrams’s scheme, which explores how concepts such as ‘contemplation’ and ‘disinterestedness’ mi-grated from theology to aesthetic theory, this paper suggests that the concept of ‘aesthetic pleasure’ underwent a similar transformation. With addison, the pleasures afforded by the imagination (greatness, novelty and beauty) acquire a new dominant position which allows one to speak of a text in modern aesthet-ics instead of a manual of Christian apologetics.1

Keywords: aesthetic disinterestedness, physico-theology, aesthetic pleasure, imagination, philosophical aesthetics, beauty, the sublime, novelty

1. Introduction

aesthetics was, by the time addison published his imagination papers, still an unborn discipline. in the early eighteenth century, theological concerns

1 This paper was completed with support from the uEfiSCdi research grant Pnii-ru-tE-2014-4-1776 (contract no. 368/2015).

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were highly intermingled with the very fabric of the aesthetic; otherwise put, in the terms of those who see the founding of disciplines as structures of exclusion,2 theological speculations had not been entirely evicted from what was to be subsequently narrowed down to become the discipline of philo-sophical aesthetics. insofar as addison’s contribution to the field is concerned, a common tendency in reading his papers is to emphasize the aesthetic par excellence, at the expense of the theological elements. This tendency is best ex-emplified by Jerome Stolnitz, who, writing about ‘aesthetic disinterestedness’ as a concept that set modern aesthetics apart from its pre-modern counterpart, made addison an original and modern contributor.3 This is an instance of the practice of viewing the emergence of modern aesthetics through the lens of a history of necessary continuities, elaborated by historians who connect great thinkers with one another in a long-term dialogue, with the aim of finding antecedents to, or even the origins of, foundational concepts.4 However, to say that addison’s theological concerns have not been addressed at all in the literature is perfunctory.

addison’s theological concerns have been explored within studies devoted to specific topics of inquiry in cultural and intellectual history. robert May-hew’s exploration of the role of addison’s theology within the history of land-scape description in the eighteenth century is a good example.5 another is lisa Zeitz’s investigation of the relation of addison’s psychology of aesthetic

2 tobin Siebers, “Philosophy and its other—Violence: a Survey of Philosophical repres-sion from Plato to Girard,” Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology 1.2 (1995), online journal, http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0102/siebers/ , accessed 12 January 2017, p. 1.

3 Jerome Stolnitz, “on the origins of ‘aesthetic disinterestedness’,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20.2 (1961), pp. 131-143, at pp. 139-143.

4 for a description of this practice, as it bears on the history of aesthetics, see Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics, new york: Columbia university Press, 1994, pp. 1-10. There is indeed a tendency to create a teleological narrative to explain the emergence of modern aesthetics. This narrative usually starts from a Kantian aesthetic concept, which it turns into a finality to which all British aestheticians would have aspired. Besides ‘aesthetic disinterestedness,’ which is Stolnitz’s starting point, another example is the notion of ‘positive and negative freedom,’ traced back by Paul Guyer. Guyer tries to explain addison’s project in purely Kantian terms: “in his complex conception of the pleasures of the imagination, addison thus puts together negative and positive conceptions of the freedom of the imagination in a way that will not be done within more professional philosophy until Kant’s synthesis at the end of the century”: Paul Guyer, “The origins of Mod-ern aesthetics: 1711-35,” in Peter Kivy (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, Malden, Ma: Blackwell, 2004, pp. 15-44, at p. 30. The critique of this practice is one of the main objectives of Quentin Skinner’s engagement with the methodology of the history of ideas. See Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and understanding in the History of ideas,” History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1969), pp. 3-53, esp. at pp. 10-12.

5 robert J. Mayhew, Landscape, Literature, and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800: Sam-uel Johnson and Languages of Natural Description, new york: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

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perception to a certain tradition of physico-theology.6 While my research is much indebted to these scholars, what i would like to show is how some of their arguments can be brought to bear on the broader question of the role theology fulfilled in the emergence and evolution of modern aesthetic theory. to my knowledge, this larger question has not been asked in addison criticism, but i believe that certain arguments in the secondary literature are conducive to it, although they were originally meant to serve different critical objectives. an engagement with the question of emergence requires a compre-hensive explanatory scheme, and it is with the purpose of providing one that i will turn to M.H. abrams, who showed how concepts formerly belonging to theology migrated to aesthetic theory. on abrams’s view, however, the scheme does not include addison; i argue that it should, once we enlarge it to include not only the concepts of aesthetic ‘contemplation’ and ‘disinterestedness,’ but also that of ‘aesthetic pleasure.’

i will begin with the question whether addison endorsed the concept of ‘aesthetic disinterestedness’ in his works (second section below). i start with Jerome Stolnitz’s view, and then move on to Miles rind’s critique of it; the point here is that even if the concept were present in addison’s text, which is not true, the model of aesthetic disinterestedness does not hold water when considered in conjunction with addison’s theology. as i will show in the third section, for addison God plays a prominent role in enabling human aesthetic experience. our aesthetic engagement with the world is, for addison, part of natural theology, and represents, more specifically, an aesthetic version of the design argument. intimately connected to this is his teleological exposition of our aesthetic pleasures, which explains the pleasures by the ends of provi-dence. as addison’s theological concerns are not intrusions into his aesthet-ics, but are constitutive of it, they are far more than explicative devices called upon to resolve the knowledge gaps in the new philosophy. it is in the final section of this paper that i deal with the role theology played in the emer-gence and evolution of modern aesthetics, by relying on a refined version of abrams’s intellectual-historical scheme.

2. Addison and the Question of Aesthetic Disinterestedness

The most common tendency in reading addison’s papers on the imagina-tion is to emphasize the preeminence of the aesthetic to the detriment of the theological concerns.7 The supremacy of the aesthetic lies in the emergence of such concepts as ‘aesthetic disinterestedness.’ in his foundational paper “on

6 lisa M. Zeitz, “addison’s imagination Papers and the design argument,” English Studies 73.6 (1992), pp. 493-502.

7 See note 4 above.

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the origins of aesthetic disinterestedness,”8 Jerome Stolnitz argues that ‘aes-thetic disinterestedness’ is the fundamental concept that set modern aesthetics apart from its pre-modern counterpart. The disinterested aesthetic experience is defined in opposition to non-aesthetic behavior, whether moral, religious, instrumental or cognitive.9 as far as addison’s contribution to the emergence of aesthetic disinterestedness is concerned, Stolnitz argues that addison’s em-ployment of the imagination announces an important fact, namely the dis-interested perception of beauty.10 as he writes, the essays are “devoted to the imagination because imagination provides a habitat for disinterestedness.”11 unlike the pleasures of the sense, which are always interested in the object, and the pleasures of the understanding, which are cognitive in nature, the pleasures of the imagination are disinterested. although there is support in the text for these distinctions, Stolnitz never really considers the matter in light of addison’s aesthetic teleology. While it is true that addison’s classification of pleasures serves to single out the aesthetic pleasures from their non-aesthetic counterparts, it would be a mistake to see the pleasures as entirely devoid of religious elements (or “behavior,” as Stolnitz would like to call it). in fact, ad-dison offers a theological grounding to the aesthetic pleasures, which i will dis-cuss in the third section below. another question that needs to be addressed, however, is whether ‘aesthetic disinterestedness’ was a concept operative in eighteenth-century aesthetic theories at all. The issue has been studied to a large extent by Miles rind,12 to whom i will now turn.

The story of ‘aesthetic disinterestedness’ must begin with the story of ‘disinterestedness.’ rind starts his own analysis with the oEd entry for ‘dis-interested,’ which gives two meanings: (a) without interest or concern, not interested; and (b) impartial, unbiased by personal interest, free from self-seeking.13 Sense (b) could be further split into a meaning that applies to judg-ment, inquiry and evaluation, and a meaning applied to human disposition, action and behavior. Stolnitz himself acknowledges that the term originated in eighteenth-century ethics before it passed into aesthetic vocabulary.14 The aesthetic version of disinterestedness reached its definitive formulation in Kant’s 1790 Critique of Judgment, where he contended that:

[…] taste for the beautiful is a disinterested and free satisfaction; for no inter-est, neither that of the senses nor that of reason, extorts approval […]. taste is

8 See note 3 above. 9 Stolnitz, “origins of ‘aesthetic disinterestedness’,” p. 138.10 Stolnitz, “origins of ‘aesthetic disinterestedness’,” p. 138.11 Stolnitz, “origins of ‘aesthetic disinterestedness’,” p. 140.12 Miles rind, “The Concept of disinterestedness in Eighteenth-Century British aesthet-

ics,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002), pp. 67-87.13 rind, “Concept of disinterestedness,” p. 69.14 Stolnitz, “origins of ‘aesthetic disinterestedness’,” p. 132.

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the faculty for judging an object or a kind of representation through a satisfac-tion or dissatisfaction without any interest. The object of such a satisfaction is called beautiful.15

according to M.H. abrams in one of his studies on ‘art-as-such’, by the disinterestedness of the percipient we mean the absorbed and exclusive per-ception without anything beyond the bounds of the contemplated object, for its own sake and without reference to personal desires, practical use and its moral content or implications.16 We will get back to the aesthetic meaning of the term later, but let us now concern ourselves with the presence of the non-aesthetic version of the concept in addison’s writings.

The first sense of ‘disinterested’ does not appear in addison, as rind notices,17 but does feature in Spectator no. 75 (May 26, 1711), penned by richard Steele. Steele makes use of it as he describes “the fine gentleman”:

The Change of Persons or Things around him [the fine gentleman] does not at all alter his Situation, but he looks disinterested in the occurrences with which others are distracted, because the greatest purpose of his life is to main-tain an indifference both to it and all its Enjoyments. in a word, to be a fine Gentleman, is to be a Generous and a Brave Man.18

in this stoic declaration, ‘disinterested,’ as used by Steele, means, literally, not interested. The fine gentleman should not be interested in the petty dis-tractions of the surrounding world. addison himself seems to use the second sense of ‘disinterested,’ as defined by the oEd, in Spectator no. 126 (July 25, 1711), where he described a projected “society” of honest men devoted to truth and equity, against the partisanship of zealots and hypocrites:

a Member of this Society, that would thus carefully employ himself in mak-ing room for Merit, by throwing down the worthless and depraved Part of Mankind from those conspicuous Stations of life to which they have been sometimes advanced, and all this without any regard to his private interest, would be no small Benefactor to his Country.19

addison here talks about avoiding private interest, behaving free from a selfish motive and acting for the common good. He goes on to recount a

15 immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. by Paul Guyer, trans. by Eric Mat-thews, Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 2000, pp. 95-96.

16 M. H. abrams, “Kant and the Theology of art,” Notre Dame English Journal 13.3 (1981), pp. 75–106, at p. 76.

17 rind, “Concept of disinterestedness,” p. 69.18 Joseph addison and richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. by donald f. Bond, 5 vols., ox-

ford: Clarendon Press, 1965, vol.1, p. 325.19 The Spectator, vol. 2, p. 2.

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fable-like story from fifth-century BCE historian diodorus Siculus, talking of a little creature called the ichneumon, which was found to instinctually break the eggs of the crocodile in Egypt. addison finds that “This instinct is the more remarkable, because the Ichneumon never feeds upon the Eggs he has broken, nor in any other Way finds his account in them.”20 The exact formu-lation he uses in describing the little creature is “disinterested animal.”21 He means free from self-interest, dedicated (even if unconsciously) to the com-mon good. (unless the ichneumon behaved as it does, Egypt would be over-come by crocodiles.)

rind accuses Stolnitz of reading the concept of ‘aesthetic disinterestedness’ into the texts of the eighteenth-century British aestheticians. Commenting on Stolnitz’s treatment of addison, rind states that “the claim that someone not only possessed the concepts of ‘the aesthetic’ and of ‘aesthetic percep-tion,’ but even made them foundational to aesthetic theory, decades before the word ‘aesthetic’ had been introduced into any modern language, is rather venturesome.”22 By ‘venturesome’ rind means, of course, ‘anachronistic.’ it is useful at this point to briefly consider this issue. according to dabney townsend, although the reference to ‘aesthetic experience’ is anachronistic prior to the nineteenth century, nevertheless the concept has its foundations in the emerging empiricism of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centu-ries.23 townsend is not shy to affirm that, in the writings of the eighteenth-century British thinkers he discusses, “there emerges a concept of aesthetic experience, which, in one form or another, dominates subsequent aesthetic theory.”24 townsend’s historical foray is informed by a belief in the possibil-ity of an identity, or at least of a similarity, of meanings between what the eighteenth-century thinkers described, lacking the concepts, and the concepts themselves, coined by later thinkers. This is to say that while the eighteenth-century British aestheticians lacked the concept of ‘aesthetic experience,’ they did express the meaning of the idea which served as the basis for the subse-quent birth of the concept. i believe, with townsend, that one is justified in using the term ‘aesthetic’ or ‘aesthetic experience’ when talking about addison (or about Plato, for that matter). However, detecting the presence of aesthetic disinterestedness in addison (or in Plato) would be distinctively hazardous—that is, indeed, anachronistic, for the reasons briefly stated at the beginning of this section, and which i will develop in the next section. Here it is no longer the history of the concept, à la rind, that will help us, but rather an intellectual-historical investigation of the shapes of the addisonian pleasures

20 The Spectator, vol. 2, p. 2.21 The Spectator, vol. 2, p. 2.22 rind, “Concept of disinterestedness,” p. 7423 dabney townsend, “from Shaftesbury to Kant: The development of the Concept of

aesthetic Experience,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48.2 (1987), pp. 287-305, at p. 287.24 townsend, “from Shaftesbury to Kant,” p. 287.

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of the imagination. My understanding of the matter is this: what addison undertakes in the imagination papers is only to single out the aesthetic plea-sures from their non-aesthetic counterpart. Here lies what i believe to be the true meaning of the aesthetic for addison: the percipient should be able to derive a special kind of pleasure (which we deem aesthetic pleasure) from na-ture and from art, from landscapes and from statues. But an aesthetic way of looking at the world is not necessarily a disinterested one.25 furthermore, the strategy which may allow us to give a proper solution to this debate would be to analyze the extent to which, for addison, the act of aesthetic perception is autotelic, in other words, to ask whether, for him, one really perceives an ob-ject aesthetically for its own sake. While rind is eager to show that we do not have sufficient evidence to call the pleasures of the imagination disinterested, as they are just a special kind of pleasure and nothing more, my belief is that we have sufficient evidence to say that the pleasures of imagination are not disinterested. With this reading grid in mind, the following passage, which is central to the aesthetic disinterestedness thesis, will appear in a wholly differ-ent light:

a Man of Polite imagination, is let into a great many Pleasures, that the Vul-gar are not capable of receiving. He can converse with a Picture, and find an agreeable Companion in a Statue. He meets with a secret refreshment in a description, and often feels a greater Satisfaction in the Prospect of fields and Meadows, than another does in the Possession. it gives him, indeed, a kind of Property in every thing he sees, and makes the most rude uncultivated Parts of nature administer to his Pleasures: so that he looks upon the World, as it were, in another light, and discovers in it a Multitude of Charms, that conceal themselves from the generality of Mankind.26

3. The Necessary Connection of Qualities and the Teleology of Aesthetic Pleasures

addison’s third paper “on the Pleasures of the imagination” starts with a line which reads: Causa latet, vis est notissima.27 This motto announces the author’s engagement with causality in endeavoring to explain several aspects of our pleasures. if for addison the creed takes the form of that ovidian quote (Metamorphoses, Book iV, 287), John locke, one of addison’s major influ-ences, expressed the idea thus: “Several effects come every day within the no-tice of our Senses, of which we have so far sensitive Knowledge: but the causes,

25 See arnold Berleant and ronald Hepburn, “an Exchange on disinterestedness,” Con-temporary Aesthetics 1, (2003), online journal, http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleid=209 , accessed 24 January 2017.

26 The Spectator, vol.3, p. 538.27 The cause is hidden, but the effect is well known.

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manner, and certainty of their production […] we must be content to be very ignorant of.” 28 as Stolnitz has shown, addison’s methodology in the papers on the imagination is derived from locke’s Essay.29 indeed, the opening of the third paper draws heavily on lockean skepticism with respect to our knowl-edge of causality and necessary connection. for addison, any object that is perceived to be great, uncommon, or beautiful can “affect the imagination with Pleasure,” but, he continues, “we must own that it is impossible for us to assign the necessary Cause of this Pleasure.”30 addison seems to be closely following locke in his use of “necessary connection,” as the term appears in a chapter of the Essay called “of the Extent of Humane Knowledge”:

[…] But our Minds not being able to discover any connexion betwixt these primary qualities of Bodies, and the sensations that are produced in us by them, we can never be able to establish certain and undoubted rules, of the Consequence or Co-existence of any secondary Qualities, though we could dis-cover the size, figure, or motion of those invisible Parts, which immediately produce them.31

francis Hutcheson also relied on the lockean framework to develop his philosophical aesthetics, including the idea of the inaccessibility, to our lim-ited minds, of the “necessary connection” between the primary qualities of bodies and such secondary qualities as the pleasure we take in them:

[…] there seems to be no necessary Connection of our pleasing ideas of Beau-ty with the uniformity or regularity of the objects, from the nature of things, antecedently to some Constitution of the author of our nature, which has made such forms pleasant to us.32

Hutcheson’s appeal to the Supreme Being here is also in tune with the role God plays as an explanatory cause in locke’s own endeavor to establish the causal relationship between primary and secondary qualities:

’tis evident that the bulk, figure, and motion of several Bodies about us, pro-duce in us several Sensations, as of Colours, Sounds, tastes, Smells, Pleasure and Pain, etc. These mechanical affections of Bodies, having no affinity at all

28 John locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. with a foreword by Peter H. nidditch, oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, 4.3.29, p. 560. See also John W. yolton, A Locke Dictionary, oxford, uK: Blackwell, 1993, p. 35.

29 Jerome Stolnitz, “locke and the Categories of Value in Eighteenth-Century British aes-thetic Theory,” Philosophy 38.143 (1963), pp. 40-51.

30 The Spectator, vol. 3, pp. 544-545.31 locke, Essay, 4.3.13, p. 545.32 francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony Design, ed., with an

introduction and notes, by Peter Kivy, The Hague: Martinus nijhoff, 1973, p. 59.

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with those Ideas, they produce in us, (there being no conceivable connexion between any impulse of any sort of Body, and any perception of a Colour, or Smell, which we find in our Minds) we can have no distinct knowledge of such operations beyond our Experience; and can reason no otherwise about them, than as effects produced by the appointment of an infinitely Wise agent, which perfectly surpass our Comprehensions.33

along the same lines, addison argues that “there is not perhaps any real Beauty or deformity more in one Piece of Matter than another, because we might have been so made, that whatsoever now appears loathsome to us, might have shewn itself agreeable.”34 This possibility of aesthetic topsy-turvies represented by the beautiful being replaced by the loathsome and vice versa betrays two basic interconnected beliefs: the fragility of the necessary con-nection, which might have been otherwise, even upside down; and the reli-ance on God to explain the state of affairs pertaining to our aesthetic experi-ence, namely “that there are several Modifications of Matter which the Mind, without any previous Consideration, pronounces at first sight Beautiful or deformed.”35 We are able to take pleasure in the contemplation of what is great, uncommon, and beautiful simply because we have been so designed by God. Hutcheson and addison, as well as their predecessor, locke, recognized the limitations of our knowledge of necessary connection, and they all relied on a form of divine volition to solve this problem.36 The gulf between primary and secondary qualities is apparently resolved by an all-loving God.

it is therefore not surprising that addison argues that “every Particle of Matter is actuated by this almighty Being which passes through it”37 and that “all the dead Parts of nature are invigorated by the Presence of their Creator, and made capable of exerting their respective Qualities.”38 The word ‘quality’ must be emphasized here. He has in mind various aspects of nature, from the heavens and the earth, the stars and planets, which exert their movements, to the instincts of brutes.39 But God is, in addison’s view, also responsible for linking the primary qualities of bodies with those secondary qualities trans-lated as the aesthetic categories of the great, the beautiful and the uncommon. So that when we perceive the primary quality of symmetry,40 the secondary

33 locke, Essay, 4.3.28, pp. 558-559.34 The Spectator, vol. 3, p. 542.35 The Spectator, vol. 3, p. 542.36 This also invites comparison with Berkeley. See ayer’s remarks on Berkeley’s epistemol-

ogy in a. J. ayer, Hume: A Very Short Introduction, oxford: oxford university Press, 2000, pp. 22-24, 29-30.

37 The Spectator, vol. 4, p. 548.38 The Spectator, vol. 4, p. 548.39 The Spectator, vol. 4, p. 548.40 according to locke, symmetry is not a primary quality, but if we take it to mean a due

proportion or balance dependent on the interrelation of the primary qualities of extension and

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quality of beauty is conveyed in our minds instantly. aesthetic perception is, in short, a God-given gift that necessarily reminds one of the Supreme author of our Being.

We have seen that addison’s aesthetic thinking is imbued with theology in-sofar as the type of efficient causality responsible for our aesthetic response to the world is directly attributed to a wise and caring God. The counterpart to this—and thus a second dimension of the intertwining between the aesthetic and the theological at work here—is that our aesthetic engagement with the world is used by addison as a design argument.41 This is an a posteriori argu-ment that appeals to facts of our experience which suggest the intentional contrivance of an intelligent agent.42 addison proves God’s existence, among other things, by a version of the design argument to which he gives an aes-thetic twist:

[…] we must be Content to know that the Spirit of God is present with us by the Effects he produceth in us. our outward Senses are too gross to apprehend him; we may however taste and see how Gracious he is, by his influence upon our Minds, by those Virtuous Thoughts which he awakens in us, by those secret Comforts and refreshments which he conveys into our Souls, and by those ravishing Joys and inward Satisfactions, which are perpetually springing up, and diffusing themselves among all the Thoughts of good Men.43

in this passage, addison employs the same phrasing present in the first paper on the imagination. The phrases which need to be emphasized in the quotation above, namely “secret Comforts and refreshments” and “good Men” can be traced to one paragraph in the first imagination paper where he writes that “a Man of Polite imagination is let into great many Pleasures, that the Vulgar are not capable of receiving. […] He meets with a secret refresh-ment in a description, and often feels a greater Satisfaction in the Prospect of fields and Meadows.”44 it is very likely that he refers to the same pleasures of the imagination. to exemplify the aesthetic version of the design argument, addison notes that the sublime of particulars, namely of the “Prospects of an open Champaign Country,” “a vast uncultivated desart,” “Huge Heaps of Mountains,” “High rocks and Precipices,” and “a wide Expanse of Waters”45 among other things, point to the infinitely sublime Being which is God. So

shape, it could be considered—as it was by addison—a member of the primary qualities in an extended sense.

41 for an exhaustive treatment of addison’s use of the design argument in the papers on the imagination, see Zeitz, “addison’s imagination Papers.”

42 Benjamin C. Jantzen, “an introduction to design arguments,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002), pp. 67-87, at p. 76.

43 The Spectator, vol. 4, p. 549.44 The Spectator, vol. 3, p. 538.45 The Spectator, vol. 3, p. 540.

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is a troubled ocean worked out in a tempest, since “Such an object naturally raises in my Thoughts the idea of an almighty Being, and convinces me of his Existence as much as a Metaphysical demonstration.”46

Thus, addison not only endorses a form of divine volition whereby God is given a prominent causal role in enabling human aesthetic experience, but he also integrated the latter in a new form of design argument. let us now turn to a third and related dimension of the theological underpinnings of addison’s aesthetics, namely his teleological explanation of aesthetic experience. as he recognizes that the efficient causes of our pleasures cannot be really pursued in a philosophically satisfactory manner, addison resorts to an exposition of the final causes of our delights. He trades efficient causes for final causes as he adds another piece to his scaffolding of theological explanations. addison lays heavy emphasis on final causes in the process of knowledge acquisition. of the function of natural philosophy, he maintains that it “does not rest on the Murmur of Brooks, and the Melody of Birds, in the Shade of Groves and Woods, or in the Embroidery of fields and Meadows, but considers the several Ends of Providence which are served by them, and the Wonders of divine Wisdom which appear in them.”47 in the manner of robert Boyle,48 a diligent inquirer into nature should not merely describe what he perceives out there in the world, but should more fundamentally concern himself with identifying ends and goals in the works of nature, which cannot be but the “ends of providence.” By the same token, a student of human nature, of our mental faculties and, more specifically, of our aesthetic pleasures is, for ad-dison, bound to raise the question of the “ends of providence” in his inquiries. Therefore he writes that the final causes of our aesthetic pleasures are that the latter generally “give us greater occasion of admiring the Goodness and Wis-dom of the first Contriver.”49 He goes on to say that God has annexed a secret pleasure to each aesthetic category: we have been allowed the pleasure from greatness because “a great Part of our Happiness must arise from the Contem-plation of his Being.”50 The pleasure from the new or the uncommon has been enabled because God wants to “encourage us in the Pursuit after Knowledge, and engage us to search into the Wonders of his Creation.”51 and finally, we have been allowed beauty in general so as to “render the whole Creation more gay and delightful.”52 it sounds as though this theologically-underpinned aes-thetic teleology transcends any possibility for aesthetic disinterestedness.

46 The Spectator, vol. 4, p. 234.47 The Spectator, vol. 3, p. 475.48 for Boyle’s influence on addison, see Zeitz, “addison’s imagination Papers,” esp. p. 496.49 The Spectator, vol. 3, p. 545.50 The Spectator, vol. 3, p. 545.51 The Spectator, vol. 3, p. 545.52 The Spectator, vol. 3, p. 546.

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Writing of Hutcheson, Peter Kivy remarks that, in his aesthetics, he is guilty of using the God-of-the-gaps approach in seeking to provide a theo-logical explanation for what the theologian confidently predicts science can-not compass.53 Kivy sometimes fugitively mentions addison’s influence on Hutcheson when discussing the latter’s theology and his conclusion is that “[w]e need not bother ourselves with the Spectator’s theology except perhaps to observe that Hutcheson seems to have incorporated some of it into his own aesthetic theory.”54 although Kivy’s reading may do justice to Hutcheson,55 it does misrepresent addison. it puts forth a reading of God as marginal to ad-dison’s aesthetics, as an object which he might have just done away with. Thus it fails to notice that God is there in his treatise not merely as supplementing naturalism with rescuing theological speculations, but as signaling addison’s distrust in a purely naturalistic basis of our aesthetic experience. as Clarence dewitt Thorpe put it a long time ago:

it would be inaccurate to hold that addison built his aesthetic theory on a purely physical basis. He is constantly dragging moral and intellectual content into his aesthetic judgments; his aesthetic contemplation frequently merges into the religious […].56

although the three aesthetic categories are, for addison, very close to what Monroe Beardsley has described as naturalistic, meaning “emergent from an ob-ject, a regional quality like any other,”57 they are never that alone. addison often blames the poverty of a purely naturalistic understanding of aesthetic percep-tion. The aesthetic categories are, for addison, emergent from an object only to the extent that the power of objects has been actuated by God in the first place:

He has given almost every thing about us the Power of raising an agreeable idea in the imagination: So that it is impossible for us to behold his Works with Coldness or indifference, and to survey so many Beauties without a secret Satisfaction and Complacency. Things would make but a poor appearance to the Eye, if we saw them only in their proper figures and Motions. […] [W]hat

53 Peter Kivy, The Seventh Sense: Francis Hutcheson and Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics, oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003, p. 114.

54 Kivy. The Seventh Sense, p. 32.55 But see Szécsényi’s more complex understanding of Hutcheson’s aesthetic theory as re-

lated to a multi-layered theological discourse: the discourse of physico-theology, that of theo-dicean arguments, as well as that of inward devotion: Endre Szécsényi, “francis Hutcheson and the Emerging aesthetic Experience,” in Endre Szécsényi (ed.), Francis Hutcheson and the Origins of the Aesthetic, special issue of the Journal of Scottish Thought 7 (2016), pp. 171-209.

56 Clarence dewitt Thorpe, “addison and Hutcheson on the imagination,” ELH 2.3 (1935), pp. 215-234, at p. 224.

57 Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism, new york: Har-court, Brace & Company, 1958, p. 507.

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a rough unsightly Sketch of nature should we be entertained with, did all her Colouring disappear, and the several distinctions of light and Shade vanish? in short, our Souls are at present delightfully lost and bewildered in a pleasing delusion, and we walk about like the Enchanted Hero of a romance, who sees beautiful Castles, Woods and Meadows; and at the same time hears the warbling of Birds, and the purling of Streams; but upon the finishing of some secret Spell, the fantastick Scene breaks up, and the disconsolate Knight finds himself on a barren Heath, or in a solitary desart. 58

in Spectator no. 580 (august 13, 1714), addison compares what would be a naturalistic view of aesthetic experience of the world with the aesthetically-pleasing religious contemplation of heaven: “The light of the Sun, and all the Glories of the World in which we live, are but as weak and sickly Glim-merings, or rather darkness it self, in Comparison of those Splendors which encompass the Throne of God.”59 The role of this comparison is not only to establish that heaven is the superlative of our aesthetic experience, but to render the natural world—seen only in its “proper figures and Motions”—aesthetically ineffectual without connecting its aesthetic appeal to its divine origin. Hence addison says that “He [God] is indeed as essentially present in all other Places as in this [heaven], but it is here where he resides in a sensible Magnificence, and in the midst of all those Splendors which can affect the imagination of created Beings.”60 in Spectator no. 381 (May 17, 1712), ad-dison discusses the idea of “Chearfulness.”61 The cheerful man “comes with a relish to all those Goods which nature has provided for him, tastes all the Pleasures of the Creation which are poured about him […].”62 one thing which deprives mankind of this state is atheism, “a disbelief of a Supreme Being.” What this entails is that one cannot truly experience the pleasures of the imagination if one is an atheist. although not authored by addison, there is an illuminating passage in The Guardian, no. 69 (May 30, 1713), which reflects addison’s position, namely that if considered in the absence of God, human life would be devoid of aesthetic experience:

o lord, what is life in the ignorance of Thee? a dead unactive Piece of Mat-ter, a flower that withers, a river that glides away, a Palace that hastens to

58 The Spectator, vol. 3, pp. 546-7 (emphasis mine).59 The Spectator, vol. 4, p. 584.60 The Spectator, vol. 4, p. 583.61 Cheerfulness, understood as the modern idea of happiness, has been linked to the emer-

gence of aesthetic theory in early eighteenth-century Britain. it has been argued that, for addi-son and Steele, the aesthetic experience of the world is accompanied by happiness, a heightened sense of feeling alive, of connecting to the providential order. See Brian Michael norton, “’The Spectator’, aesthetic Experience and the Modern idea of Happiness,” English Literature, 2.1 (2015), pp. 87-104.

62 The Spectator, vol. 3, p. 430 (emphasis mine).

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its ruin, a Picture made up of fading Colours, a Mass of shining oar, strike our imaginations, and make us sensible of their Existence. We regard them as objects capable of giving us Pleasure, not considering that Thou convey-est through them all the Pleasure which we imagine they give us. Such vain empty objects that are only the Shadows of Being, are proportioned to our low and groveling Thoughts. That Beauty which Thou hast poured out on thy Creation, is as a Veil which hides Thee from our Eyes.63

further, i would argue that the most important point of convergence be-tween aesthetic and religious contemplation lies in the category of the great. The faculty responsible for aesthetic perception, namely the imagination, is not merely a device given by God to mankind to prove his existence. it is above all a cornerstone of religious devotion. aesthetic contemplation—of great objects, at least—is a spiritual exercise which can move one from the cold acknowledgment of God’s existence to an act of divine worship:

our admiration, which is a very pleasing Motion of the Mind, immediately rises at the Consideration of any object that takes up a great deal of room in the fancy, and, by consequence, will improve into the highest Pitch of astonishment and devotion when we contemplate his nature, that is neither circumscribed by time nor Place, nor to be comprehended by the largest Ca-pacity of a Created Being.64

What addison is doing here is to infuse a philosophical-naturalistic ap-proach with spiritual significance. The effort is explained by a more basic distinction which he draws between ‘philosophy’ and ‘religion.’ He opts for the primacy of the latter, as he writes:

a state of temperance, Sobriety, and Justice, without Devotion, is a cold, lifeless, insipid Condition of Virtue; and is rather to be stiled Philosophy than religion. devotion opens the Mind to great Conceptions, and fills it with more sublime ideas than any that are to be met with in the most exalted Science; and at the same time warms and agitates the Soul more than sensual Pleasure.65

There is an evident distinction between philosophical reflection and re-ligious contemplation as he writes of the Supreme Being that: “it is not to be reflected on in the Coldness of Philosophy, but ought to sink us into the lowest Prostration before him, who is astonishingly Great, Wonderful and

63 richard Steele, The Guardian, ed. with an introduction and notes by John Calhoun Ste-phens, lexington, Ky: university Press of Kentucky, 1982, p. 260. This passage is part of a french prayer (by fénelon), translated by a correspondent in a letter to the authorial persona. There is a debate on the identity of the correspondent, who was sometimes identified as luce or Berkeley. Stephens attributes no. 69 to Steele. for this debate, see Stephens’s note at pp. 665-666.

64 The Spectator, vol. 3, p. 545.65 The Spectator, vol. 2, p. 287 (emphasis mine).

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Holy.”66 devotion is a subjective experience of God, and it is the natural end-point of the aesthetic experience of sublimity: “The devout Man does not only believe, but feels there is a deity. He has actual Sensations of him; his Experience concurs with his reason, […] and even in this life almost loses his faith in Conviction.”67 for addison, man is not strictly a rational animal, but a devout animal. it is no wonder then that the final cause of our pleasure from the great is the contemplation of God as a way to the ultimate goal of life, happiness: “it would likewise quicken our desires and Endeavours of uniting our selves to him by all the acts of religion and Virtue.”68 Whenever we are aesthetically experiencing the sublime, we are immediately transported to a state of devotion.

4. Disciplinary Implications

The larger concern of this paper is with the disciplinary matrix of mod-ern aesthetics before its birth as a philosophical discipline. i use ‘matrix’ here to refer to the confluent discourses which were constitutive, and sometimes vitally so, of eighteenth-century aesthetic theories in Britain. one of these constitutive discourses was theology. Therefore, in this section, i would like to comment on the more general disciplinary implications of the theological underpinnings of addison’s emerging aesthetic thought.

in his book on landscape, literature and English religious culture, robert J. Mayhew established that religion was the key factor structuring the diverse contexts in which landscape description was invoked in the eighteenth centu-ry.69 He was concerned with the way latitudinarian theology—taken to be the dominant form of anglicanism in the long eighteenth century—incorporated the natural world. according to him, eighteenth-century latitudinarians such as isaac Barrow, John tillotson and Samuel Clarke gave the natural-world-turned-landscape an unprecedented role in their Christian apologetics,70 insofar as they relied on three closely interwoven readings of the ‘book of nature’: the argument from the design, the aesthetics of design, and the spiri-tualization of nature.71 one important subchapter of this book is devoted to addison (“The theological pleasures of the imagination: Joseph addison and landscape”). Mayhew establishes that addison was strongly latitudinarian in

66 The Spectator, vol. 4, p. 586.67 The Spectator, vol. 4, p. 143.68 The Spectator, vol. 4, p. 394.69 Mayhew, Landscape, p. 70.70 Mayhew, Landscape, p. 72.71 Mayhew, Landscape, p. 79.

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his thought72 and argues that addison’s “landscape aesthetic” could more ac-curately be described as a theological landscape aesthetic; witness this example from Spectator no. 411: “a beautiful Prospect delights the Soul, as much as a demonstration.” 73

Mayhew’s aim is to demonstrate how religion was fundamental in shaping responses to landscape description. Mayhew’s plea for studying the history of landscape description on its own terms is perfectly justifiable,74 but it seems to me that his clear-cut intellectual efforts point in the direction of a larger concern with the birth of modern aesthetics. His passing but pithy remark in the subchapter on addison is worth quoting here: “to analyze addison’s ‘aesthetic’ independent of the function of that [theological] project is to com-partmentalize it according to subsequent divisions of knowledge to which he did not conform.”75 The statement is highly meaningful in the context of the debate on the question of aesthetic disinterestedness in addison’s work. of the founding of disciplines, tobin Siebers wrote:

We are accustomed today to thinking about the founding of disciplines in terms of what they must exclude. Structures of exclusion, the argument goes, are the defining practices for the creation of disciplinary formations. The iden-tity between a discipline and its other is cemented by the act of excluding the other from the scene of representation.76

if we are justified in believing that the founding of disciplines can be seen as the work of structures of exclusion, then the concept of ‘aesthetic disinterested-ness’ is a powerful example of such a structure, indicating that any interest in theological matters would have to be bracketed in the name of a specific kind of experience, deemed aesthetic, which aspires to nothing beyond its own bounds. But in addison’s case, we must acknowledge that the aesthetic was not freed from the influence of its older sister, theology. Because philosophical aesthetics had not yet been born by the time addison published his imagination papers, a revision of the aesthetic per se has to be carried out in relation to the discourses which were originally part of it, in our case, theology.

My contention is that theology fulfilled a vital role in the emergence and evolution of modern aesthetic theory and my specific claim is that addison is an important instance of that process. The aesthetic did not come to the fore as a result of an unforeseen revolution, but it emerged as a process of reorga-nizing of and capitalizing on ideas already existing in the theological discourse

72 Mayhew, Landscape, p. 83.73 Mayhew, Landscape, p. 85.74 See the rationale of his project in Mayhew, Landscape, pp. 1-38.75 Mayhew, Landscape, p. 85.76 Siebers, “Philosophy and its other,” p. 1.

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of the time. This theological discourse, it appears, was channeled in a different direction and it was given a new emphasis.

This broader contention appears to be the main point of M.H. abrams’s important paper on “Kant and the Theology of art.” This paper is concerned less with the historical and more with the intellectual changes that made pos-sible Kant’s aesthetic theory. His objective is rigorous: “My concern is with the origin, and with the antecedents in intellectual history of the modern theory of art-as-such.”77 according to abrams, there are three interconnected dimensions to the idea of art for art’s sake: (1) art as constituting the objects to be contemplated (whether painting, a poem, sculpture, music, or architec-ture), (2) the perceiver’s experience when contemplating a work of art; this experience is said to be disinterested, meaning the absorbed and exclusive perception without anything beyond the bounds of the contemplated object, for its own sake and without reference to personal desires, practical use and its moral content or implications, and (3) in terms of its own attributes, a work of art is said to be autotelic, autonomous, and independent of any rela-tions to anything outside its bounds.78 This description does not only func-tion as a definition of art for art’s sake, but it reveals abrams’s preference for a particular aesthetic vocabulary in his inquiry, a vocabulary comprising the terms ‘contemplation’ and ‘disinterestedness.’ abrams’s thesis is that these two concepts, originally part of theology, ultimately laid the disciplinary founda-tion of aesthetics, or at least shaped the way we have come to understand it. But there is, of course, another fundamental idea, that of “aesthetic pleasure,” which deserves to be accommodated within this otherwise illuminating ex-planatory scheme. it seems to me that this idea, which addison promoted, should not be brushed aside, as abrams did, from the overarching discussion of the “theology of art.”

to the extent that abrams’s overarching objective is to demonstrate that theology played a crucial role in the emergence of art-as-such, his treatment of addison is minimal. He commences the second part of his article by explicitly stating that:

it was not addison, the empirical analyst of the pleasurable and non-posses-sive responses of a spectator to a beautiful object, but the Earl of Shaftesbury who […] introduced and set current the specific terms ‘contemplation; and ‘disinterested’ in connection with the arts.79

addison’s treatment of the pleasures of the imagination is shown to be in-compatible with the model of aesthetic disinterestedness. But our focus is now different. Considering the wide and ambitious scope of abrams’s explanation,

77 abrams, “Kant and the Theology of art,” p. 76.78 abrams, “Kant and the Theology of art,” p. 76.79 abrams, “Kant and the Theology of art,” p. 84.

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whose core was the essential role theology played in the emergence of aesthetic theory, the question is why leave out a thinker who fits the story perfectly well. obviously, abrams cast aside addison’s contribution to the story of theology-and-aesthetics simply based on the model he used to describe it. But perhaps the model does not do justice to the story.

abrams argues that theories of art-as-such fall under two distinct catego-ries: the spectator model and the contemplation model. The spectator model is the one employed by addison; its lineage is empirical and the idiom psycho-logical. Conversely, the contemplation model, to which Shaftesbury belongs, comes in the Christian and/or Platonic lineage; the idiom is metaphysical and it focuses on the work of art/nature being described as self-sufficient and as promoting a contemplative state.80 in abrams’s view, it is the latter model that captures the inheritance which theology left to modern aesthetic theory. Such terms as ‘contemplation’ and ‘disinterestedness,’ applied formerly to God, now migrated to the work of art and/or the work of nature. in this contempla-tion model, the beautiful takes a “transcendental form,” as Beardsley would call it: “beauty is a platonic universal that exists, or subsists, outside of space and time, but supervenes upon the aesthetic object which then embodies it more or less fully.”81 according to Beardsley’s vocabulary, addison abides by a naturalistic understanding of aesthetic experience, whereby the aesthetic cat-egories of the new, the great and the beautiful are “emergent from an object, a regional quality like any other.”82 The empirical-psychological idiom adopted by addison was similarly described by Stolnitz, who argued that “the most obvious changes, when we come to addison […] are the abandonment of the metaphysical approach von Oben herab and the introduction of the psycho-logical, introspective approach.”83

But in this essay i have shown that while addison’s contribution to aes-thetic theory can be justly described using the terms above (empirical-psy-chological, naturalistic, and departing from the model von Oben herab), it is a mistake to detach his aesthetic theory from its theological foundation. it is true that, unlike Shaftesbury, addison was not part of the Platonic mi-lieu. However, addison also backed up his spectator model with a theological foundation. This leads us to rethink our explanatory schemes concerning the more general status of theology in relation to the emerging aesthetic theory. While abrams offers an explanatory model which i take to be true, i would like to argue that we should expand the analysis to include addison. The in-fluence of theology on aesthetics should not be restricted to the neo-Platonist Shaftesbury. The concepts of ‘disinterestedness’ and ‘contemplation’ make up

80 abrams, “Kant and the Theology of art,” p. 99.81 Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 507.82 Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 507.83 Stolnitz, “origins of ‘aesthetic disinterestedness’,” p. 139.

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the core of abrams’s argument, but i suggest that the idea of ‘pleasure’84 un-derwent a very similar transformation. This transformation is, moreover, best understood by means of abrams’s explanatory model:

i think it can be shown that both the point of view and philosophical idiom constituting the new theory of art were, in a systematic form, commonplac-es—very familiar commonplaces—which long predated the eighteenth cen-tury; that they had their place, however, not within traditional discussions of the arts, but within the realm of metaphysics, and especially of theology; and that when these ideas were imported into, and specialized for, the theory of the arts, their novelty was not a novelty of content but of application.85

despite the differences between addison’s spectator model and Shaftes-bury’s contemplation model, could there be an underlying similarity between the two models in the sense of how these models were employed? i believe the answer is positive. Both models can be seen as instances of application to the aesthetic of content originally part of theology. let me show why i think this is the case for addison.

Ernest lee tuveson claimed that addison’s innovation was located in the “omission of conscious reflection.”86 tuveson saw addison as an innovator in terms of an affective dimension which he ascribed to aesthetic perception, as opposed to conscious reflection.87 But Zeitz showed that the design ar-gument, which was fundamental to addison’s text, was not solely rational, but often incorporated an element of the affective and intuitive and this can explain why, for addison, pleasure has taken on a spiritual meaning. Pleasure could be an integral part of the argument from design. Zeitz comments on three thinkers who deployed the argument from design not only rationally, but affectively: John ray equated the natural-theological contemplation of the natural world with the immediate experiencing of the truest pleasure.88 Walter Charleton treated the human capacity for aesthetic response within a discus-sion of why God created the world.89 restoration divine isaac Barrow com-mented on a similar relationship between divine goodness and human feelings of pleasure in a number of his sermons. insomuch as her engagement with tuveson is concerned, Zeitz concludes that “[w]hat tuveson has described as addison’s ‘innovation’ of ‘the omission […] of conscious reflection’ is not an

84 in addisonian terminology, the pleasures of imagination would include the affective and/or the emotional response. See my discussion of tuveson and Zeitz below.

85 abrams, “Kant and the Theology of art,” p. 84.86 Ernest lee tuveson, The Imagination as a Means of Grace: Locke and the Aesthetics of Ro-

manticism, Berkeley: university of California Press, 1960, p. 102.87 tuveson, Imagination as a Means of Grace, p. 102.88 Zeitz, “addison’s imagination Papers,” p. 497.89 Zeitz, “addison’s imagination Papers,” p. 498.

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innovation at all: it is a popularization of an established tradition of argument within a new form.”90

addison’s choice of using the affective version of the argument from design in his imagination papers can be best described not in terms of a novelty of content, but of a novelty of application. Whereas the main subject matter of the theological treatise is the attempt to defend the existence of God a poste-riori, for addison, the main purpose is to defend, as it were, the pleasure itself, which only the imagination can afford. Where addison seems to have inno-vated is not in the omission of conscious reflection but in the employment of the imagination which is no longer subservient to reason91 so its workings can generate a special kind of pleasure, distinct from the pleasures of the sense and from the pleasures of the understanding. tuveson is right to state that “it was only when addison considered the imagination as a thing in itself that he was led into new paths.”92

as early as 1607, Bishop Joseph Hall wrote a treatise entitled Holy Ob-servations Lib. I, which contained a small section “on a fair prospect.” Here, Hall uses the pleasure afforded by a landscape to promote the praise of God:

What a pleasing variety is here of towns, rivers, hills, dales, woods, meadows; each of them striving to set forth the other and all of them to delight the eye! So as this is no other, than a natural and real landscape, drawn by the almighty and skilful hand, in this table of the earth for the pleasure of our view. no other creature, besides man, is capable to apprehend this beauty: i shall do wrong to him, that brought me hither; if i do not feed my eyes, and praise my Maker. it is the intermixture and change, of these objects, that yields this contentment both to the sense and mind.93

This is undeniably an affective version of the design argument. What sets apart addison from Hall are two main differences. firstly, Hall’s Holy Observations is a theological treatise, part of a total of fourteen overtly

90 Zeitz, “addison’s imagination Papers,” p. 499. on the design argument in the later seventeenth- and early eighteenth-centuries, see further Jantzen, “introduction to design arguments,” who describes the period from about 1650 to 1850 as the golden age of natural theology (p. 59). robert Boyle, richard Bentley, isaac newton as well as John ray and Wil-liam derham all used the argument from design. Many of them saw themselves as serving the purposes of both science and theology in their work (p. 60).

91 for a particular focus on the imagination as no longer subservient to reason, see tuveson, Imagination as a Means of Grace, pp. 92-132, and William H. youngren, “addison and the Birth of Eighteenth-Century aesthetics,” Modern Philology 79.3 (1982), pp. 267-283. for a discussion of the freedom of imagination as the foundational idea in eighteenth-century British aesthetics, see Guyer, “The origins of Modern aesthetics”.

92 tuveson. Imagination as a Means of Grace, p. 93.93 Joseph Hall, The Works of Joseph Hall: With Some Account of His Life and Sufferings, vol.

Xi, oxford: d.a. talboys, 1837, p. 56.

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devotional works, while addison’s collection of papers capitalize on the aesthetic pleasures themselves and can thus be rightly considered a text in modern aesthetic theory. Secondly, for Hall the pleasure one feels when see-ing a beautiful landscape is guaranteed by sense alone: “all of them delight the eye.” He does mention at the end of the excerpt that the pleasure yields both to sense and mind, but this has to be understood simply as an affective version of the design argument according to which one is to be rationally persuaded of God’s existence, based on the delight provided by the senses. in contrast, for addison, it is the faculty of imagination which affords this special kind of pleasure.94 The aesthetic pleasures in addison’s text are theo-logically underpinned by their final causes, but what is at stake here, in the disciplinary context, is a shift in priority as they appear in a new dominant position, which allows one to speak of a text in modern aesthetics instead of a manual of Christian apologetics. i believe this is crucial to the way one can frame the relation between theology and modern aesthetic theory at this incipient stage. looked at through the eyes of modern philosophi-cal aesthetics—which is informed by a more rigorous division of knowl-edge—the theological concerns can be ultimately seen as a regress, a kind of relegation to theological matters. However, the centrality that the pleasures of the imagination acquire is a consequential move in the longer process of disciplinary formation.

Works cited

M. H. abrams, “Kant and the Theology of art,” Notre Dame English Journal 13.3 (1981), pp. 75–106.

Joseph addison and richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. by donald f. Bond, 5 vols., oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.

a. J. ayer, Hume: A Very Short Introduction, oxford: oxford university Press, 2000.Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism, new york:

Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1958.arnold Berleant and ronald Hepburn, “an Exchange on disinterestedness,” Con-

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Paul Guyer, “The origins of Modern aesthetics: 1711-35” in Peter Kivy (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, Malden, Ma: Blackwell, 2004, pp. 15-44.

94 i am indebted to Prof. Endre Szécsényi for making this apt comparison between Hall and addison in his paper “Joseph addison’s imagination: Some fertile incongruities,” delivered at the workshop “The Janus face of the Early Modern imagination,” Bucharest, 9 September 2016.

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Joseph Hall, The Works of Joseph Hall: With Some Account of His Life and Sufferings, vol. Xi, oxford: d.a. talboys, 1837.

francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony Design, ed., with an introduction and notes, by Peter Kivy, The Hague: Martinus nijhoff, 1973.

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William H. youngren, “addison and the Birth of Eighteenth-Century aesthetics,” Modern Philology 79.3 (1982), pp. 267-283.

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department of Comparative Humanitiesuniversity of louisville

Bingham Humanities 3032211 South Brook

louisville, Ky 40292, uSaeduard.ghita@louisville.edu