Virtue Aesthetics: The Form of the Good

A basic illustration of a hierarchy of virtue

Often derived from religious underpinnings, the virtue aesthetic aims to bring beauty to what is considered spiritually virtuous. For example, the Christian virtuous woman is one often covered in body, pious, innocent — and whatever else you can ascribe to the immaculate lady of conception, the Virgin Mary. Venus or Aphrodite, who also represent the divine feminine in European myths, are almost never presented as pious and innocent — not even their bodies are covered in a manner to subvert their sexual nature. In fact, if anything, in art these figures are often presented to be charged with sexual power.

In many African mythologies, mother goddesses linked to the divine feminine like Osun or Ala are never presented in a manner that regards the body as profane. In fact, it is very common for Ala in Igbo shrines to be sculpted with bare breasts, often with someone or even animals suckling as a way to communicate the nourishing character of the divine feminine. A single glance at the nipples of the mother of Jesus would be sacrilegious in ways I cannot even begin to imagine.

Virtue beyond just attitudes towards sex also seeks to set a moral standard prioritising certain expressions over others. For example, the hyper-masculine aesthetics of Abrahamic religious thought, even in a trinity as developed by the Catholic Church, still feature no feminine conception in its theory — father, son, and the Holy Spirit. The disciples, all 12 recognised in canon, are men. And the most recognised woman is idealised as the ultimate mother of virtue in relation to sexual purity and submission of will to service. African spiritual aesthetics feature very many female appearances in cosmology, centred as a source of power to which we owe gratitude and veneration. While it took the Church of England to break women into holding priesthood positions, female Dibias have been roaming sub-Saharan Africa since like — forever.

Outside of visual art, there are also aesthetic qualities to be found in poems, stories, and even language embedded in cultures and reflective of their moral landscape. But such analysis in the tiniest detail is more fitting as the subject for a PhD thesis — linguistics is a different beast. For now, let us muse about aesthetics as it relates to everyone's favourite topic — sex.