ST. AUGUSTINE (354-430 CE)

Defining Beauty (On the Beautiful and Fitting, De Pulchro et Apto)

What, then, is beautiful? And what is beauty? ... I marked and perceived that in bodies themselves there was a beauty from their forming a kind of whole..., and another from mutual fittness.

Beauty is a property of heterogenous wholes (City of G-d, Book 11, chapter 18):

As...these oppositions of contraries lend beauty to the language, so the beauty of the course of this world is achieved by the opposition of contraries, arranged, as it were, by an eloquence...of things.

Beauty results from ordered diversity (City of G-d, Book 17, chapter 14):

Now David was a man skilled in songs, who dearly loved musical harmony...and by it served his G-d...by the mystical representation of a great thing [NB!]. For the rational and well-ordered concord of diverse sounds in harmonious variety suggests the compact unity of the well-ordered city.

Beauty requires proportion of parts (City of G-d, Book 9, chapter 22):

...in the visible appearance of a man, if one eyebrow be shaved off, how nearly nothing is taken from the body, but how much from the beauty! For [beauty] is not constituted by bulk, but by the proportion and arrangement of the members.

City of G-d, Book 22, chapter 19

All bodily beauty consists in the proportion of the parts...Where there is no proportion, the eye [ear!] is offended.

The crucial importance of order for Beauty (City of G-d, Book 19, chapter 13):

The peace of the body then consists in the duly proportioned arrangement of its parts...The peace of all things is the tranquility of order [and] order is the distribution which allots things equal and unequal, each to its own place.