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III. THE THEORY LAPSES

One searches the literature of later antiquity in vain
for the development of these ideas. It is not merely
that the epigoni of the post-Aristotelian schools lacked
originality, rather the topic seems to lapse into neglect.
There are, to be sure, scattered references to children's
play, to gaiety of spirit and the like, e.g., in Lucian,
Horace, Pliny, Plutarch, and even in Cicero; and the
history of aesthetics continued to be served, but the
connection between them is broken. Play as such is
not neglected but passes into the fierce competition
of the agon to make a Roman holiday. The magic child
of many pagan traditions is absorbed, especially by
Augustine, into Christianity, and combines great sim-
plicity and wisdom as before (cf. Boas, 1966), but there
is no connection with art.

Perhaps too much joy had escaped the life of reason
in the sequence of Greek collapse, stern Ciceronian
injunctions to duty, Roman decline, and Christian
asceticism. Even Roman comedy displays little of the
lightness of touch that might suggest that a practical
connection continued even though the theory might

be lacking. The Church Fathers frowned on anything
that might distract the Christian from the grim search
for salvation: Chrysostom, for example, in the Sixth
Homily of his Commentary on Matthew, tells us “It
is not God who gives us the chance to play, but the
devil” (PG 57, 70D). These strictures of course had
a target, for while the dominant theories to govern
human nature had changed, that nature no doubt
remained the same.

A contribution to our theme is to be found, therefore,
only by default, for the same antipathy to play is also
directed against art. The latter was only to be re-
deemed by the subordination of its subject matter to
doctrinally sound topics expressed in a rigid formal
perfection taken to be the microcosm of the universe.
Not until we reach Aquinas do we find a revival of
the generous Aristotelian view: in his commentary on
the Nicomachean Ethics Saint Thomas favorably
explicates the concept of eutrapelia, a lightness of spirit
midway between boorishness and frivolity (cf. Rahner
[1967], p. 99). The emphasis here, as in the Summa
theologica (II-II, q. 168 a. 2), is however on play as
relaxation from labor and tension, without reference
to art.

For a long time there seems to have been little
patience with play as a feature of imagination, crea-
tivity, and art, whether we search among British
empiricists or continental rationalists, or among think-
ers not so easily labeled. For one thing all these shared
in common a view that is in essence hostile to the
innocence of art (or simply hostile to innocence) and
so we find three aspects, variously emphasized, all of
which illustrate the decline of interest in play. The
first is rarely explicit, since it treats some forms of art
as scarcely worthy of notice: the sort of art that might
be associated with play is taken as childish, vulgar
(popular), primarily time-killing entertainment, and
thus not a fit subject for intellectual inquiry (Schleier-
macher).

The second and third views involve even loftier
pretensions in which art is justified predominantly with
reference to cognition and morality. The position of
Leibniz usefully exemplifies the second view: such
validity as art possesses lies in its anticipation of posi-
tive knowledge. Aesthetic vision yields petites percep-
tions as the first of four grades of perceiving reality
in the world. As the mind advances toward fully ra-
tional knowledge the lower grades are superseded.
Moses Mendelssohn pointed out in criticism of this
view that art is thus assumed to have no intrinsic value
of its own; and that therefore as positive knowledge
increases, the significance of art will decline. The third
aspect is found more frequently where the concept of
taste and its educability comes to the fore, e.g., in
Hume, Burke, Vico, Lessing, and Herder, among
others. Here taste becomes a function of sophistication
and wide experience, and so cannot be assimilated to
the play theory. Where formal perfection is a major
objective of art (e.g., in the theory and practice of
Dryden or Pope) this further militates against an
analogy with play. For that formal perfection is not
infrequently seen as the aesthetic counterpart of a
wholly rational world (conceived not only scientifically,
but as part of a theodicy) such that art is not an explo-
ration beyond what is currently known, so much as
a confirmation of the philosophically demonstrable.

Such views may be mathematically static (as in
Leibniz) or historically dynamic (as in Vico). One could
quote indefinitely, but Vico may speak for all:

(Scienza Nuova I, iii, 26; in Croce, Aesthetic, pp. 221-22).

A whole family of related views subordinates the
culture role of play: historically oriented figures like
Vico, Herder, Hegel, Croce, to name only a few, all
treat art as something to be superseded—a fortiori
imagination and play will be left behind for if ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny, they belong to infancy:
“Whoever turns to writing poetry in an age of reflec-
tion is returning to childhood and putting his mind
in fetters” (Vico: letter to De Angelis of Dec. 25, 1725).
Perhaps, after all, the theory of an analogy between
play and art did not lapse, but was merely pursued to
the detriment of both! But, happily, more affirmative
positions are near.