"Beauty" from the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics Part 3

Augustine (fifth century) and Boethius (sixth century) strong emphasized proportion, harmony, congruence, and consonance, especially in relation to music, which Boethius understood in Pythagorean terms to be regulated by number. Augustine understood beauty in Neoplatonic terms, after Plotinus, as regularity and simplicity, promoting a conflict in later writers between a beauty of quality and a beauty of quantity. For medieval writers, as for Augustine, light, color, radiance, brilliance, and clarity all were beautiful, testaments to the unity of God. Unity in multiplicity but also unity as such were regarded as beautiful.