Aquinas on Beauty

Aquinas on Beauty

Author: Christopher Scott Sevier

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2015-02-12

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0739184253

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Aquinas on Beauty explores the nature and role of beauty in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Beginning with a standard definition of beauty provided by Aquinas, it explores each of the components of that definition. The result is a comprehensive account of Aquinas’s formal view on the subject, supplemented by an exploration into Aquinas’s commentary on Dionysius’s Divine Names, including a comparison of his views with those of both Dionysius and those of Aquinas’s mentor, Albert the Great. The book also highlights the tight connection in Aquinas’s thought between aesthetics and ethics, and illustrates how Aquinas preserves what is best about aesthetic traditions preceding him, and anticipates what is best about aesthetic traditions that would follow, marrying objective and subjective aesthetic intuitions and charting a kind of via media between the common extremes.


Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas

Author: Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2013-08-29

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 0199213143

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Thomas Aquinas is widely recognized as one of history's most significant Christian theologians and one of the most powerful philosophical minds of the western tradition. But what has often not been sufficiently attended to is the fact that he carried out his theological and philosophical labours as a part of his vocation as a Dominican friar, dedicated to a life of preaching and the care of souls. Fererick Christian Bauerschmidt places Aquinas's thought within the context of that vocation, and argues that his views on issues of God, creation, Christology, soteriology, and the Christian life are both shaped by and in service to the distinctive goals of the Dominicans. What Aquinas says concerning both matters of faith and matters of reason, as well as his understanding of the relationship between the two, are illuminated by the particular Dominican call to serve God through handing on to others through preaching and teaching the fruits of one's own theological reflection.


Being and Thought in Aquinas

Being and Thought in Aquinas

Author: Jeremiah Hackett

Publisher: Global Academic Publishing

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9781586840358

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Papers from Binghamton University's Conferences on Medieval Latin Philosophy, 1995-2000, on St. Thomas Aquinas' oeuvre. The essays examine his sources within the Neoplatonic and Islamicist traditions, major themes in his writing, and his reflections on time and thought.


Bonaventure’s Aesthetics

Bonaventure’s Aesthetics

Author: Thomas J. McKenna

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-12-10

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1498597661

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The authors of the standard approach to Bonaventure’s aesthetics established the broad themes that continue to inform the current interpretation of his philosophy, theology, and mysticism of beauty: his definition of beauty and its status as a transcendental of being, his description of the aesthetic experience, and the role of that experience in the soul’s ascent into God. Nevertheless, they also introduced a series of pointed questions that the current literature has not adequately resolved. In Bonaventure’s Aesthetics: The Delight of the Soul in Its Ascent into God, Thomas J. McKenna provides a comprehensive analysis of Bonaventure’s aesthetics, the first to appear since Balthasar’s Herrlichkeit, and argues for a resolution to these questions in the context of his principal aesthetic text, the Itinerarium mentis in Deum.


Unlocking Divine Action

Unlocking Divine Action

Author: Michael J. Dodds

Publisher: CUA Press

Published: 2012-09-26

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0813219892

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Provides a sustained account of how the thought of Aquinas may be used in conjunction with contemporary science to deepen our understanding of divine action and address such issues as creation, providence, prayer, and miracles.


The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas

The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas

Author: Brian Davies

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 2012-01-25

Total Pages: 606

ISBN-13: 0195326091

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This volume presents an introduction to Aquinas and a guide to his thinking on almost all the major topics on which he wrote. The book begins with an account of Aquinas's life and the historical context of his thought. The subsequent sections address topics that Aquinas himself discussed. The final sections of the volume address the development of Aquinas's thought and its historical influence.


The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas

The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas

Author: Umberto Eco

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 9780674006768

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The well-known Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco discloses for the first time to English-speaking readers the unsuspected richness, breadth, complexity, and originality of the aesthetic theories advanced by the influential medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas, heretofore known principally as a scholastic theologian. Inheriting his basic ideas and conceptions of art and beauty from the classical world, Aquinas transformed or modified these ideas in the light of Christian theology and of developments in metaphysics and optics during the thirteenth century. Setting the stage with an account of the vivid aesthetic and artistic sensibility that flourished in medieval times, Eco examines Aquinas's conception of transcendental beauty, his theory of aesthetic perception or visio, and his account of the three conditions of beauty--integrity, proportion, and clarity--that, centuries later, emerged again in the writings of the young James Joyce. He examines the concrete application of these theories in Aquinas's reflections on God, mankind, music, poetry, and scripture. He discusses Aquinas's views on art and compares his poetics with Dante's. In a final chapter added to the second Italian edition, Eco examines how Aquinas's aesthetics came to be absorbed and superseded in late medieval times and draws instructive parallels between Thomistic methodology and contemporary structuralism. As the only book-length treatment of Aquinas's aesthetics available in English, this volume should interest philosophers, medievalists, historians, critics, and anyone involved in poetics, aesthetics, or the history of ideas.


Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages

Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages

Author: Umberto Eco

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2002-01-01

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 9780300093049

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In this authoritative, lively book, the celebrated Italian novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco presents a learned summary of medieval aesthetic ideas. Juxtaposing theology and science, poetry and mysticism, Eco explores the relationship that existed between the aesthetic theories and the artistic experience and practice of medieval culture. "[A] delightful study. . . . [Eco's] remarkably lucid and readable essay is full of contemporary relevance and informed by the energies of a man in love with his subject." --Robert Taylor, Boston Globe "The book lays out so many exciting ideas and interesting facts that readers will find it gripping." --Washington Post Book World "A lively introduction to the subject." --Michael Camille, The Burlington Magazine "If you want to become acquainted with medieval aesthetics, you will not find a more scrupulously researched, better written (or better translated), intelligent and illuminating introduction than Eco's short volume." --D. C. Barrett, Art Monthly


The God Who Is Beauty

The God Who Is Beauty

Author: Brendan Thomas Sammon

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2013-11-12

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 1620322455

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When in the sixth century Dionysius the Areopagite declared beauty to be a name for God, he gave birth to something that had long been gestating in the womb of philosophical and theological thought. In doing so, Dionysius makes one of his most pivotal contributions to Christian theological discourse. It is a contribution that is enthusiastically received by the schoolmen of the Middle Ages, and it comes to permeate the thought of scholasticism in a multitude of ways. But perhaps nowhere is the Dionysian influence more pronounced than in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. This book examines both the historical development of beauty's appropriation as a name for God in Dionysius and Thomas, and the various contours of what it means. The argument that emerges from this study is that given the impact that the divine name theological tradition has within the development of Christian theological discourse, beauty as a divine name indicates the way in which beauty is most fundamentally conceived in the Christian theological tradition as a theological theme. As a phenomenon of inquiry, beauty proves itself to be enigmatic and elusive to even the sharpest intellects in the Greek philosophical tradition. When it is absorbed within the Christian theological synthesis, however, its enigmatic content proves to be a powerful resource for theological reasoning.