Search Results (10)

Over the past 150 years, Thomists have been divided over whether or not St. Thomas Aquinas himself held to the transcendentality of beauty. Francis J. Kovach divides the Thomists into three groups: (1) the transcendentalists, (2) the anti-transcendentalists, and (3) the undecided. Some contemporary Thomist philosophers in the transcendentalist camp, such as Étienne Gilson, see beauty as the forgotten transcendental. We will briefly trace the historical context of the debate by mentioning how philosophers viewed the transcendentality of beauty in ancient and medieval times. Then, we will summarize a contemporary Thomistic transcendentalist view of the nature of beauty and its transcendental status, followed by a contemporary Thomistic anti-transcendentalist view of the nature of beauty and its transcendental status. After that, we will evaluate the nature of beauty according to St. Thomas, as well as the criteria which determines transcendentality. Finally, both the transcendentalist and anti-transcendentalist positions on beauty’s transcendental status will be evaluated to determine whether it is metaphysically consistent to regard beauty as a transcendental according to Thomistic thought. Full article

There have been many attempts to give a precise definition of beauty. In this article, I join a tradition of trinitarian reflection on beauty and attempt to add further clarity to a trinitarian definition of beauty. Beauty, in my construal, is the gravitas amoris of the triune being of love—it is, in other words, the objective attractional “force” or “weightiness” exerted by triune love on the soul by which one, if she yields to triune love, experiences the bliss and delight of triune love and is thereby drawn into deifying union. This article will proceed as follows: First, I will survey the relationship between beauty and love found in the classic philosophical tradition represented by Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. Then, I will survey this beauty–love relation in Christian thought from Augustine, Aquinas, Ficino, Edwards, and von Hildebrand. These figures will provide supporting evidence for my construal of beauty. I then turn to the constructive task. I argue that there is an abductive fit between the features of beauty and the nature of the Trinity. In light of this fit and the sources of traditional thought above, beauty is best thought of as the gravitas amoris—the weighty impression of God’s triune love in created things that draws one into the triune life and is experienced as delight when perceived. I conclude by answering objections and reflecting on how this account reframes the transcendentals and coordinates the experience of beauty with Christian love. Full article

This study addresses Roger Scruton’s understanding of what he called “moments of revelation”. In two short essays, both entitled “Effing the ineffable”, Scruton framed his discussion of moments of revelation with reference to the medieval Christian mystical discourse. Introducing the medieval discussion of this topic, this study provides an analysis of Scruton’s approach to the theme. In tune with the traditional discourse on revelation, his general aim was to demonstrate that there are ways of revealing important truths about the supernatural, of the world “beyond the window”, that do not require words to be pronounced. He calls our experiences of such phenomena moments of revelation and identifies four different transitory sources of revelation. This study deals with them one by one, after considering whether it is right to label such a revelation transcendental. The four sources of Scruton’s moments of revelation are natural beauty, the beauty of painting, the beauty of music, and personal encounters. The first three examples are connected to his thoughts on art and beauty as a substitute of divine revelation. Perhaps the most surprising of these is the last ones, moments of intersubjective human relationships, “our knowledge of each other”. Relying on both Buber and Levinas, Scruton makes the strong claim that it is in the other that we can experience that world “beyond the window”. His phenomenological exploration of human encounters sheds light on concepts like grace, shekhinah, or real presence and gift. He explains the Christian understanding of the human–divine relationship as well along the lines of the nature of interpersonal human relationship, both of them being in a certain sense, he claims, transcendental. From grace, his account moves forward to self-sacrifice and finally arrives at his idiosyncratic understanding of gratefulness for life. His moments of revelation in art and interpersonal exchange turn out to be, indeed, late and secular versions of the Christian understanding of revelation. In its summary, this study claims that revelation, understood by Scruton as a form of general human experience, allows to catch a glimpse of that which is beyond the window, by the direct, sensually based experience of either the existence of another person or of the beauty of nature and art. Full article

The late Middle Ages witnessed a recapitulation of medieval reflection on beauty. Jean Gerson is an important representative of these philosophical and theological contributions, although he has been largely neglected up to this time. A first dimension of his ideas on beauty is the incorporation of beauty (pulchrum) into the number of transcendentals, i.e., the concepts “convertible” with the notion of being (ens), that is, unity, truth, and goodness (unum, verum and bonum). This article revisits Monica Calma’s study on Gerson’s theory of beauty and suggests new hypothetical sources that may have inspired this aspect of his thought. The second aspect emphasised here is Gerson’s classification of beauty, which entails some similarities to the one of Ulrich of Strasbourg, but also differs from it. Moreover, its incorporation of a division entirely devoted to artistic beauty is highly remarkable. Full article

Ancient philosophers attached great importance to the ideals of unity, truth, goodness, and beauty as the path to the greatest good. Beauty expressed through works of art can open the eyes of the mind and heart and direct the human spirit to transcendence. The beauty of art awakens inner emotionality, evokes elation in silence, and leads to “coming out of oneself”. The concept of beauty is inextricably linked to Catholic theology and preaching. Beautiful sacred images were a source of theological messages, intercession, and entry into the transcendental world. Medieval Gothic cathedrals had images on the walls as a basic tool of catechesis. Even in today’s teaching of young people, images play a crucial role. The world of symbols enables Christians to connect everyday life experiences with theological messages. The image of the Virgin Mary is the best example of recognizing personal life situations, with the story of a mother who loved her child, accepted the suffering and death of her own son, and together with St. Joseph formed a holy family, which is the image of an imperfect family in which each person recognizes himself. All these aspects of the life of the Virgin Mary could form the basic concepts of the Christian understanding of beauty. In modern thought, the concept of beauty is understood quite narrowly (we are talking about narrowing the meaning of the concept of beauty). In the first part of this paper, we focus on the philosophical concept of beauty with a brief historical overview, then we point out the difference between transcendental beauty and aesthetic beauty. Beauty appeals to the human being and opens the heart to the transcendent, to God, who is the source and fullness of beauty, beauty itself. The originality of the article is in its presentation of the understanding of the Christian concept of beauty through the figure and image of Mary, the Mother of God. The experience of the beauty of Mary and Mary’s life story enables the believer to have a different perspective on the perception of his own life and thereby opens him to the transcendent, to a personal relationship with God, who is eternal Beauty. Full article

As an aesthetic resource in ancient China, the Zhuangzi’s description of Dao is similar to the American philosopher Emerson’s experience of beauty, and both reveal that the essence of beauty lies in its inherent vitality, spiritual transcendence, and the unity of multidimensional connotations. Emerson defines beauty as the constitution of all things in the world and believes it to be an expression of the universe. The Zhuangzi proposes the thought of tiandi damei 天地大美 (lit. Great Beauty of heaven and earth) as a manifestation of the function of the wordless Dao. Nature, intact from any human interference, becomes the common intermediary for Emerson and the Zhuangzi to elaborate on the connotations of beauty. The Emersonian definition of beauty originates from the philosophical implication of the world in ancient Greek, whereas the meaning of Great Beauty in the Zhuangzi, which embodies the worship of heaven in primitive religion, is very close to Emerson’s definition of beauty. The pattern of mei 美 consisting of da 大 (lit. great, equivalent to Dao) and yang 羊 (lit. auspice) signifies the natural celestial phenomena predicting good or bad luck and can be seen as synonymous with Dao illuminated by Daoism. By describing such natural imagery as forest, time sequence, dawn, and wilderness, Emerson reveals the vastness, harmony, brightness, and tranquility of beauty, which not only delights the spirit but also brings the human soul back to its natural state and improves personality. Emerson’s illumination of beauty conforms to those of Dao unraveled by the Zhuangzi. Despite the difference between the former’s poetic linguistic feature and the latter’s application of allegorical fables, both resort to visualized language to express internal aesthetic perceptions of the physical nature. Using the approaches of word tracing, textual comparison, and logical analysis, this article identifies the consistency in the original meanings of beauty in both Emerson’s essays and the Zhuangzi first and then goes on to analyze the similarities between their descriptions of natural imagery, so as to hint at the commonality in their understanding of natural beauty and verify the significance of literary language in cross-cultural comparative research. Full article

John Hare argues that Kant, in his Third Critique, offers an aesthetic argument for God’s existence that shares premises with his famous moral argument. Karl Ameriks demurs, expressing skepticism that this is so. In this paper, I stake out an intermediate position, arguing that the resources of Kant provide ingredients for an aesthetic argument, but one distinctly less than a transcendental argument for God or an entailment relation. Whether the argument is best thought of as abductive in nature, a C-inductive argument, or a Pascalian natural sign, prospects for its formulation are strong. And such an argument, for its resonances with the moral argument(s), can work well in tandem with it (them), a fact not surprising at all if Kant was right that beauty—in accordance with an ancient Greek tradition—exists in close organic relation to the good. More generally, along the way, I argue that the sea change in Kant’s studies over the last decade or so should help us see that Kant is an ally, rather than foe, to aesthetic theodicists. Full article

Introduction: Spiritual care is needed in a clinical setting to improve the patients’ quality of life. Deep connection with another person and delight with the beauty of nature or art and (in some cases) with God are all transcendental experiences. They may enable patients to ascribe meaning to their life with a chronic illness, find hope and well-being despite burdening symptoms. The opposite situation: lack of inner peace, inability to accept what is happening, feeling disconnected from others is called spiritual distress. Objectives: The aim of this research is to assess spiritual distress and spiritual needs of a group of Polish chronically ill patients and find associations with independent variables in order to provide data for recommendations on spiritual care in Poland. Patients and methods: 204 patients treated at the University Hospital and the Cystic Fibrosis Clinic in Poznan were surveyed in 2017 and 2018 with an original questionnaire. Results: Over half of the patients felt that their illness was life-threatening. A little more than half reported that faith was a resource to cope with suffering. Almost all patients showed signs of spiritual distress, and more than half expressed spiritual needs. The intensity of distress correlated only with the severity of the disease. The most important predictor of having spiritual needs was recognizing faith as a resource. Conclusions: Spiritual needs are associated with personal beliefs; however, spirituality spans beyond the religious context since spiritual distress is unrelated to the level of religious devotion. Therefore, any patient with a severe chronic disease needs basic spiritual care, which includes being treated with compassion. Full article

The article addresses the basic elements of Thomas Aquinas’s thought on beauty by analyzing some selected texts and points out some of the debates that still exist regarding the interpretation of Thomas Aquinas’s position on various issues, such as the question of the transcendentality of the beautiful. The fundamental aim is to recover some of Aquinas’s basic intuitions for contemporary aesthetics, which no longer makes use of many of the intellectual categories that were in common use in medieval philosophy, and to show how some of Thomas Aquinas’s fundamental ideas are closer to the aesthetic thought of some fundamental contemporary authors than the modern categories with which aesthetics was forged. This article is also intended to show how the modern conception of the beautiful has meant an ontological impoverishment with respect to the medieval thought. Full article

Dostoevsky can be meaningfully read as a defender of Russian Orthodoxy; a psychologist; a polemicizing anti-nihilist ideologue; a Schillerian romantic; a Solovyovian believer in love, goodness, and beauty; a prophet. I approach Dostoevsky through a new lens—Dostoevsky as an existential phenomenologist. Although writers such as Kauffman, Camus, and Shestov have cast Dostoevsky as an existentialist, their readings often focus too heavily on the critique of rationalist thinking in Dostoevsky’s The Underground Man and explore Dostoevsky’s existentialism largely in ethical rather than in existential-ontological terms. My interpretation will instead demonstrate that the primary focus of Dostoevsky’s novels is on immanent existential-ontological truths—human life—rather than on transcendental, ideal truth, although the emphasis on the former does not negate the possible existence of the latter. This interpretation will also provide an original route towards a polyphonic reading of Dostoevsky. Full article