After Aquinas: restoring hope to beauty
This article centers on the modes of maintaining an equivalence of the moral and the good that lies behind and within Augustine’s and Aquinas’ understandings of beauty. Beauty, in the medieval experience of it, never derived exclusively from sense impression; it was neither purely pleasure in the se...
Main Author: | |
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Format: | Electronic/Print Article |
Language: | English |
Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
Published: |
Marquette Univ. Press
[2016]
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In: |
Philosophy & theology
Year: 2016, Volume: 28, Issue: 1, Pages: 91-100 |
Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Augustinus, Aurelius, Saint 354-430
/ Thomas, von Aquino -1297
/ Beauty
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RelBib Classification: | KAB Church history 30-500; early Christianity KAE Church history 900-1300; high Middle Ages NBC Doctrine of God VA Philosophy |
Online Access: |
Volltext (doi) |
Summary: | This article centers on the modes of maintaining an equivalence of the moral and the good that lies behind and within Augustine’s and Aquinas’ understandings of beauty. Beauty, in the medieval experience of it, never derived exclusively from sense impression; it was neither purely pleasure in the sensuous nor a wholly intuitive contemplation of the transcendent occurring exclusively in the mind. Rather, beauty was the intelligible form of some higher reality, the quality of things that reflects their origin in the divine. Beauty, then, like meaning itself, could never be fully present in its material sign, as it appears to us only as a promise of presence through embodied absence, neither fully here and now nor entirely elsewhere and beyond. This, ultimately, may be the very purpose of beauty, a hopeful pull toward the perfect and yet never fully knowable God who is beauty. |
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ISSN: | 0890-2461 |
Contains: | Enthalten in: Philosophy & theology
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Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.5840/philtheol201662446 |