Aquinas on Beauty

Christopher Scott Sevier

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This book comprehensively examines the aesthetic views of Thomas Aquinas, treating both the objective nature and the subjective human experience of beauty. It locates Aquinas's views in their historical context and illustrates their relations to other popular aesthetic views.

Book Details

Publisher: Lexington Books
Publish Date: Nov 14th, 2016
Pages: 242
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.90in - 5.90in - 0.60in - 0.70lb
EAN: 9781498512541
Categories: • Aesthetics• Europe - Medieval• Religious

About the Author

Christopher Scott Sevier teaches philosophy at the College of Southern Nevada.

Praise for this book

My first reading of Aquinas on beauty was in a book by Umberto Eco. But Eco believed that the aesthetics of Aquinas is of little value in our age. Sevier argues otherwise and does so with clarity.

Sevier is to be commended for his pursuit of questions, themes, and texts that are frequently ignored by Aquinas scholarship. Sevier expresses the hope that his volume 'will advance the discussion a little further, that it will expand appreciation for Aquinas's little acknowledged contribution to the great aesthetic tradition, and that it provides evidence for the all-too-neglected Platonic impulses that punctuate his thought.' On all three counts, Aquinas on Beauty succeeds very well.

This book shows us, as Plato thought, that beauty is without a doubt difficult and that in Aquinas it involves aspects of his psychology and ethics, together with his metaphysics and theology--a daunting task for any one book to embark upon--but Sevier's book does justice to this endeavor. The student of Aquinas will find in this relatively brief book further avenues to pursue on the fascinating, even if at times enigmatic, subject of beauty.

Of the several books on Aquinas's aesthetics published in recent decades, Sevier's is perhaps the boldest attempt to approach beauty by way of Aquinas's psychology and ethics rather than his epistemology and metaphysics.... Particularly compelling is the way he connects the passions with Aquinas's theory of beauty. This is a line of research that needs to be deepened, and Sevier has provided an extremely fine resource for doing so.

Another book on Thomas's aesthetics? Yes, because all that might be said hasn't been. Yes, because what Sevier does say offers Thomistic, Scholastic, and aesthetic readers a gift: a fresh survey of Thomas's aesthetics whose expanded scope yields a more beautiful Thomas, not to mention rich endnotes and bibliography. And yes, because there breathes through Aquinas on Beauty exactly the kind of aesthetic delight it means to detail. Theological readers will want more.

Christopher Scott Sevier's Aquinas on Beauty is a very impressive piece of scholarship on a perennially interesting but notoriously mysterious and elusive subject. The author has done his homework, understood all the relevant medieval nuances of the subject, and has clearly explained and readably expressed Aquinas' major points directly and succinctly. Sevier demonstrates how Aquinas' aesthetic follows from and presupposes his metaphysics and cosmology, and clarifies the contrasts between Aquinas and modern theories of beauty. This book will be a touchstone for all subsequent investigations of the subject.

Aquinas's approach to beauty has not received the attention it deserves among philosophers, theologians, and medievalists. In this excellent and clearly written book, Christopher Scott Sevier provides a thorough, sophisticated and well-documented analysis of it. He recognizes how important it is to understand Aquinas on a range of topics in order to grasp what he says about beauty, and he provides readers with exactly what they need when trying to understand the complexity behind Aquinas's apparently simple claim that 'We call those things beautiful which please when seen'.