Module description
The module will teach students about the sustained and rich discussion of the theme of the beautiful in the Western Church, a discussion which runs through every century of its history and has often provoked fierce contention (as in the Reformation). It will introduce students to this tradition, tracing its debts to classical models of the relationship between beauty and goodness (especially in the works of Plotinus), through the medieval discussions of beauty as a transcendental (especially in the work of Aquinas), to the theological influence on philosophical aesthetics in the 18th and 19th centuries (including the observation of a distinctively British tradition in Coleridge, Ruskin, Hopkins and others). It will conclude with the major works in the area of theological aesthetics that have been produced since the 20th century (Jacques Maritain, David, Jones, Hans Urs von Balthasar, David Bentley Hart, Rowan Williams). The module will encourage students to judge the status of 'aesthetics' as a theological locus, and to relate the philosophical and theological discussions they encounter to actual works of art.
Assessment details
Two 4,000-word essays (50% each)
Teaching pattern
One two-hour weekly class over twenty weeks