God & Beauty

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course is an extended study of beauty as it relates to the nature of being and the nature of God, with considerations of the divine nature as trinitarian as well as certain Christological and pneumatological dimensions. Alongside Plato, Plotinus, Basil of Caesarea, St. John of Damascus, Augustine, Bonaventure, Dante, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Joseph Ratzinger (as well as engagement with art, novels, and poetry), we will explore themes which include the coincidence of the transcendental of beauty with truth and goodness, as well as the intersections between beauty and nature, beauty and creativity, beauty and suffering, beauty and sanctity/sainthood, and beauty and structures of human desire. The course seeks to overcome notions inherited from modern aesthetic developments of what the category of beauty can in fact signify: that is, it will presuppose an understanding of beauty that is not merely superficial, frivolous, or subjective, but rather a category and a phenomenon with immense ontological and theological depths.