Beauty, Art, and the Polis
Edited by Alice Ramos
Introduction by Ralph McInerny
Book Overview
The essays in this volume, indebted in great part to Jacques Maritain and to other Neo-Thomists, represent a contribution to an understanding of beauty and the arts within the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition. As such they constitute a different voice in present-day discussions on beauty and aesthetics, a voice which nonetheless shares with many of its contemporaries concern over questions such as the relationship between beauty and morality, public funding of the arts and their educational role, objective and universal standards of what is beautiful.
In the tradition in which the contributors of this volume reflect, beauty manifests itself in the order of the universe, an order that provides human reason with a window onto the transcendent. For Aristotle and Aquinas the natural order grounds both art and morality, and yet it is this very order which has been called into question by modern science and philosophy. Instead of pointing us to a suprahuman order, the beautiful then points to the order of human freedom and creativity. Reflection on the beautiful since the modern philosopher Immanuel Kant has thus often taken a subjectivistic turn.
Because of the importance of beauty and art in human existence, in man's education and life as a moral and political being, an alternative should be sought to any reduction of the beautiful to a purely subjective experience or cultural construct. The Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, in dialogue with modern and contemporary conceptions of the beautiful, provides us with just that alternative, and thus the essays herein represent a decisive step in the "journey for Thomistic aesthetics."
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Contents
Editor's Note
Ralph Mcinerny, “Introduction: A Bracelet of Bright Hair About the Bone”
John G. Trapani, Jr., “Radiance: The Metaphysical Foundations of Maritain's Aesthetics”
Donald Haggerty, “The Agent Intellect and the Energies of Intelligence”
Matthew Cuddeback, “Form and Fluidity: The Aquinian Roots of Maritain's Doctrine of the Spiritual Preconscious”
Christopher M. Cullen. S.J., “Scholastic Hylomorphism and Western Art: From the Gothic to the Baroque”
Francis Slade, “On the Ontological Priority of Ends and Its Relevance to the Narrative Arts”
Alice Ramos, “Beauty, Mind, and the Universe”
Patrick Downey, “Dante, Aquinas, and the Roots of the Modern Aesthetization of Reality”
Gregory J. Kerr, “Art's Invaluable Uselessness”
Thomas S. Hibbs, “Portraits of the Artist: Joyce, Nietzsche, and Aquinas”
Daniel McInerny, “The Novel as Practical Wisdom”
Carrie Rehak, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of the Annunciation in Anne Sexton's ‘The Fierceness of Female’”
Ralph Nelson, “Music and Religion in Gilson's Philosophy of Art”
Stephen Schloesser, S.J., “Maritain on Music: His Debt to Cocteau”
Desmond J. FitzGerald, “Maritain and Gilson on Painting”
Katherine Anne Osenga, “Incarnate Beauty: Maritain and the Aesthetic Experience of Contemporary Icons”
Wayne H. Harter, “Dangerous Music”
Brian J. Braman, “Epiphany and Authenticity: The Aesthetic Vision of Charles Taylor”
James P. Mesa, “The Good. the Bad, and the Ugly: The Aesthetic in Moral Imagination”
John F. Morris, “Is Medicine Today Still an Art?”
Jeanne M. Heffernan, “Art: A "Political" Good?”
Joseph W. Koterski, S.J., The Arts and Authority”
Henk E. S. Woldring, “Social Justice as a Work of Art in Action”
Contributors
Index