Catholic 301: Theology of Beauty
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The Truth of God Made Visible, the Goodness of God Made Desirable
Fyodor Dostoevsky remarked that beauty will save the world, a line that is often repeated by Catholic speakers and writers who more and more identify beauty as the best way forward for a Church that needs to evangelize a culture and rekindle the imaginations of its believers.
But what is beauty? And how does beauty work?
Join us on Wednesday evenings at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen as we study the tradition of the Church (medieval and modern) to find answers to these questions. We will first work through 3 preliminary texts that will give us some of the tools we need to make sense of the basic elements of the beautiful:
Art and Scholasticism by Jacques Maritain
The Metamorphosis of Plants by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Love and the Postmodern Predicament by D.C. Schindler
We will then take a dive into the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, the Catholic theologian who in the 20th century did more than any other author to retrieve and restore the reality of beauty to its proper place in Roman Catholic theology. Balthasar wrote a series consisting of 7 books on the subject of beauty. We will read the first, foundational text: The Glory of the Lord vol. 1—Seeing the Form.
New Day, New Time, Same Location: Classes will be held on Wednesday evenings at 7pm at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen. Classes will begin on Wednesday, October 16th.
I hope that you will join us!
Will you send a reading schedule or should we just read all of Art and Scholasticism for next week?