Aquinas on Beauty

290 Pages·2015·1.31 MB·English

by  Christopher Scott Sevier

Aquinas on Beauty
Aquinas on Beauty
Christopher Scott Sevier
LEXINGTON BOOKS
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Lexington Books
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Copyright © 2015 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means,
including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission
from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of
Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available Sevier, Christopher Scott.
Aquinas on beauty / Christopher Scott Sevier.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7391-8424-0 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7391-8425-7
(electronic) 1. Thomas, Aquinas, Saint, 1225?-1274--Aesthetics. 2. Aesthetics,
Medieval. I. Title.
B765.T54S428 2015
111'.85092--dc23
2014047124
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
This book is dedicated to my lovely wife, Jackie, who regularly inspires me to
attempt more than I would otherwise believe possible, and without whom the
appearance of this work would have been unlikely.
“This willingness continually to revise one’s own location in order to place
oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One
submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that
one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through
a certain patch of sky.”
—Elaine Scarry1
Footnote 1. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1999), 7.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Psychological Components of Beauty
Chapter 3 Human Desire and Pleasure
Chapter 4 Objective Components of Beauty
Chapter 5 Comparison with Significant Influences
Chapter 6 Conclusion
Bibliography
About the Author
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank those who have aided me in the process of bringing this
manuscript to light. I am indebted to the late Paul Hoffman, who encouraged me
to begin the project; and also to both David Glidden and Calvin Normore, who
helped me see it through to completion. I am grateful to input by Robert Pasnau
on an earlier draft of chapter 2. I owe special thanks to Jana Hodges-Kluck, who
expressed initial interest in bringing this project to Lexington Books, and for her
exceeding patience. I would like to thank my wife, Jackie, for encouraging me at
every step of the way, and for providing me with both the space and the time to
work on this project in the midst of raising our three young daughters—Eliana,
Emma, and Eden—who have also sacrificed no small amount of “daddy time” so
that this work might be realized. I owe each of you more than I can ever repay.
Some material in chapter 6 used by permission of De Medio Aevo, an academic
journal edited by the Research Group CAPIRE, at the Universidad Complutense
de Madrid.