This article covers the aesthetics of the Church Fathers of the first several centuries after Christ and the aesthetics of St. Thomas Aquinas eight to nice centuries later. The article gives a brief background to the views of the Church Fathers, focuses on Aquinas, then returns in greater detail to the Church Fathers. Essentially, this overview of aesthetics from the Christian perspective focuses on the nature of beauty and on the specific language used to describe and analyze beauty and its relation to art and religion.
The aim of the author is to show how the aesthetics of these Christian thinkers were in effect arguments to show how God has infused the universe with beauty, order, proportion, etc., as manifestations of His own qualities. The author covers too much ground to go into any real depth on any of these Christian philosophers, aside from Aquinas. The author, in this excerpt in any case, clearly intends to give only an overview of the subject.
We read first that there is an apparent gap between the thoughts of the Church Fathers on philosophical questions of aesthetics and the thoughts of Aquinas in the 13th century. However, the author notes that there were a handful of Christian writers who kept alive the philosophical aesthetics of St. Augustine who in turn had carried on some of the tradition of the classical (i.e. pre-Christian) thinkers of Greece and Rome in the intervening centuries.
But first he explores at length the aesthetics of Aquinas. He says that Aquinas actually wrote little on aesthetics, but what he did write has had a great impact on the development of scholastic philosophy. Aquinas borrowed from the Greek philosopher Aristotle in his attempt to blend theology and philosophy. He was trying to give a philosophical or more scientific spirit to the Christian faith, to show that faith could be supported by reason. His aesthetics included consideration of a broad range of elements, including being,...