Restoring Beauty

More and more in our modern and postmodern culture the twin concepts of beauty and truth have been separated both from each other and from their individual connection to the divine source of Beauty and Truth. Even as our public schools move further and further away from their connection to the universal moral code, the world of art (both high and low) embraces an aesthetic that privileges ugliness over beauty, nihilism over form, and radical self-expression over the pursuit of higher truth. As both an effective apologist for truth-based education and as a sub-creator of his own beauty-enhancing fiction, C.S. Lewis is the ideal guide for those who would seek to restore truth and beauty to their proper place and role in our modern world. Sections one and two analyze Lewis' eleven novels, showing how Lewis counters the growing cult of the ugly and helps restore a clearer understanding of the nature of good and evil. Sections three and four turn to Lewis' non-fiction works to assess what advice Lewis can give educators at all levels who would steer their students away from chronological snobbery and values-free education toward a true re-engagement with the past. The book concludes with a commentary on Screwtape Letters that exposes what Satan's main temptation tactics have been since the 1960s and a detailed bibliographical essay of books by and about Lewis.

Numerous contemporary theologians depict divine glory as overwhelming to or competitive with human agency. In effect, this makes humanity a threat to God's glory, and causes God's glory to remain opaque to human enquiry and foreign to human life. Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar have avoided this tendency, instead depicting God's glory as enabling people to participate in glorifying God. Nevertheless both accounts fall short of their initial promise by giving one-dimensional accounts of human obedience to God within largely conventional divine command accounts of ethics. The form of human obedience they present as compatible with divine glory does not actively overwhelm the human, but rather brackets out her agency as inappropriate in the face of divine revelation or command. And so, ironically, on these accounts God's glory remains opaque to human enquiry and foreign to human life. This study builds a case for seeing divine glory as intrinsically relational, creating a sociality which allows for a human agency transfigured by God's glory. Moving beyond Barth and von Balthasar, this work turns to theological exegesis of Scripture to construct an alternative account of divine glory. This glory is worked out in the act of glorifying: first in God, then in divine glorifying of humans, creating a responsive human glorifying of God; and finally in processes of honouring or glorifying among humans. Divine glory is shown to be consistent with a responsive and creative human obedience to God, and shown to constitute human agency which is creaturely and dependent yet not overwhelmed.

Until recently it has been commonplace to believe that Vatican II represents a permanent sidelining of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas for theology. The documents of that council, it is said, moved away from the scholastic categories that had informed Catholic theological work since the Reformation, and most particularly since Vatican I. There is some truth to this, of course, since the council fathers preferred biblical formulations in a personalist and pastoral mode over the kinds of concepts one finds in Neo-Thomism. The effect of this shift on theological education is well known. Indeed, so swift was the change that one finds figures as different as Jacques Maritain, Karl Rahner, and Joseph Ratzinger worrying soon after the Council's conclusion that the Angelic Doctor had all but disappeared from Catholic theology. Each in his own way sought to call the Church's intellectuals back to a consideration of Aquinas to address not simply philosophical issues but those dealing with the central doctrinal mysteries of the faith. It is now clear that after decades of experimentation with various philosophical systems, a number of scholars have either found a new audience for their work or have recently discovered for themselves the ancient beauty of Aquinas' theological work. The present volume brings together a number of prominent scholars to explore the different ways in which the writings of Thomas Aquinas on Christ, grace, faith, and other properly theological themes retain their relevance, and indeed, constitute a firmer basis upon which to explore these mysteries than many recent streams of thought. Contributors include: Thomas Weinandy, OFM, Cap., David C. Schindler, Michael Torre, Jessica Murdoch, Francis Feingold, Thomas Rourke, Marie George, James Hanink, John F.X. Knasas, Heather Erb, Joshua Schultz, Anton Schaube, William Hamant, Joel Johnson, Philip Berns, Daniel Drain, Fred Boley, Justin Matchulat, and Michael Humphreys.