The Catholic Culture Podcast: Ep. 63 – Beauty Revealing Being (Vision of the Soul Pt. II)

Jan 23, 2020

It is in the nature of Being to reveal itself to us, and in the
natural realm this is done preeminently through beauty.

Aquinas mentions radiance, clarity and proportion as beauty’s
three criteria. Proportion is arguably the most important in
showing forth Being, as beauty reveals the plenitude of relations
among all things: the relation of the parts of a thing, of the
parts to the whole which surpasses them, of the whole object to all
other things, and to its Maker.

This is part two of a three-part interview with poet and
philosopher James Matthew Wilson about his book The Vision
of the Soul.

[3:10] The nihilistic disenchanting force of rationalism and its
infiltration of Catholic thought

[10:47] Beauty as a transcendental property of Being, and the
“synthesis of all the transcendentals”

[18:50] Theodor Adorno on reason and beauty

[22:53] Aquinas’s tripartite formulation of beauty (radiance,
clarity, proportion) illuminates the older definition of beauty as
the splendor of form; an argument for proportion as most
important

[30:13] The pitfalls of Maritain’s focus on radiance and clarity
over proportion

[35:31] The modernist experiment to find out the degree to which
beauty could eschew a pleasant surface and still remain
beautiful

[40:29] Modernism as a movement for metaphysical realism in
art

 

Links

James Matthew Wilson: https://www.jamesmatthewwilson.com/

JMW Twitter: https://twitter.com/JMWSPT

The Vision of the Soul:
https://www.amazon.com/Vision-Soul
Goodness-Western-Tradition/dp/0813229286

A few of the artworks mentioned by James:

The Dying Gaul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_Gaul

Seamus Heaney’s poem inspired by The Dying Gaul https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57044/the-grauballe-man

Laocoön and His Sons https://mymodernmet.com/laocoon-and-his-sons-statue/

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