Beauty after Aesthetics: The Appearance of a New Theological Category

The experience of beauty is an important part of the Holy Tradition of the Eastern Church. From the very beginning of the Christian thought, Beauty appears as a notion and a value. However, among Holy Fathers’ texts there is none specifi cally devoted to this topic. Alongside this, in modern history...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Artem Ovcharenko
Format: Article
Language:Russian
Published: St. Tikhon's Orthodox University 2018-12-01
Series:Вестник Православного Свято-Тихоновского гуманитарного университета: Серия I. Богословие, философия
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Online Access:http://periodical.pstgu.ru/ru/pdf/article/6306
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Summary:The experience of beauty is an important part of the Holy Tradition of the Eastern Church. From the very beginning of the Christian thought, Beauty appears as a notion and a value. However, among Holy Fathers’ texts there is none specifi cally devoted to this topic. Alongside this, in modern history there arose a new trend in secular thought which came to be termed aesthetics, which in a sense usurped Beauty as its own category. Only in the 20th century, aesthetics discarded Beauty, and it has taken several generations of religious thinkers to look at Beauty disregarding aesthetics, i.e. as at a specifi cally theological problem. This article gives an overview of this process and discusses the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar, the Theology of Beauty of Pavel Evdokimov and David Bentley Hart. It provides a comparative analysis of approaches of these authors to the study of the problem of Beauty and analyses reasons for the emergence of the new trend in theological thought.
ISSN:1991-640X
2409-4692