10/07/2025 08:30
- 10:45
HALL: Lecture Hall 34
Proponent:
Bennett D.,
Rakotoniaina M.
Chair:
Bennett D.,
Rakotoniaina M.
Speaker:
Bennett D.,
Jankowski J.,
Juurikkala O.
From Socrates who once asked, "could Love be anything else but love of beauty?" (Plato, Symposium) to Augustine's cry, "Late have I loved you, O Beauty so old and so new," (Confessions X) the metaphysics of love calls for an appreciation of beauty. The reflection of divine beauty upon the created order has elicited diverging cultural and theological perspectives. The mystery of Incarnation both reveals and conceals Christ's incorruptible beauty, as Augustine describes in the enarrationes in Psalmos. At the heart of this existential hide-and-seek, lies beauty as arousing desire, as attracting love towards the divine. If the ugliness of evil renders even more acute the absence of divine beauty in the world, it further invites a reconsideration of the connection between beauty and morality. In this sense, the aesthetics of virtue may be interrogated.
The present panel invites papers willing to engage the relationship between love and beauty in dialogue with the theology of Augustine of Hippo from direct exegesis of of Augustine, historical interrogations into Augustinian influence and theologies to contemporary receptions and critiques in different Christian traditions. Perspectives as diverse as philosophy, anthropology and epistemology, ethics and theological aesthetics, may echo and speak to the Augustinian tradition. In the current crisis of solitude, the emergence of artificial realities, the omnipresence of images, pondering these questions is to weigh upon our human condition in relation to beauty and eternal.