Abstract

This book, unpretentious in length, is a journey of the lover of beauty through the realm of beauty. The stages of the journey are arranged in a Plato-inspired sequence in Chapters 2 to 5. After the introductory chapter based on Thomas's metaphysics of the beautiful, interpreted in terms of Gilsonian existentialism, there comes the "ladder of beauty" of the Symposium in five stages. Chapter 2 deals with the perception of corporeal beauty; Chapter 3, with natural beauty to be found in the universe from the moment of its inception to the appearance of man; Chapter 4, with the intrinsic and extrinsic beauty of the human body and the intellectual and moral beauty of the human soul; Chapter 5, with artistic beauty; and the concluding chapter, with the beauty of God, in Whom the aesthetic journey ends not only in the fashion of the Symposium but also in the manner of visio beatifica of Christian theology.