Description
When, in the sixth century, Dionysius the Areopagite declared Beauty to be a name for God, he gave birth to something that had long been gestating in the womb of philosophical and theological thought. In doing so, Dionysius made one of his most pivotal contributions to Christian theological discourse. This contribution was enthusiastically received by the schoolmen of the Middle Ages, and it came to permeate the thought of scholasticism in a multitude of ways. But nowhere is the Dionysian influence more pronounced than in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. The God Who is Beauty examines the historical development of beauty's appropriation as a name for God in Dionysius and Aquinas, and what it means.
The argument that emerges from this study is that the phenomenon of Beauty as a divine name indicates the way in which beauty is conceived in the Christian theological tradition as a theological theme. The concept of beauty proved itself to be enigmatic and elusive to even the sharpest intellects in the Greek philosophical tradition. When it is absorbed within the Christian theological synthesis, however, its enigmatic content proves to be a powerful resource for theological reasoning.