Iconography in the Western Church

Today is the first full day of "Beauty Will Save the World!", a camp for high-school students I am running on the campus of the University of Saint Francis this week. Twenty-five students from five states are attending the second such camp we have run thanks to a grant I secured from the Lilly Endowment. Last year's went fantastically well, and we are even more confident for this year. The grant runs another two years at least, so if you have kids who would be interested, send me an e-mail (adeville@sf.edu) and I can put you on the list to receive word about next year's camp.

The centerpiece of the week is a workshop in Byzantine iconography taught by the lovely and talented Lorie Herbel, wife of the Orthodox priest and scholar Fr Oliver Herbel (whose book you must read!).

They will also be reading Icons in the Western Church: Toward a More Sacrament Encounter by the lovely and talented Sr. Jeana Visel. You can read my review of this hugely helpful and important book here. It is very affordable; and if you are Roman Catholic and can spare it, buy an extra copy and give it to your priest or bishop.

The God Who Is Beauty

It is of course a topos of Eastern Christianity that "beauty is God's middle name" as I've heard one priest put it--that beauty, in the almost hackneyed phrasing of Dostoevsky, will save the world. A recent book by Brenda Thomas Sammon explores the role of beauty in depth in two pivotal philosopher-theologians of East and West: The God Who Is Beauty: Beauty as a Divine Name in Thomas Aquinas and Dionysius the Areopagite (Princeton, 2013), 402pp.

About this book we are told:

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 makes one of his most pivotal contributions to Christian theological discourse. It is a contribution that is enthusiastically received by the schoolmen of the Middle Ages, and it comes to permeate the thought of scholasticism in a multitude of ways. But perhaps nowhere is the Dionysian influence more pronounced than in the thought of Thomas Aquinas.

This book examines both the historical development of beauty's appropriation as a name for God in Dionysius and Thomas, and the various contours of what it means. The argument that emerges from this study is that given the impact that the divine name theological tradition has within the development of Christian theological discourse, beauty as a divine name indicates the way in which beauty is most fundamentally conceived in the Christian theological tradition as a theological theme. As a phenomenon of inquiry, beauty proves 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.