Aesthetics and Theology

4.5 ECTS / Semester / Português

Aesthetics is not a secondary and little frequented path of theology, but an essential path that has been neglected – writes von Balthasar at the beginning of his study on the aesthetic aspects of revelation. This course intends to reflect and sensitize students to the inflection of rationalist and moralist tendencies in theology that empties it of its essential dimensions of beauty and spirituality. From theological aesthetics, a complex discipline close to theology of Revelation, taught in the previous semester, only introductory texts will be read. Rather, we will focus on the correlation between aesthetics, reflection on sensitive experience, beauty and art, and the cultural aspects of spirituality, beauty, art, architecture and liturgy. We are interested in questioning, from the present, the relationships between art's autonomy and transcendence, artistic style and religious symbol, architecture and liturgical space, poetics and liturgy.