Called to Attraction: An Introduction to the Theology of Beauty

Brendan Thomas Sammon

Oct 2017 · Cascade Companions Book 38 · Wipf and Stock Publishers

About this ebook

What if there is more to beauty than meets the eye? What if beauty named more than the human response to a thing’s appearance, but instead named the very presence of God in the world? And what if beauty provided a power enabling human beings to think in novel and creative ways, to see with new eyes? This book explores the various ways in which the Christian theological tradition has provided responses to these questions. Taking its starting point from the view that beauty is above all a divine name, this book explores the consequences that such a starting point has not only for the human experience of beauty but also for the way in which beauty penetrates to the very heart of human nature, uplifting and inspiring human thought and action to ever new frontiers of existence. In its experience of beauty, so this book argues, the human spirit encounters the divine presence in unexpected and transformative ways, such that one may come to see that not only is God beautiful, but God is beauty itself!

About the author

Brendan Thomas Sammon received his PhD from the Catholic University of America and is an assistant professor of systematic theology at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia. He is the author of The God Who Is Beauty: Beauty as a Divine Name in Thomas Aquinas and Dionysius the Areopagite (Pickwick, 2013).