Tag: Beauty

Mathematical Understanding as Seen Within a Framework of Beauty (part 3)

In the first two parts of this series, I began outlining how mathematics and mathematical understanding can be framed within the Thomistic modes of beauty: proportio, claritas, and integritas. In particular, I defined mathematics as the science whose subject-matter is measurable orders: objects understood as parts united into whole, having a distinction of same or […]

Beauty for Truth’s Sake (Book Review)

“Music, architecture, astronomy, and physics — the physical arts and their applications — demonstrate the fundamental intuition behind the Liberal Arts tradition of education, which is that the world is an ordered whole, a ‘cosmos,’ whose beauty becomes more apparent the more carefully and deeply we study it. By preparing ourselves in this way to […]

Mathematical Understanding as Seen Within a Framework of Beauty (part 2)

In part 1 of this series, I began to explore how mathematical reasoning can be understood within a Thomistic framework of beauty as expressed in the modes proportio, claritas, and integritas. In that post, I arrived at an initial description of the subject-matter of mathematics as pertaining to quantitative being understood as parts ordered into […]

Mathematical Understanding as Seen Within a Framework of Beauty (part 1)

In a previous series of posts (part 1 being here:  https://thinkingbeautifully.org/form-beauty-and-euclids-elements-part-1/) I began to describe how mathematics could be understood as an endeavor of human discovery and invention by showing how form and the pursuit of beauty underlies successes in such efforts. In particular, I focused on the opening of Book I of Euclid’s Elements […]

Beholding the Beauty of the Lord

One thing I asked of the Lord,that will I seek after:to live in the house of the Lordall the days of my life,to behold the beauty of the Lordand to inquire in His temple. “Come,” my heart says, “seek His face!”Your face, Lord, do I seek.           Psalm 27:4, 8 The Biblical […]

Beauty as Divine Yearning

My colleague Harry Plantinga, director of the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, recently posted a blog meditating on the Syrian mystic Dionysius’s ideas of yearning for God. Harry connects the experience of yearning with the attractiveness of God’s beauty. He says:  Paul’s description of the spiritual life is not the slightest bit dispassionate in the modern […]

Reading for Beauty

Sarah Clarkson has a recent blog post with a title that makes a big claim: “We Read for Beauty.” Naturally, I decided I needed to read this one. Here’s what she understands by that claim: What do I mean by beauty? I mean a bone-deep knowledge of the goodness of the world; the heaven-crammed splendor […]

Beauty Ever Ancient, Ever New

I’ve been reading Thomas Williams’ new translation of Augustine’s Confessions (Hackett 2019), and yesterday I came to my favorite passage. It’s a very famous section, which Williams lays out as a poem. Late have I loved you, beauty so ancient and so new!Late have I loved you!And behold, you were within, but I was outside […]