Overview

In the first of the two long talks published here, Johann Moser defends the classical view that beauty is grounded in the irreducible splendor of form itself, enjoyed and enjoyable by all cultures and ages. Yet often today, beauty is said also to lie elsewhere: ""She has such a beautiful soul""; ""The Pythagorean theorem is beautiful""; ""Beauty is truth, truth beauty."" Moser shows that to discover the very essence of beauty and to clearly delineate its elements, we must leave behind such high-sounding but ultimately unhelpful claims and turn first to consideration of real things that are universally considered beautiful. There, with a precision rarely found in talk of beauty today, Moser delicately pries beauty free from scores of analogous but ultimately non-aesthetic values. That done, he shows that nine specific elements of beauty remain-the nine qualities that characterize any and all unequivocally beautiful things. * In the second lecture published here, and with equal care and precision, Moser distinguishes the many kinds of values borne by fine works of religious art and then explores the frequent fusion of aesthetic and religious values there by addressing-and resolving-the narrower question of whether there can be such a thing as a Catholic theory of beauty.

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9781964001302

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Johann M. Moser was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1940. He grew up in New York City and later in New Jersey. At Dartmouth College he majored in philosophy and studied with the poet Richard Eberhart. In 1970, he received a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where he specialized in poetics and medieval literature. From 1970 until his retirement in 2000, he taught literature and philosophy at St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire.Moser published a volume of verse titled Most Ancient of All Splendors with Sophia Institute Press in 1989, as well as edited and translated for the press both an anthology of classical Nativity verse and, in collaboration with a colleague, Robert Anderson, an edition of St. Thomas Aquinas's hymns and prayers. Moser has recently published two additional collections of verse, as well as two full-length novels and two collections of short stories. He is now embarked on bringing together his various scholarly works, which are being published by the Diamond Ledge Press in a series of volumes. The studies are the results of forty years of course teaching, of public lectures, presentations, and seminars, and of writing, in the early 2000s, for a website he once managed. Further volumes may be provided in the future as the occasion requires.

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