Holy Beauty

Chrysostomos Stamoulis is Professor of Dogmatic and Symbolic Theology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and has lectured across Europe, Asia and the United States. He is interested in the relation of Orthodox theology to a range of contemporary issues, and his previous publications include 'What Business has the Fox at the Bazaar? Essays on the Dialogue of Orthodoxy with Politics, Culture and the City (2016), and Love and Death: An Essay on the Incarnation (2019). Norman Russell, an Orthodox translator and patristic scholar of partial Greek descent, is an Honorary Research Fellow of St Stephen's House, University of Oxford, and Professor of Patrology at the Istituto Teologico 'Santa Eufemia di Calcedonia', Bologna. His publications include The Doctrine of Defication in the Greek Patristic Tradition (2004) and Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age (2019).

• Translator’s IntroductionAuthor’s PrefacePart I. Philokalia or Aesthetics? The ‘Dilemma’ of Contemporary Orthodoxy1. Kostas Zouraris: ‘What We Call “Philokalia” Is Not the Same as Western Good Taste’2. Father Alexander Schmemann: ‘One Cannot Banish the Senses’3. Nikos Matsoukas: ‘Aesthetics Is a Lasting Victory over Distraction and Fragmentation’Part II. Orthodoxy’s Philokalic Aesthetics: The ‘Both Together’ of Patristic Teaching4. ‘Supra-Substantial Good’: Dionysius the Areopagite and the Church Fathers on the Holy Trinity5. ‘Where Has Your Beauty Gone?’: Anthropological Notes on the Beauty Lost by the Fall6. ‘The Heavens Tell of the Glory of God’: The Orthodox Doctrine of Creation and the Problem of the EnvironmentPart III. ‘Unutterable Beauty’: Examples of a Philokalic Reading of Ecclesial Life7. Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis: A Walk ‘by the Seashore’ and the Boundaries of the Church8. The Elder Sophrony of Essex: The Remembrance of Death and the ‘Conflict’ with a Passion for Painting9. The Elder Porphyrios, the Nightingale and the Current Debate on Aesthetics: Parallel Readings of the Elder’s Discourses and Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic TheoryAfterword: Saints and Poets Perhaps …Who’s WhoSelect BibliographyIndex

An important and very engaging book that reads as a deep intellectual dialogue. Stamoulis has re-aligned the philosophical and theological debate around aesthetics with a delightfully fresh stance re-presenting Byzantine Orthodox traditions in a way that is neither obscurantist or triumphalist but energised in a presentation that shows the Christian ancients as significant heirs of Aristotle, and the moderns as acute conversational partners with Marx.