Agostino e l'estetica: un punto

The article appears in a special number of the journal dedicated to Augustine and the Christian tradition. The editors requested a review and update of international studies of those aspects of Augustine’s work that we would today call ‘aesthetics’. As a result, the first part is given over to making clear how much aesthetics can be found in Augustine’s writings: a Platonic-Pythagorean theory of beauty; an idea of art as suspended between the liberal arts of the trivium (which are basic for hermeneutics) and the useless figurative expressions that can distract or confuse because they easily lead us into interpreting them; a sort of theology of divine beauty, which is asign of the good and of God’s presence in the world. After this textual survey, the twentieth-century literature is examined and it is shown that the aspect that is progressively more emphasised (whether positively, as in von Balthasar, or negatively) is the theological, while less attention has been given to the Augustine’s thoughts on the arts, except by way of historical reconstruction (Marrou, I. Hadot).