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SEVIER, Christopher. Aquinas on Beauty. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2015. xi + 226 pp. Cloth, $85.00-While there have been several books on Thomas Aquinas's aesthetics-most notably those of Umberto Eco, Francis Kovach, and more recently Kevin O'Reilly-it remains a relatively unexplored area of Thomas's thought. Christopher Sevier's Aquinas on Beauty is therefore to be welcomed since, as the author himself notes, "Aquinas's views on the subject are fascinating, genuinely unique, and instructive."
For Sevier (and others), Aquinas's greatest contribution to the domain of aesthetics is the way his account harmonizes the objective and subjective aspects of beauty-that is, its existence in reality and our experience of it. According to Sevier, this harmony is reflected in Aquinas's famous definition of beauty-"those things are called beautiful that please when seen"-since it brings together the three elements of every aesthetic experience: the beautiful object itself, the perception of the object, and the pleasure caused by that perception. Hence, Sevier organizes his book mostly around the elements of this definition: after an introductory first chapter (of six), he devotes chapter 2 to aesthetic perception, chapter 3 to aesthetic pleasure, and chapter 4 to the objective conditions for beauty.
Unlike other scholars (Maritain comes to mind), Sevier is well...