4.8 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 10 July 2025
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Prof. George Corbett explores the philosophical and theological foundations of beauty through Mozart’s music, highlighting the "pathway of beauty" as a means of encountering the divine and engaging culture.
This lecture was given on March 13th, 2025, at University of Edinburgh.
For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.
About the Speaker:
George Corbett is Professor of Theology at the University of St Andrews, and the Director of Cephas (a Thomistic Centre for Philosophy and Scholastic Theology). He researches and teaches theology and the arts (with specialisms in Dante studies, sacred music, and theological aesthetics) and historical theology (with specialisms in medieval theology, Aquinas’s theology and its influence, and Catholic theology). His books include Dante’s Christian Ethics (2020), Dante and Epicurus (2013), and, as editor or co-editor, Vertical Readings in Dante’s ‘Comedy’ (2015-18), Annunciations: Sacred Music for the Twentieth-Century (2019), and Music and Spirituality: Theological Approaches, Empirical Methods, and Christian Worship (2024).
Keywords: Aesthetics, Beauty, Catholicism, Culture, Evangelization, Don Giovanni, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Incarnation, Mozart, Pope Benedict XVI
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
0:00.0 | Welcome to the Timistic Institute podcast. |
0:06.2 | Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square. |
0:12.7 | The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world. |
0:19.3 | To learn more and to attend these events, |
0:21.7 | visit us at Thomisticinstitute.org. I'm going to be talking about aesthetics, Mozart, and the pathway |
0:28.3 | of beauty, the pathway of beauty. And where does that come from? Well, in his inaugural |
0:35.5 | homily of 2005, amazing to think that's now 20 years ago, |
0:41.4 | Pope Benedict the 16th renewed his call for the pathway of beauty, the Via Pulcritudiness. |
0:48.3 | It is this call. There is nothing more beautiful than to know Christ and to speak to others |
0:53.9 | of our friendship with him |
0:55.2 | that also launched the Pontifical Council of Culture's document the following year 2006, |
1:02.0 | responding to the prevailing religious indifference, materialism and unbelief in early 21st century culture and to a society in which truth itself and ethics |
1:15.2 | in particular are under grave threat, whether it states instrumentalized by ideologies, |
1:21.7 | relativized so that objective truth becomes hard to discern or flattened so that the good is horizontalized |
1:30.0 | into a merely social act, Pope Benedict XVIth and the Council proposed the pathway of beauty, |
1:36.9 | the vehicle clutourthiness, as a pathway of evangelisation of cultures and a crucial dialogue |
1:42.3 | with non-believers leading to Christ the way, the truth and |
1:46.6 | the life. An accomplished amateur pianist as well as professional theologian for Pope Benedict |
1:53.1 | 16th himself, music appears to have been a particularly privileged pathway of beauty. Speaking in 2015, he asked, what in reality is music, from where |
2:05.3 | does it come and to what does it tend? And he looked at this anthropologically, and he said, |
2:12.8 | look, the first source is the experience of being seized by love, which opens up a new dimension of being, |
2:21.3 | a greatness of breadth and breadth of reality, impelling expression through poetry, song, and music, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Thomistic Institute, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Thomistic Institute and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.