Must Beautiful Things be Natural? – Prof. Raymond Hain

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Prof. Raymond Hain examines whether beauty must be natural, exploring Thomistic metaphysics, twentieth-century debates between Maritain and Gilson, and contemporary examples from architecture and literature to probe the relationship between nature, artifice, and the beautiful.

This lecture was given on May 31st, 2025, at Mount Saint Mary College.

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About the Speakers:

Raymond Hain is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Associate Director of the Humanities Program at Providence College in Providence, RI. Educated at Christendom College, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Oxford, he is the founder of the PC Humanities Forum and Humanities Reading Seminars and is responsible for the strategic development of the Humanities Program into a vibrant, world class center of teaching, research, and cultural life dedicated to the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. His scholarly interests include the history of ethics (especially St. Thomas Aquinas), applied ethics (especially medical ethics and the ethics of architecture), Alexis de Tocqueville, and philosophy and literature (especially Catholic aesthetics). His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Templeton Foundation, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Charles Koch Foundation. His essays have appeared in various journals and collections including The Thomist, International Journal of Applied Philosophy, and The Anthem Companion to Tocqueville. He is the editor of Beyond the Self: Virtue Ethics and the Problem of Culture and is currently working on a monograph titled The Lover and the Prophet: An Essay in Catholic Aesthetics. He joined Providence College in 2011 and lives just across the street with his wife Dominique and their five children.

Keywords: Aesthetics, Art and Imitation, Christopher Alexander, Clarity And Proportion, Creative Intuition, Etienne Gilson, Integration and Wholeness, Jacques Maritain, Smith of Wootton Major, Thomistic Metaphysics

Transcript

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0:50.4	My topic is beauty and its relationship to nature. Must all beautiful things to the extent that they're beautiful be natural. Like all of our topics, I think this weekend we could spend many days thinking about this topic and the issues in connection with it. Think of what I'm going to say here as a kind of
1:13.1	orientation and I hope provocation, giving you some resources for continued reflection
1:20.1	on to mystic aesthetics and on the place of beauty in human life. There's three parts
1:26.2	to what I have to say. First, I'll give you a sense of the roots
1:30.1	in St. Thomas for something we might call to mystic aesthetics. Second, I'll explore an important
1:37.0	20th century debate between Jacques Maritan and Etienne Gilleson about mystic aesthetics, and in particular about the relationship
1:45.3	between nature and art.
1:47.8	And finally, I will offer you two examples of applications for us that are possible in 21st
1:53.0	century, one drawn from the architectural theorist Christopher Alexander and the other from
1:59.0	the writer J.R.R. Tolkien.
2:04.2	I think, now, Father Ambrose can correct me,
2:10.0	I gave all of you who were registered an excerpt from Alexander that I think is about 100 pages long,
2:12.7	for which I do not apologize.
	...

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