Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.

Thank you all for the warm introductions.

First, I want to thank David and all the students who are leaders here in this chapter, the Timistic Institute,

for inviting me this evening to talk about a topic that is very, very dear to me.

It's also nice to have some friendly faces in the audience who've heard me speak on this topic

before, so go big red and buck eyes. The title of tonight's lecture is the beautiful and the sublime

how to make art that leads to God. For the purposes of tonight's talk, I want to acknowledge that

there are many alternative theories about aesthetics. Does anyone know, show of hands,

who knows what I mean when I say aesthetics? Okay, not everyone. Okay, so just to be clear where we are, take the pulse.

So aesthetics is the philosophical study of beauty.

And there are both modern and contemporary theories that we're just not going to get into tonight

because this is a Timistic Institute chapter.

So I'm going to present my thoughts at least drawn from the work of St. Thomas Aquinas.

And I don't think it's out of order for me to spend the majority of our time talking about

what St. Thomas Aquinas might say about this, about the beautiful, the sublime, and about art.

At the same time, I should acknowledge just openly that if you want to dive deeper into this topic, that St. Thomas

Aquinas, while he wrote many things in the many volumes, he never wrote a formal treatise

on the subject that I'm about to present. So I, like many others over the centuries, must infer certain connections

based on St. Thomas Aquinas' stated principles about the nature of beauty in and of itself,

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