The Portal of Beauty

Book excerpt: A famous Italian theologian's eloquent reflections on beauty and God. / "Beauty is an event: it happens when the Whole, the All, offers itself to us in the fragment, when the Infinite makes itself little." This is how Bruno Forte describes the long-held Christian tradition that sees God as the source of all beauty. In The Portal of Beauty Forte examines the deep, though not always obvious, contribution of theological thought from the minds of such luminaries as Augustine, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Balthasar, and Evdokimov to our understanding and experience of beauty. / The Portal of Beauty is an erudite, moving, and deeply-felt study by the most famous Italian theologian in Italy on the nature of beauty and how it can lead us to a greater understanding of and communion with the divine.