The Evidential Power Of Beauty

Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M.

While everyone is delighted by beauty, and the more alive among us are positively fascinated by it, few are explicitly aware that we can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. Dubay explores the reasons why all of the most eminent physicists of the twentieth century agree that beauty is the primary standard for scientific truth. Likewise, the best of contemporary theologians are also exploring with renewed vigor the aesthetic dimensions of divine revelation. Honest searchers after truth can hardly fail to be impressed that these two disciplines, science and theology, so different in methods, approaches and aims, are yet meeting in this and other surprising and gratifying ways.

This book relates these developments to nature, music, academe and our unquenchable human thirst for unending beauty, truth and ecstasy, a thirst quenched only at the summit of contemplative prayer here below, and in the consummation of the beatific vision hereafter.

"This is as complete a theology of beauty in one simple volume as I know, uniting Christian theology, modern science, and daily experience—a sort of von Balthasar for the masses. It vastly expands our understanding beyond 'aesthetics', and shows us how nearly right Keats was in saying 'Beauty is truth, truth is beauty.'"
—Peter Kreeft, Author, Back to Virtue

"You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity."
—Richard Feynman, Nobel Laureate in Physics

Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M., one of the foremost spiritual directors of our time, is the author of the best-selling work on prayer, Fire Within.