Unearthly Beauty
The Aesthetic of St John Henry Newman
Guy
Nicholls, Cong. Orat.
Cardinal John Henry Newman is recognized as one of the foremost
intellectual figures of the nineteenth century. A prolific writer, with over forty
major works published, he is well known as a theologian, philosopher, educational
theorist and poet. His mind, however, was also informed by other arts - music, architecture,
sculpture and painting.
In this significant new book, Fr Guy Nicholls, a member of
the same Oratory of St Philip Neri in Birmingham that Newman himself founded, examines
for the first time in a detailed study the aesthetic that inspired Newman. He looks
at Newman’s own musical compositions and the music of great composers that influenced
him; at the churches that Newman built, at their furnishing and decoration, and the
European and British buildings which he used as points of reference; at painting
and landscape that was important to his development.
This book has been commissioned
by the Postulator of the Cause of Blessed John Henry Newman, and publication will
coincide with his Canonization in the autumn of 2019.
Guy Nicholls is a priest of
the Oratory of St Philip Neri in Birmingham, the Oratory founded by Cardinal Newman,
and where his relics are kept. He is the Founder and Director of the John Henry Newman
Institute of Liturgical Music, and a Lecturer at Oscott College, the Seminary of
the Archdiocese of Birmingham. He has previously published on Newman’s Philosophy
of Education.
978 085244 947 9
340 pages + 48 colour and b+w plates
£25hb
