Aesthetics is the science which is concerned with the beautiful and with art. Since art and beauty are on the plane of the sensible, the question arises as to whether they can have transcendental dimensions and what their relations may be to the transcendent. This difficulty was felt very early, quite apart from Christian thought. In his Republic Plato judged art as fatally linked to the sensible. Nonetheless, condemnation of art was followed by praise of beauty, which was given its most significant interpretation in the Sym…