Ars Naturae Imitatio: Stoa, Plotinus, Augustine

Prof. Lenka Karfíková, Dr. theol., from the Department of Philosophy of the Evangelical Theological Faculty of Charles University, was invited to participate in the Artes liberales Brunenses lecture series of honorary and external members of the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University.

The lecture will attempt to show three late ancient variations on the idea of art "imitating nature," and in each of them it will focus on the question of what art imitates: nature as the artist according to the Stoics; the structures of the divine Intellect in Plotinus; the numerical symmetry that, according to Augustine, is grounded in the intra-divine equality of the divine persons. The authors the lecture is focused on are concerned with the anagogical role of art, which they pursue while showing the divine origin of the world and the soul. Human art imitates nature in its creativity, but, like nature itself, in doing so it develops structures hidden in the soul and in the world. Both Plotinus and Augustine differ from the Stoics as they assume a transcendent basis for these structures while, at the same time, they understand art as a place of their possible visibility.