Turns out a long and thoughtful read will become very long and employ most of my brain power to comprehend it. David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth is probably the most challenging (challenging in the fact that I think I only understand 35% of what he's saying) book I've read in a very long time!
There are many factors that make this a difficult book for me to read. I lack a background in theology and philosophy, so the terms employed and the people he references are like old high school acquaintances on facebook (I think I might remember that person from somewhere, but I really have no idea who they are or why they were important!). Another factor that adds to the difficulty is that Hart comes from an Eastern Orthodox tradition - I've never read anything written from the Easter perspective so sometimes I feel like I'm reading a foreign language!
That said, this is a fascinating book - unlike anything I've ever read or heard before. A discussion of beauty - particularly the beauty of Christian truth found in the suffering of a servant is a timely and hopeful voice in the postmodern world. He calls into question the way in which we view and communicate the good news of the gospel - do we downgrade the gospel to simply a symbol of universal truth? Does the church use coercion and manipulation to get people to believe? Or is the gospel inherently beautiful, needing to be peacefully offered, speaking in the incarnation of beauty itself - that is, Christ.
Christ is a persuasion, a form evoking desire, and the whole force of the gospel depends upon the assumption that this persuasion is also peace: that desire awakened by the shape of Christ and his church is only truly reborn as agape, rather than merely the way in which a lesser force succumbs to a greater, as an episode in the endless epic of power. Christian rhetoric, then, is already a question to itself; for if theology cannot concede the intrinsic violence of rhetoric as such, neither can it avoid the task of framing an account of how its own rhetoric may be conceived as the peaceful offer of a peaceful evangel, not as - of necessity - a practice of persuasion for persuasion's sake, violence, coercion at its most enchanting. Such an account must inevitably make an appeal to beauty. Page 3
So what is beauty? Certainly the word conjures up many images from the gaudy and superficial to the inexpressible awe that touches us from time to time. Hart offers six definitions to clarify the term "beauty" as employed in this book.
1. Beauty is objective. Not that there is any "science" of beauty or that it can be concisely defined to a list of criteria, but that the beauty is something that is received in "astonishment" - that is, it is only known in the "moment of response". "It appears on the vastest of scales and on the most minute, at once familiar and strange, near and remote..."
2. Beauty is the true form of distance. This distance spoken of is the distance between God and creation - God is not creation, it is separate, and in the separation lies beauty. This separation is not to be understood as the separation between God and humanity through sin, but as the "otherness" of God.
The question of theological aesthetics is "what the shape of that distance is, what is its original context, how it is most truly inhabited and disclosed..."
3. Beauty evokes desire. Beauty "gives shape to the will that receives it". It is desire not to "consume and dispose" but to dwell alongside "what is loved and possessed in the intimacy of dispossession". For the Beauty of Christ is not what we'd expect to desire - the suffering servant - but something that can be desired without "shadowless glamour" and is not dismayed by mystery - what Augustine calls "a taste for the Beauty of God".
4. Beauty crossed boundaries. The most obvious example is that of the incarnation. "Beauty traverses being oblivious of the boundaries that divide ideal from real, transcendent from immanent, supernatural from natural, pleasing from profound... 'Crossing these boundaries so forgetfully,' remarks Balthasar, 'belongs to the essence of the beautiful and of aesthetics almost as necessity'". This speaks to the dynamic involvement of God in the world.
5. Beauty's authority, within theology, guards against any tendency toward gnosticism. "...on one hand worldly beauty shows creation to be the real theater of divine glory - good gracious, lovely, and desirable, participating in God's splendor - and on the other hand it shows the world to be unnecessary, an expression of divine glory that is free, framed for God's pleasure, and so neither a defining moment in the consciousness of God nor the consequence of some defect or fall within the divine."
6. Beauty resists reduction to the symbolic. Here, Hart is not speaking about the arts, nor is he criticising use of symbolism in telling Christian truth. Rather, the beauty of Christ - an of the gospel story - cannot be reduced to a symbol "concerning inner truths". "But the beautiful is prior to all schemes of insoluble meanings: it is excess but never formlessness, a spilling over, jubilant, proclaiming glory without 'explaining' it."
I have never read anything that has put so much emphasis on aesthetics in realm of theology. I know that Augustine wrote about beauty, but we rarely speak of aesthetics in any setting, even though, back in "the day", it used to be that just about every major philosopher or theologian wrote on aesthetics.
This is just the introduction, so hopefully I'll have the stamina to continue! After all this in the intro, I have high hopes for the rest of the book.
Labels: aesthetics, art, beauty, faith
