Theological Aesthetics Part One

One of the questions I will need to answer for my upcoming comprehensive exam is on theological aesthetics. Hans Urs von Balthazar has drawn a harsh line across this field of study by claiming that theology must be the adjective and aesthetics the noun, and not the other way around. To inquire into aesthetic theology is to free a conception of beauty from the tradition of theology, only to apply it to theology itself, thereby twisting theology towards a non-theological conception of beauty. In opposition to this, theological aesthetics weds Christian claims with a conception of beauty. We essentially refuse the difference between God and beauty, while asserting the truth of Christian dogma. The transcendental of beauty finds it's home in the trinity and not the other way around.

How is the father revealed to the world? Through the son as logos and as Jesus the Christ. Here we run smack dab into Isaiah's account of the messiah: "He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him" (Isa 53:2b). Christ was not beautiful of body, but beautiful in action, in obedience, in spirit. Beauty, if it is linked to the trinity, must have an aspect in it that can hold both the apex and nadir of the kenotic passage in Phil. 2:6-11. We have Christ the humble, who was willing to become horrendous on the Cross, but who was raised up in his true light...a light that is too radiant for fallen eyes. We see a foretaste of this in the transfiguration of Christ, and we see the analogical fulfillment of this beautiful, awesome Christ in Rev. 1:12-16. This is Christ as he was uttered before time: the cosmological Christ who shines like the sun, speaks with words that sound like running waters, holds seven stars in his hand, has hair like wool, eyes like blazing fire, wearing a golden sash. John of Patmos then goes on to rhetorically unfold this figure, but if we move too fast to the hermeneutics of apocalyptic secrets, we miss the most important point of all. This analogical image of Christ is one that ascends and descends. The beauty of Christ is explained through the sensuous particulars of creation, all of which are brought together in a constellation that mediates Christ's beauty. We ascend to the glory of the son through an appreciation of the materials of the world.

Here is the central tension of theological aesthetics. It must orient us toward the beauty of the trinity, while also demonstrating how it is that the trinitarian beauty is transcendentally present in the world. If we cut off the world, we lose the flesh to a variation of gnosticism, and as we know from the crucifixion and resurrection, Christ valued humanity so much that he sought to redeem his "very good" creation (Gen. 1:31).

In part two I'm going to look at Allen Tate's conception of the universal in the particular, as articulated by Francesca Murphy in Christ the Form of Beauty.