I'm back, loaded down with pictures and credit card debt

So I'm back from Colorado. I took over 700 pictures there and had a great time doing it. We did a lot - hiked (in Rocky Mountain National Park during a snowstorm, up a arid canyon outside Gateway, all over Denver), went white water rafting (royal gorge on the Arkansa river), wedded (Rachel and JEB), went to a Hold Steady concert (at the Ogden theater in Denver), ate Fondue with Mark (high school bud) and Kristin, sipped world famous Martinis with Rach and Pete (friends from Acadia), swam across a fast running river, frolicked in poison ivy (me - no reaction), teased mom-in-law (me - quite a reaction), and watched Rach get the biggest speeding ticket known to man ($393 for doing 45 mph in a 25 mph school zone while descending the rockies in the Mustang Pete rented). Go here to look at some pics.

I'm relaxed. Perhaps, way too relaxed. I've got my proposal presentation next Friday before the faculties of religious studies at WLU and UW. Peter and I are going to plan this thing out tomorrow. I've got to kick the brain back into gear. But I must say, it's funn running down low on the mental rpms for a week or two.

Colorado

Well, I've been maxing and relaxing in Colorado for about five days now. I'm not reading all that much, (though I did finish the future of religion by Rorty and Vattimo just before I left). I wrote my last comp exam on May 11 and I've been letting the brain heal since then. I hooked up with an old buddy from highschool in Colorado Springs. We had a great time. Attended New Life Church at his request. It was quite moving for me, though my wife was skeptical about the performance element in the worship. It was very interesting to see what they were doing post-Ted Haggart. I wonder if NLC doesn't know more about the future of religion then Rorty and Vattimo (still thinking about this one). We did some white water rafting later that day. We're now in Denver, and I've got a new SLR - the Nikon D80 - so I'll have lots of pics to post when I return. I haven't really taken a lot of joy from photography since I returned from Korea and found out film was so expensive to use in Canada. But the Nikon D80 fixes all that. I think this will prove to be a nice pass time - get me out of the books, but still flexing my creative and analytical muscles. Plus I love what the practice of photography makes me notice about the world around me. The phenomenology of a photographer is quite interesting. I'm sure I'll post more on this in the future. We head to Grand Junction tomorrow for a family wedding. Snappy dappy do. Until next time!

Theological Aesthetics Part Four - The Beauty of the Infinite

David Bentley Hart published The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth in 2003. Hart, an American Greek Orthodox himself [I suspect he is a convert], draws on the thought of Gregory of Nyssa, who was a contemporary of Augustine, the younger brother of Basil the Great, and a good friend of Gregory of Nazianzus. It seems that Gregory of Nyssa was (one of) the first theologian(s) to argue that God was infinite. Before this thinkers like Origen had argued, as consistent with Platonism, that God was limited. I suspect this has something to do with the "form" of the Good in the Platonic system. At any rate, Nyssa pushed towards negative theology, claiming that God was unknowable. The idea that is at the centre of Hart's text, which I suspect comes form Nyssa, is that God is an abyss in which beauty subsists. All the beautiful particulars of creation are not subsumed into unity with God, but given to the beauty of their very particularity in the infinite distance of God himself. For the first third of the book, Hart critiques the "postmodernists" - Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Levinas, Lyotard, Nancy, as well as their intellectual fathers, Heidegger and Nietzsche. Following in Milbank's footsteps, he argues that these thinkers theorize an ontology of violence, a Hobbsian war of all against all, which is based on the Cartesian separation of soul and body, God and creation - that leaves us with skepticism about reality - an inner violence of self consciousness. This is to say that the postmodernists, following Nietzsche, claim that the will to power precedes any peace. For Christians this in unacceptable as the peace of God, b(r)ought through the lamb of God, was spoken before time as the Word of God, and is the primary principle of creation. Any violence that ensues, ensues through deviance from the beautiful order of God in the Garden. We see the violence of lying and disobedience in Adam and Eve, which leads to the brother against brother violence, when Cain kills Abel. The chaos of the Cannanite myth of the Leviathan is placed after the order, peace, goodness and beauty of God's creation (Hart 257-8; this is the best Christian answer to Zizek's chaotic "night of the world" which is his primary principal of the imagination - The Ticklish Subject 29-32 and throughout).
The chaos of culture obscures the objectivity of beauty that was so central to Hellenistic and the Church Fathers. But Hart claims that beauty must not be relegated to a subjective effect, but exalted as an on objective presence (I'm lost for a word here, as Hart critique metaphysics heavily). However, he would be the first to claim that empirical methodologies will not be able to capture of isolate beauty as it is a transcendental, embodying divine distance, which always has a beyond, even while it is present. Like the transcendentals, Hart's thesis pervades his work and yet is not fully understable until you have read the whole.
Not being able to get into the myriad arguments that he puts forth, I will list off notable comments about the beautiful that he makes in the introduction, and which are elaborated throughout.
I should mention that Hart is in Balthasar's camp - arguing for beauty through the analogy of beauty. He critiques Barth quite heavily on this topic.

1. Beauty is objective: "in the beautiful God's glory is revealed as something communicable and intrinsically delightful, as including the creature in its ends, and as completely worthy of love...beauty calls not only for awe and penitence, but also for rejoicing" (17-8).

2. Beauty is the true form of distance: Hart has his eye on Derrida here, who claims that "meaning" [for lack of a better word] cannot traverse distance, and falls to differance. "This presence of distance within the beautiful, as primordially the effect of beauty, provides the essential logic of theological aesthetics: one that does not interpret all distance as an original absence, or as the difference of differentiation's heterogeneous and violent forces, but that sees in distance, and in all the series and intervals that dwell in it, the possibility of peaceful analogies and representations that neither falsify nor constrain the object of regard"(18). "The first thought ... is the thought of the distance that opens up all differences, the interval between their terms, the event of their emergence; and in asserting that distance is originally the gift of the beautiful - rather then the featureless sublimity of will, or force, or differance, or the ontological Nothing - theology interprets the nature and possibility of every interval within being" (19). Hart latter evokes Augustine's analogy of music to describe how created differences can be brought together beautifully and peacefully, under God's orchestration - perhaps the most important point of the book.

3. Beauty evokes desire. Contra Luther and Kierkegaard, who separate ethics and aesthetics, Hart sides with Dante and sees eros and agape united in desire of the particular.

4. Beauty crosses boundaries. Goodness, truth and beauty are convertable..."that God is good may be seen and tasted; and this means that a theology of beauty should not scruple to express itself at times as an ontology, an epistemology, or an ethics...theology should ponder how beauty can compel morally by its excess" (21).

5. Beauty's authority, within theology, guards against any tendency towards gnosticism. Beauty is the incarnate logos, Christ. He came as God and man, spirit and body, united. Creation is good.

6. Beauty resists reduction to the "symbolic". "beauty lies in the immediacy of a certain splendor, radiance, mystery, or allure; it plays upon the continuous insisture of a plastic, or lyric, or organic, or metaphoric surface" (24). He, here, is denying the bad symbolic of fixity (Lacan's law of the father)"the symbolic occurs as that which stabilizes the individual aesthetic moment as a fixed property, a meaning, a kind of exchangeable capital or currency that stands in lieu of substantial wealth" (25). This invites the Cartesian gnosticism, where real and symbolic are parsed from each other, causing the real or the meaning to be an abstracted extra, a supplementarity. For Hart, beauty is on the surface, not in the depths (gnostic truth). "But the beautiful is prior to all schemes of isolable meanings: it is excess but never formlessness, a spilling over, jubilant, proclaming glory without "explaining" it. For just this reason it fixes reflection upon the irreducibly particular, the momentary, fragile, and fortuitous. In the beautiful, when it is liberated from the "symbolic," a purely serial infinity is implied - such as Hegel dreaded - and the circular infinity of synthesis and transcendental reconciliation - such as Hegel heralded - is resisted"(25).

Hart concludes by arguing that beauty is in the particulars: "In the end, that within Christianity which draws persons to itself is a concrete and particular beauty, because a concrete and particular beauty is its deepest truth" (28). Here Hart is trying to side step the onto-theological critique of Heidegger and Derrida.

As you can see, Hart has given Christian thinkers much to mull over. I am not done with Hart. And I'm sure the exercise isn't in vain.

Pope condemns three more glands - The Onion

Serious business - theological anatomy. We have orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and orthoanatomy?

Pope Condemns Three More Glands

Theological Aesthetics Part Three - Barth and VB

Ladies and gentlemen: wake the kids, call this neighbours, this is an extravaganza you won't want to miss - Theological Aesthetics Part Three.

I have an image in my mind of Karl Barth and Hans Urs Von Balthasar sitting in a dusty European room with a phonograph. Light pours through the window, refracting off the ancient particles floating through the air. Barth is sitting back in a leather chair with stained wooden arms, and Von Balthasar is leaning forward on a piano bench. There are books surrounding them. Towers on the end tables, tomes in the corners, piled high like miniature babels, or conversely, paper altars. What has these two great theologians enraptured? Mozart. His music enchants the still air of their dim room. Both listen for hours, allowing the music to take hold of their bodies, not to dance, but to cause shivers and great sensuous pleasures. But we must not forget the soul. The soul climbs on braided strands of the music, floating on the drafts of sonorous emanations, lifting the mind higher, perhaps contemplating even the lower stratum of the third heaven. Perhaps…
This image is not one I have read of in a book, but one that I have stored in my mind from a course on Charles Taylor by Peter Erb. I have added to it, but it expresses something eminently European, something North American Christians have lost sight of. If this certain “je ne sais qua” was simply European there would be no need for its recovery, but the truth of the matter is that this European element is an important aspect of Christian tradition – the enjoyment of God’s beauty.
Today I want to look at Barth’s thoughts on beauty. There is a difficulty here for Barth. As a protestant who leans on the pillars of Catholicism, Barth saw a danger in raising mater up so high that it might refract God’s glory. Barth thinks Balthasar and his church does this. Balthasar picks up Erich Prytzwara’s notion of the analogy of being, which expresses the idea that the ontic substance of humanity, being, shares a similarity with God’s being, that is separated by a humanly unbridgeable distance between God’s being and Humanity’s. Barth stresses that such an analogy is only to be made through eyes that have been graced by faith. The term often used for Barth’s position is called the analogy of faith. While Barth’s expression of the analogy of faith is to be seen as the door to the contemplation of any further theological analogies, Balthasar sees the analogy of being and the analogy of faith as overlapping analogies. This is to say that the beauty of God can be seen in nature without faith (Rom: 1:20), but that faith perfects this analogy. Where Paul writes: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Rom 1:20), Balthasarian scholar Stephen Fields claims, “If loving self-sacrifice exerts a universal aesthetic appeal, then worldly beauty is an analogy of proper proportionality. In other words, beauty inheres in the Grand Canyon, a Mozart sonata and the Parthenon, even as it does in Mother Theresa and her work. As a result, anyone, even without the analogy of faith, can begin to understand how Christ’s crucifixion can be perceived as beautiful, although only the conviction of faith can ground a firm certitude of this beauty” (“The Beauty of the Ugly” 181).
Barth has problems with this view because it is tied in, traditionally, with a merit mediating interpretation of the sacraments, and leads, in his eyes to the idolatry of nature. I have not read Barth on Rom 1:20, so I cannot speak to what he says about natural theology. But let it be known that the relationship between, in the first case, natural theology and its parallel, “intramundane aesthetics” (Fields’ term for philosophical aesthetics), and revelation, in the second case, is what is at stake here. Is revelation so strange that we are fools before the world? Or is there a kernel of “natural” reason within Christian revelation, which makes us only seem the fool? I’m drawn to the parables and Christ’s concept of hiddenness on this front, but I’ll not advance that idea here.
But what does Barth think about beauty? I’ll let the horse speak (from the horse’s mouth…):
“in answering this as all other questions in the doctrine of God, we must be careful not to start from any preconceived ideas, especially in this case a preconceived idea of the beautiful…. God is not beautiful in the sense that He shares in an idea of beauty superior to Him, so that to know it is to know Him as God. On the contrary, it is as He is God that He is also beautiful, so that He is the basis and standard of everything that is beautiful and of all ideas of the beautiful….” (Gesa Theissen’s Theological Aesthetics: a Reader 318). That said, Barth does not think that beauty is “a leading concept” of God (316). He thinks that both Pseudo-Dionysius and Augustine have mis-stepped here (Balthasar does not share Barth’s opinion). But if we are going to talk about beauty we must see it as an aspect of God’s glory, which includes what we call beauty. “The objective meaning of God’s glory is His active grace and mercy and patience, His love” (317). His glory gives pleasure, awakens desire, but above all “creat[es] enjoyment” (317). Here Barth recovers Augustine, who claimed that there are two categories all “things” can fall into usi (use) and frui (enjoyment). God is the only “thing” that can be enjoyed, where as all other things are to be used for the enjoyment of God; yes, this includes other people, a concept which is repugnant to modern ears. But let us put it this way, if God is the summon bonum, the supreme good, it is likely that his desire for one’s use of other people will not contradict his goodness, and will instead lead to mutual enjoyment in God (for more on this see Paul Griffith’s Lying 52-3). So when Barth claims that God’s glory is to be enjoyed, he is tying theological conceptions of beauty to the source of enjoyment. What is then the sensation of beauty? Joy. “…[T]he glory of God is not only great and sublime [read Kant here] or holy [Otto] and gracious [Luther]…[God’s glory] awakens joy, and is itself joyful. It is not merely a glory which is solemn and good and true, and which, in its perfection and sublimity, might be gloomy or at least joyless…The theologian who has no joy in his work is not a theologians at all” (319). As we can see, Barth is serious about joy, and rightly so. What is it about God that makes him this source of enjoyment and beauty? Barth claims that God is the perfect unity of form and content, “in this form the perfect content, God Himself, shines out” (319). I find this argument to be a bit circular, but I suppose it is the best we can do for now. God is what makes God beautiful. I would point to aspects of wholeness, as Barth does, symmetry, unity, proportionality, spoken-ness and absolute reception in love. But much of this is tied to the imminent trinity and not the economic trinity, which I think is the most tangible aspect of God’s beauty, his discipline. Odd that I’m saying this, but his discipline gives form to his beauty in us, which we are to respond to in obedience. Ultimately we fail, but we fail into grace, which is a beautiful thought.

I’m going to try and tackle David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite, tomorrow – Part 4. I find his conception of beauty very compelling, and theoretically potent. You might notice that you’ve been getting Balthasar throughout. I wonder if I’ll dedicate a day to him, or if he just floats through this whole investigation like a spirit…time will tell.