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.