“We live in a period when ‘things are deprived of the splendor reflected from eternity’. -Hans Urs Von Balthasar.
In the ancient world, beauty was understood as a transcendental property synonymous with goodness and truth. The dominant ancient worldview across philosophy and religions was dualistic, accommodating the physical temporal world and a metaphysical, spiritual, eternal and unconditional realm that transcends ‘beyond’ man’s finite existence. According to Plato, these two realms were seen as antithetical with an ontological qualitative difference on the level of good. The physical was a lesser good in contrast to the higher spiritual good which is eternal, unseen and metaphysical. In Plato’s view, true beauty is in the transcendent realm of ‘forms’, which are where ideas originates in their pure form before descend into the lesser the material manifestation we encounter with our senses. The world of physical appearances are merely a shadow to the pure forms from that originate in the untainted, trustworthy and eternal world.
Contrary to the Platonic view, the medieval philosophers and theologians retrieved the Aristotle’s position which conceived of matter and spirit as one integrated substance. In the middle ages, philosophers sought to articulate theological truths and demonstrate the harmony of reason and the natural world with spiritual revelation. Through elaborate treatises theologians and philosophers alike described the architecture of God’s universe was initiated by Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover and the creation is good reflection and orderly extension of the same source in different linguistic terms. For the medieval mind, the material world is not so much in opposition to spirit as it is participating in and growing toward a union with the metaphysical transcendental ideal state and final end. The physical properties of the universe radiate traces of infinite splendor of the Creator and reflect meaning which transcend its immanence and inherent properties.
The Fall of Beauty as a Transcendental
This sounds like a foreign language to our modern empirical worldview which excludes any notion of a metaphysical realm beyond our five senses. In today’s world, Beauty is stripped of its spiritual qualities and transcendent value brought underneath the microscope of empirical reason and bound within the arena of our senses. The Protestant church is equal to blame for stripping aesthetics and beauty of its spiritual value. The reformation advanced one-sided emphasis of faith comes by hearing and sola scriptura. During the reformation the revolts of the peasants it was common practice to loot churches, shatter stain glass windows, remove sculptures and leave the only remaining aesthetic object was the preacher’s lectern with the Bible in the center of the church. This became the aesthetic transformation the Protestant church underwent and eventually contributed to the the elimination of an immanent aesthetics in view and practice.
For the reformation sealed ‘a sharp dichotomy was introduced between hearing and seeing. For the reformers, the heart of faith was listening to God’s word, not contemplating his appearance’. For Luther, ‘reason is of the devil’. Human rationality needs to be regenerated and cleansed by the grace of God in order to properly apprehend truth. Man’s rationality without God’s grace is insufficient to intuitively grasp truth. ‘The fact that God who is exalted becomes lowly, that the Holy identifies with the sinner, that the ever-living Lord dies on the cross- all these contradictions are stumbling blocks for reason and can only be accepted by faith’. Karl Barth went so far as to say, ‘that the reformation and Protestant orthodoxy completely ignored the aesthetic element’.
After the reformation into the enlightenment period, human autonomous reason, elevated to become the judge of all truth with its gavel of the scientific method and empirical evidence the ecclesiastical authority was dethroned. ‘As Europe is recovering from religious warfare, it has become divided after decades of bloodbath. Part of what the enlightenment thinkers are trying to think together, without being dependent on religious categories, you have religious difference and still have rational discourse’. As metaphysics is bound up in the territory of the Ecclesial, man liberated reason from the guidance of Ecclesial authority and into the realm of autonomy. The human subject is moved to the center no longer dependent on the authority of revelation from the church. It is here a divergence is wedged between autonomous reason and revelation. ‘Because it is believed that revelation takes away our autonomy and leaves us in thrall to the authority of others or of the other impersonal other, it becomes necessary to replace untrammeled reason’. As a result of the loss of metaphysics and revelation, man’s aesthetics is reduced to a ‘reality mirrored in its own representations; it does not transcend itself’.
The romantic period rose in reaction to the enlightenment period in a shift turns to an anthropocentric worldview. For the Romantic, It’s not only man’s reason as the source of creative power but additionally one’s imagination, freedom, boundlessness, the subject’s interrelation nature and the infinite. The result is a complete embodiment of human freedom, then imagining is propelled by a will which is empowered to wholly reformulate reality’. The most formidable thinker to advance this spirit from the romantic period into the future generations is Frederic Nietzsche. We will examine the function of his aesthetics as an antithesis to transcendentals.
With Nietzsche’s famous pronouncement ‘God is dead’ in ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’. Nietzsche’s character displaces Moses with Zarathustra a prophet of scientific enlightenment with inverted revelation utters the destruction of metaphysics, the decline of moral values and echoed the destruction of objective moral truth. Nietzsche critiqued reality as dominated by a nihilist, meaninglessness, and absurd existence. The true and good is purely an issue of what you will it to be. Truth is invented and no longer discovered. ‘It is only various individual perspectives that reflect unique wills to power for that matter, perspective is the basic condition of all life’.‘The valorization from the point of view of ‘truth’ and morality (the good) is radically replaced by subjective aesthetic valorization, the only possibility in a perspectival world of pure appearances’.
As an erudite classicist Nietzsche reinstated the ancient Greek gods Appolline and Dionysius to elucidate the nature of human reality and aesthetic experience essentially is order and chaos. Appolline is symbolic of light, reason, clarity, order and Dionysius on the other hand is representative of revelry, drunkenness, irrationality, wild and ecstatic. For Nietzsche human life is marked by experiences of both natures. The function of ‘Appolline and Dionysian need reconciliation, in one sense you don’t get sublimation you get moments of stability but you don’t really move beyond it, they reach temporary settlements’. As Quash elucidated the point further, ‘the world is like this, drawing making figures on the beach, then knocking them over and taking just as much pleasure in destruction as creating’. It’s that you need Appolline to make life possible. For Nietzsche art functions as Appolline to stabilize, tame, and heal the misery we experience in every day life. Art is not a medium that draws you out subjectivity and consoles you with a transcendent meaning. Rather, its function is to ‘give us an insight into the nature of reality, and at the same time reconciles us with, and ‘tames’, a broader range of the phenomena and experiences that one faces at the brink of rationality’.
‘Man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence… he is nauseated. Here, when the danger to his will is greatest, art approaches as a saving ‘rettende’ sorceress, expert at healing ‘heilkundige’. She alone knows hot to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions which one can live: these are sublime as the artistic taming of the horrible, and the comic as the artistic discharge of nausea of absurdity’.
We can see with the loss of the vertical dimension of metaphysics, transcendence and revelation, the secular aesthetic function is limited to mirror reality and make connection with it. For Nietzsche transcendence is an illusion that ‘destroys rationality, and the aesthetic comes as a ‘savior to repair the shattered perspective’. For Nietzsche Art replaces the need for religion. In refute of Nietzsche’s critique, I will seek to show that revelation, analogy and transcendence are embedded in human reality and indispensable to an aesthetic encounter. This is in contrast to Nietzsche’s diagnosis of reality self-constructed truth, autonomy of reason and will to power.
Transcendence & Revelation as a part of Ordinary Life
‘All Truth is a species of revelation.’- Coleridge
A closer look at reality portrays that its structure constitutes a transcendental dynamic. One need only to recourse to knowing and relating to another human being to witness the horizontal transcendence with the other. In Colin Gunton’s essay, ‘The authority of the other: Towards a general theology of revelation’ he goes to show, ‘revelation is integral to our being’ and ‘without which we should know nothing at all’. Before making an appeal to transcendence, Gunton intimates knowledge of other finite beings and the world are predicated upon revelation. In quoting Hamann’s revelatory paradox, ‘Speak that I may see,’ be opened as a window of the mystery of personal revelation’. Hamann’s statement illustrates the fact that knowledge of other humans is dependent upon the free personal self-disclosure. ‘We do not truly know others unless he or she opens him or herself to be known. The second reason Gunton highlights the reason self knowledge has to be mediated is because here too we are beings in relation, and we know ourselves with our mediation of others’.
Additionally, man’s relationship to the external world is by necessity a matter of revelation. Science thinks that it does not depend upon authority or revelation but an exercise of free autonomous reason of inquiry. On the contrary the laws of nature tell us in fact man’s reason is dependent upon the mediation of external stimuli on the senses. For example, human sight without the substance of light would be unable to see material form. Secondarily, ‘only if we listen, look and receive we shall know. In that sense we are under authority of that which is other than we, and that means truth’. Now that point being made is if clear observations of nature show knowledge of it, truth (revelation) is mediated to us by an ‘other’ whom we are under authority. Free rational inquiry is not the whole picture because knowledge is mediated through an other finite being or sense impressions from external objects Then it is only logical to conclude that divine revelation occurs under the same guise and can be trusted because it’s encoded in all reality.
It was Albert Einstein who quoted the very fact our minds are intelligible to the world is a ‘miracle of science’, ‘that there can be, we not know how, some measure of correspondence between our words, concepts, mathematics, models and the real world’. Gunton soon after notes, a miracle cannot be explained only by recourse to the concept of God, but rather who gives a reason why our experience of the world as a place of revelation and understanding should be as it is’. Thus knowledge and intellect affirm a transcendent dimension. As our knowing is dependent upon the sensation of external physical media, our intellect then formulates concepts that transcend and articulate the reality experienced. As Aquinas outlined ‘knowing begins in the sensation of particular things. Although imagining and thinking are based in their work, true knowledge is beyond the scope of senses’. It is clear then that knowledge is revelation insofar as it is truth disclosed by an other whether finite beings, the world or divine. Secondly the intellect is a transcendental that ‘goes beyond the physical conditions it deploys. A judgment can’t be described in terms of the physical events which initiate it. This brings us to our next proof of the analogical condition of reality.
‘All language about God must , as St. Thomas Aquinas pointed out necessarily be analogical’.
In Dorothy Sayers text, ‘In the Mind of the Maker’ shows how the creative agency of an artist is an analogy to God’s divine agency in the world. In the section on analogical language Sayers highlights the inward mechanics of language denote a dynamic of transcendence, in that we know nothing in themselves. She notes, ‘Not only is language of the divine but in fact all language about everything we think in a series of metaphors. We can explain nothing in terms of itself but of other things. Sayers goes on to show even the occupation of Science whose choice of language is the most empirical and literal is dependent on analogy:
‘Similarly the physicist, struggling to interpret the alien structure of the atom, finds himself obliged to consider it sometimes as a “wave” and sometimes as a particle.” He knows very well that both these terms are analogical- they are metaphors, “picture-thinking,” and as pictures they are incompatible and mutually contradictor’. The fabric of human existence is encoded with analogies whose nature is transcendent, meaning is beyond it’s empirical existents. Nietzsche’s aesthetic discourse is a reductive materialism is incomprehensive. It excludes the dynamic of transcendence clearly encoded in language, finite relationships and the creation.
Recovering Transcendental Beauty
In order to illuminate the necessity for beauty as a transcendental Jacques Maritain a 20th century Thomist philosopher will throw further light. For Maritain like Sayers in the tradition of Aquinas, ‘the strongest argument for the existence of the transcendental notions is that they are only real means of communication’. Another words, if communication lacked transcendental notions we would be trapped in particularity and be incommunicable to the surrounding world. In order to ‘have a community of knowledge if our judgments refer to objects outside us. Further, these aspects must have something in common, some bonds of unity, over and above their particular existence’. For example, the meaning man procures life necessities of food and shelter to provide a safe prosperous environment for his family to thrive and values the quality of life which is a shared objective universal quality. Though various cultures linguistic communication differ in phonic expression, yet there is a universal meaning. ‘For Maritain, the communication of meaning is the evidence for, not the foundation of, the possibility of metaphysics’.
For Maritain, beauty is ‘the radiance of all the transcendentals united’. In adopting Aquinas aesthetics, beauty is dependent upon three categories: proportion, integrity and clarity. We will see the equivalent for Balthasar is form and splendor. Yet both Balthasar and Maritain maintain these criteria are integral to the material form, which derive their beauty from its source of metaphysical participation in God. The creation’s beauty is an analogy of beauty of the Creator. Beauty has the same many-sidedness as being. All things are analogously beautiful because they are engendered by the one ‘super-analogue of beauty: God’.
It has been pointed that with the dissolution of beauty as a transcendental, this was perpetuated by the enlightenment, romantic and proponents such as Nietzsche. The premise was the shattering of a metaphysical worldview, elevation of human faculties and denial of revelation. In recent time, Philosopher Maritain and Balthasar are a couple thinkers who have shown aesthetics need not be exclusive nor antithetical in adopting a physical or metaphysical. Rather, the proper mode of understanding is a retrieval of medieval aesthetics, which understands the metaphysical participating in the physical world and illuminating its reality. In Balthasar’s words ‘the transcendental property of being, truth which is no abstraction. Rather the living bond between God and the world’. Now we turn to Balthasar’s task to revive theological aesthetics.
“Beauty is the apprehensive power by which we behold the good”.- Balthasar
Thus far I have sought to show the structural make up of our world connotes revelation, transcendence, which are essential to human existence and an aesthetic paradigm that denies these dynamics is untenable. A turn to Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s Theological aesthetic program will further illuminate the need and necessity for beauty as a transcendental. Balthasar (1905-1988) is a Swiss Catholic theologian who gave his life to service of the Church as a Jesuit priest, a non officiated academic whose magnum opus ‘The Glory of The Lord’ three volume systematic text on theological aesthetics, dramatic, and logic which aims to restore aesthetics as a transcendental alongside goodness and truth. For the purpose of our discussion we will examine his work on Beauty the analogy of being, Splendor & Form, the centrality of Christ and the aesthetic encounter, arguing for beauty as a transcendental which is a universal, objective aesthetic.
‘…The One, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, these are what we call the transcendental attributes of Being, because they surpass all the limits of essences and are co-extensive with Being.’
‘Since the transcendental properties of being are supra categorical, they must be, predicable to both divine and worldly being’.
For Balthasar as for Maritain, in order to speak of transcendence one must make intelligible analogies from the physical dimension that explicate its metaphysical reality. Natural examples point to metaphysical reality. Nichols points out that what Balthasar wanted then, was a philosophy, and ultimately a theology, that started from the analogy of being (the limited but real comparison we can make between created being and its uncreated source)’ Unlike Kant who posited that the phenomena world is unable to render knowledge of the metaphysical objective universal knowledge ‘noumena’ thing in itself is a transcendental property for reason. Though they differ ontologically in man’s ability to intuit knowledge from the physical phenomena analogically of the metaphysical. They do agree that the epistemological function of aesthetic ‘sense’ experience mediates an intimation of transcendence. ‘So ‘Theological aesthetics’ will consider the part played by the sense with their associated powers of memory and imagination- in the awareness of God’. Another words, the engagement of our senses with the beauty of physical reality mediates a bond with its metaphysical source, God. For Maritain in aesthetics there is not an incommunicable gap, rather beauty in the world is like a ladder which invites one from the physical to the spiritual.
‘Balthasar firmly holds on to the idea of the ‘analogy of being’ (analogy entice) and rejects any univocal applications of categories in Christian theology. God is nothing of Being’. As ‘nature is the art of God’, it can only render limited knowledge of Him analogically. It is incomprehensive because He is also ‘wholly other’ from His creation. Similarly, one would not know everything about an artist by looking at one of his paintings. In order to know him fully he must bestow revelation of himself, free personal self-disclosure. This touches on a topic to be discussed later on in Christ the form of beauty’s aesthetical function. The point being made, analogy of being mediates revelation of the metaphysical world, without rendering complete knowledge.
A key influential theologian to Balthasar’s aesthetics on the ‘analogy of being’ was a Protestant Gerard Nebel. Noting the mediating role of beauty (GL 1, 62), Nebel goes on to say that something of God’s splendor into his creatures (GL 1 64). At the same time anything beautiful in nature has to point away from itself to some other beauty’. Essentially beauty is the transcendent revelation of truth. The immanent beauty of the creation radiates the spiritual beauty of the glory of Christ. Thus beauty has revelatory nature, in that it discloses transcendent knowledge to the senses. Which brings one to Balthasar’s first step which is ‘to show that beauty is a possible vehicle for divine self-manifestation’.
Two key words to understand Balthasar’s aesthetic ontology are form and splendor. ‘Form is important to understanding of beauty as it is to an account of how reality is presented to us by the senses’. Balthasar’s notion of form was developed during his studies in Vienna in the 1920’s under the philosopher Franz Brentano who studied musical composition, melody, the form gestalt with a particular focus on ‘the objects in terms of the relations of parts within the whole’. In noting the particular unity within the changing sequence of sounds. Further a melody retains its specific quality when it is transposed into a different key. This must result from the gestalt , which inheres in and shapes each melody’. The gestalt is the organic wholeness of things’. This gestalt in Aquinas terms is the distinctive quality which is inherent to its property.
While, ‘splendor is the light of meaningfulness which shines through all form (Created and Uncreated). Thus beauty contains a horizontal dimension, an inherent harmony of proportion in the object that makes it a form and the vertical intersection of splendor upon the form. ‘The beautiful, is as he would put it, the meeting-place of finite form with infinite light’. Another words beauty is the transcendent contact with our immanent finite world. ‘While the form signals transcendence by pointing away from itself as so much disclosing its own depths. Transcendence is the depth within the form, and is more pointed toward an infinite depth’. Hence Balthasar’s aesthetics upholds that beauty is concrete, intelligible to the senses and points toward transcendence. Ontologically speaking, beauty as in ‘God’s order of salvation Plato’s idealistic imago-metaphysics and Aristotle’s realistic causa-et-finis metaphysics actually come together on a higher plane’. Thus retrieving the metaphysical dimension that is communicable and not exclusive of the empirical.
‘We ought never to speak of God’s beauty without reference to the form and manner of appearing which he exhibits in salvation-history. The beauty and the glory which are proper to God may be inferred and ‘read’ off from God’s epiphany and its incomprehensible glory which is worthy of God himself’.
At the same time, Balthasar wants to make clear that theological aesthetics is not based on ‘worldly philosophical aesthetic’ principles, but the form of Christ in historical revelation which is the central focal point. The influential figure on Balthasar here is Karl Barth whom he credits in his introduction to ‘The Glory of the Lord’(GL1 53ff) the very idea of contemplating the divine glory and of reconciling Christian theology in the light of Beauty comes from Barth’. Balthasar disagrees with Barth, ‘in making Christ’s form as God made human the sole analogue between God and the world’. Contrarily he states, ‘it is impossible to understand beauty as supernatural revelation without first experiencing beauty naturally, in creation’. O’Donaghue points out in Balthasar’s Herrlichkeit, Balthasar is bridging a tension between ‘The Barthian theology of discontinuity (and the total otherness of God in Christ) and the Platonic and Aristotelian strand in Catholic theology which sees nature and grace as somehow continuous, and so defends the basic concept of goodness of beauty of human life’. The telos is for ‘Balthasar’s aesthetics begin humbly at the level of sense perception, but ultimately they investigate the meaning and content of encounter with the glory of God’. Thus the end result for Balthasar’s theological aesthetics in line with Barth is contemplation of spiritual beauty, God’s ‘glory’ manifest in ‘super-form’ Christ. In order to carry forth this task Balthasar posits from Barth one ‘does not proceed from the traditional aesthetic theory, but ‘arrives at the content of beauty in a purely theological manner’, that is by contemplating the data of scripture, in particular the phenomenon of glory (GL1 53)’.
‘. And this persuasive and convincing form must necessarily be called the beauty of God’.
For Barth, God’s glory is beautiful in it’s attractive power to draw man to the visible historical form of revelation, the event of the incarnation. In crediting classical tradition Barth notes beauty was rightly understood in Augustine, ‘what is beautiful produces pleasure’ and Aquinas ‘beauty is that which pleases when being seen’. Barth defines beauty in the dogmatics ‘If we can and must say that God is beautiful, to say this is to say how he enlightens and convinces and persuades us’. Thus, the classical definition for beauty invoking desire, pleasure and attraction is transferred to God’s glory. ‘That which attracts us to joy in Him, and our consequent attraction, is the inalienable form of his glory and the indispensable form of the knowledge of his glory’. Beauty is the aesthetic encounter with revelation that radiates glory and invokes pleasure and delight in the beholding subject.
Barth further intimates the conquering and attracting dynamic in revelation is the concrete perfect form of Divine being revealed in Jesus Christ. He posits ‘this form has been ‘visible to us and has made an impression on us’. The transcendent revelation of absolute truth and goodness has condescended into our immanent sphere, manifest concretely to the senses to be contemplated. ‘The perfection of His form is simply the radiating outwards of the perfection of His content and therefore of God Himself’. The function of the form is radiant, and what it radiates is joy. It attracts and therefore it conquers. It is, therefore ‘beautiful’. Byochov further highlights, ‘Barth mentions the beauty of Christ- the concept fully developed by von Balthasar- and emphasizes the importance of seeing’ the form of the event of Jesus. Beauty in Barth can be seen as the transcendent revelation of truth. For God’s beauty is ‘How God in his glory, in his self-declaration, makes himself clear to man’. The incarnation simultaneously shatters a solely abstract metaphysical aesthetic criteria and complete immanent aesthetic elimination, by positing the concrete form of Jesus Christ as ‘the source of all truth and all goodness, but also the source of all beauty’. After Barth posits revelation at the locus for aesthetics, Balthasar propels this doctrine forward in his ‘Theological Aesthetics’ with aims to restore beauty as a transcendental alongside goodness and truth because ‘without beauty, the good also ‘looses its attractiveness the self-evidence of why it must be carried out”, and ‘the proofs of truth ‘loose their cogency’(GL1 19)’.
‘Since no theological perception is possible outside the ‘lux tuae claritatis’ and outside the grace that allows us to see, a grace which already belongs objectively to rapture and which subjectively may be said at least to initiate man’s transport to God’.
The subjective evidence for revelation lies upon the human side, pertaining to the gift of faith. The objective evidence for Balthasar is: ‘Christ Jesus as he is in himself, the Trinitarian Son disclosing in his humanity the hidden Trinity of divine being’. For Barth and Balthasar, revelation ‘the perfect form of Divine Being’ in Jesus Christ is only apprehensible in an encounter with illuminating grace enabled by the Holy Spirit. ‘Faith is a power of apperception experienced as a gift from a source beyond oneself’ and ‘on our part, the grace of faith requires a readiness to receive the light God gives, and a surrender to that light’. For ‘faith- is itself a kind of seeing. It is the establishment of a communion of reciprocal knowledge between God and myself’. But what reason does do is lend in advance certain credibility to the sign which makes it possible to see what is objectively visible’. Once reason is aided by grace man is able to aesthetically affirm and bear witness to Jesus Christ as Divine revelation.
Balthasar outlines the aesthetic experience connotes a double transcendent dynamic which occurs between the human and divine revelation. ‘This double and reciprocal ekstasis– God’s venturing forth to man and man’s to God’. Balthasar’s examination of Bonaventure’s vision and rapture illustrates this. Bonaventure’s fundamental experience’ is, first, surprise in the marvel of being as it touches his self. Bonaventure is ‘transported out’ of himself by the wonder of the infinitude of being’. Analogically a similar dynamic resonates in music, Barth comments ‘Mozart’s music is an invitation to the listener to venture just a little out of the sense of his own subjectivity’. This radically differs from Nietzsche who saw the function for aesthetics to stabilize a destructive reality, heal and remedy one’s subjective needs. Contrarily in Balthasar, aesthetic experience of revelation persuades man to venture out of subjectivity by participating in the objective and ‘creative powers of the universe’, i.e, God’s Trinitarian Being. In the event, Christ the beauty of revelation condescends to man, persuades him to transcend, ‘go beyond’ his own subjective desires and find his true intended unconditional joy in his Creator and love of the other.
I have attempted to demonstrate Beauty is a transcendental property in its function to mediate revelation and is synonymous with goodness and truth. In time past metaphysics grounded objective reference for a universal moral law which guided the actions of men. Beauty is the aesthetic encounter that reveals the transcendent. With the reformation iconoclasm, the rise of Science, Nietzsche’s shattering of metaphysics and pronouncement ‘God is dead’, morality was extracted from an objective universal, beauty is in the power of the subject. The general view mankind shares is limited within the horizon of sense gratification and attaining the ubermensch identical to the heroic fame eternal life is replace with lasting memory in posterity.
Predominantly in the realm of art, the modern age has carried forward one baton of Dionysius into our own age, leaving behind Appolline and the majority with a one-sidedness. Theologian Paul Tillich succinctly defined this phenomenon when he stated, ‘modern art is a mirror of meaninglessness’. ‘The creators of modern art have been able to see the meaninglessness of our existence and participated in its despair’. Thus, the aims of the modern aesthetic experience which assumes beauty as an immanent subjective property offers only a one-dimensional relationship. This reflects the world merely as it is and lost touch with its spiritual worldview and the notion beauty as an ideal and transcendent. One need only compare Jeff Koons sculpture with Michael Angelo’s sculpture of David. Beauty stripped of transcendence reflects humanity’s lower instincts, chaotic features of the world, the ephemeral fads, and whimsical trends. In contrast to the prevailing modern empiricist view, we discover in Gunton, Sayers, Maritain and Balthasar an physical universe radiates transcendence. The neglect of transcendence is reductionistic and neglects both common experience and plain logic. As William Blake stated, ‘If our perception were cleansed everything would appear to us as infinite.’
In Christ’s revelation we see the ultimate typology of aesthetic experience: one that accomplishes modern art’s aims by descent into solidarity with the chaos of the world to then and transcends in transformation into an ideal of transcendent beauty. This pattern of redemption is the death and rebirth cycle in nature. The Transcendent Truth is revealed in the historical form through the incarnation of Jesus Christ, when the Creator descended into man’s abysmal, ugly reality and participated in its meaninglessness. The Creator thereby established solidarity with man, absorbed human suffering, and conquers it by death and resurrects into glory. The subject’s aesthetic encounter with revelation is one where the Creator enters into solidarity with the species, illuminates a person with purpose, persuades the individual to venture beyond his or her subjectivity and partake in the universal divine agency fellowship of the Trinity. Thereby imbuing the recipient the consolation of beauty and hope of transformation. In this type of encounter, beauty invokes a feel feeling of hope, solidarity, consolation as an end, and as philosopher Sir Roger Scruton called a ‘transcendental homecoming’.
Footnotes
[1] Aidan, Nichols. A Key To Balthasar. (Dalton: Longman & Todd, London, 2011), p. 12.
[2] John SJ, O’Donnell. Von Balthasar: Outstanding Christian Thinkers. (Geoffrey Chapman: London, 1992), p. 19.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Oleg V., Byochov. Aesthetic Revelation. (The Catholic University Press of America: Washington, 2010), p. 52.
[5] Ben, Quash. Lecture on Kant. (Kings College: London, 22 January 2016)
[6] Colin, Gunton. ‘Lecture 2, The Authority of the Other: Towards a General Theology of Revelation’, in A Brief Theology of Revelation, (Bloomsbury Publishing: Edinburgh, 2005), p. 21.
[7] Francesca, Murphy. Christ The Form of Beauty. (T & T Clark LTD: Edinburgh, 1995), p. 138
[8] Ibid., p. 5
[9] Nietzsche, Frederich. Beyond Good and Evil (New York: Modern Library, 1992), p. 193.
[10] Murphy, p. 40.
[11] Ben, Quash. Lecture on Nietzsche. (Kings college, London: 19 February 2016)
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Murphy, p. 41.
[15] Nietzsche, Frederich. ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, edited & translated by W. Kaufmann, (New York: Modern Library, 2005), p. 98.
[16] Murphy, p. 41.
[17] Gunton, p. 19.
[18] Ibid., p. 33.
[19] Ibid., p. 23.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid., p. 26.
[23] Ibid., p. 35.
[24] Albert, Einstein. ‘The World as I See it’, translated by Alan Harris (London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1935), p. 156.
[25] Gunton, p. 37.
[26] Murphy, p.1
[27] Ibid., p.1.
[28] Sayers, Dorothy. In the Mind of the Maker (Harper: San Francisco, 1987), pp. 22-23.
[29] Ibid., p. 23.
[30] Murphy, p. 42.
[31] Ibid., 45.
[32] Jacques, Maritain. Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (Princeton University Press: New Jersey, 1953), p. 162.
[33] Murphy, p. 49.
[34] Hans Urs, Balthasar. ‘Point of Departure and Concerns’. In: E. Leiva-Herikakis (Trans.), The glory of the Lord: a theological aesthetics, Vol. 1, Seeing the Form. (T & T Clark, Edinburgh), p.18. Balthasar book are you referencing-add Book title to reference)re.
[35] Hans Urs, Balthasar. The Glory of the Lord. A Theological Aesthetics I. Seeing the Form (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1982), p. 467.
[36] Stephan, Van Erp. ‘The Art of Theology. Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological Aesthetics and the Foundations of Theology’ (Lueven: Peeters, 2004), p. 16
[37] Nichols, p. 9.
[38] Ibid., p. 14.
[39] Bychkov, reference to Henrici (GW256-57) & Balthasar GL5 613-56)., p. 67.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Nichols, p. 42.
[42] Ibid., p. 16.
[43] Murphy, p. 134.
[44] Ibid.
[45] Ben, Quash. Balthasar Lecture. (Kings College: London, 23 March 2016)
[46] Murphy, p. 143.
[47] Nichols, p. 18.
[48] Quash, Balthasar Lecture.
[49] Balthasar, p. 123.
[50] Ibid., p. 124.
[51] Byochov, p. 52
[52] Nichols, p. 20.
[53] Hans Urs, Balthasar. The Glory of the Lord. A theological Aesthetic. The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity, op. cit.,pp. 23-25.
[54] Noel, O’donaghue. The Analogy of Beauty. Edited by John Riches (T & T. Clark LTD: Edinburgh, 1986), p. 3.
[55] Murphy, p. 18.
[56] O’Donnell, p. 20-21.
[57] Karl,Barth. The Doctrine of Creation, the first-half volume II of Church Dogmatics. edited by Bromiley, G.W. & T.F. Torrance, (T. & T Clark: Edinburgh, 1957), p. 659.
[58] Ibid., p. 656.
[59] Ibid., p. 650.
[60] Ibid., p. 655.
[61] Ibid., p. 658.
[62] Ibid., p. 661.
[63] Bychov, p. 54.
[64] Barth, p. 666.
[65] Ibid., p. 664.
[66] Bychov, p. 59.
[67] Balthasar, p. 125 .
[68] Nichols, p.31
[69] Ibid., p. 29.
[70] Aidan, Nichols. The Word Abroad Has Been Abroad: A Guide through Balthasar’s Aesthetics. (The Catholic University Press of America: Washington, 1998), p. 25.
[71] O’Donnell, p.23.
[72] Balthasar, p. 126.
[73] Murphy, p. 148.
[74] Paul, Tillich. The Courage to Be. (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2014),
- 136.