Beauty and Its Violences

Abstract

This essay interrogates the complex relationship between beauty and violence through an examination of the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, John Milbank, and David Bentley Hart. I argue, first, that in Milbank’s move beyond Balthasar, there are subtle differences in his coding of the transcendentals with significant theopolitical effects that must be reckoned with. In the end, I argue that while Milbank’s phenomenology of violence cannot be gainsaid, that the subsequent formative prescriptions that he thinks follow from this draft and deform beauty into performing a function essentially alien to it. In the second section, I turn to the theological aesthetics of David Bentley Hart and argue that if we decouple Hart’s telling of the story of the postmodern city and its wastes from Milbank’s telling of a similar tale that we will be in a better position to understand the radical nature of his provocations. Contrary to much of the received wisdom with respect to Hart’s work, I argue that the form of his theological labor has everything to do with his argument that martyrdom is the normal condition for the professing Christian, which despite his critique of “pacifism” represents a significant advance on Milbank’s political theology.