Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine Daniel H. Williams Carol Harrison . Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine Oxford Theological Monographs Series. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pp. xi + 289. While there is nothing new in recognizing the theological importance of aesthetics for interpreting Augustine, Harrison has made a strong case both for the preeminence of Augustine's quest for beauty and for the way this quest served to modify significantly the Platonic dualism which acted as the intellectual underpining of the bishop's thought. Augustine freely admits in the Confessions how strongly he was attracted to Platonism's emphasis on the superiority of knowledge derived from the Ideas by the mind or reason in contrast to the materialism he once imbibed as a Manichee. With impressive familiarity of Augustine's work and judicious deployment of secondary literature, Harrison charts Augustine's glad reception of Neo-Platonic epistemology and yet how the Christianization of his thought led him to reject Platonism's negative evaluation of the temporal, sensible realm. For it is in the beauty of this realm, despite its ontological inferiority to the eternal, that God, the Supreme Beauty, is revealed to the human senses. Thus, one may say that Augustine developed his own "ascent of the soul" in which created reality need not hinder our attainment of eternal truths, but becomes the very arena where divine revelation is imparted to those who will receive it by faith. Throughout the book Harrison foils with R. J. O'Connell's interpretation of Augustinian aesthetics (pp. 33-34, 60-61, 67, 151) which argued that Augustine only theoretically arrived at an "incarnate aesthetic" since the centripedal tug of Platonic forces in his philosophy never allowed him to transpose it into theological practice. Harrison martials numerous examples in her refutation of O'Connell (and Svoboda) from a wide spectrum of the Augustinian corpus that "as a Christian and a bishop" Augustine does achieve an "incarnate aesthetic," that is, a truly positive evaluation of temporal and external beauty, as demonstrated in his views on anthropology, Scripture and especially the Incarnation of the Word. The doctrine of the Incarnation (pp. 193-94), which Harrison says, "stands at the hub of Augustine's thought" and forms it into "a working and harmonious whole," offers the most tangible illustration of the way God reaches fallen humanity through the sensible and temporal in order to lead us to the divine and ideal. As God's ultimate revelation of Himself, the event and purpose of the Incarnation underlines the point that the material creation is not set aside in Augustine's mind as a seductive snare for carnal humanity, but as the work of the Divine Artist, "for those who can see" (p. 136) and as the locus where redemption takes place. Insightful use is made of the Latin word forma (which functioned as the Latin equivalent for the Platonic archetype of reality, and could also be translated adjectivally as "beautiful," pp. 2; 38-39), by which Christ, the incarnate divine Form, is said to have reformed the deformity or ugliness of our humanity. At the heart of Harrison's complex argumentation lie two assertions: 1) that an aesthetical paradigm can successfully function as an underlying hermeneutic for our interpretation of Augustine, and more problematically, 2) that Augustine's [End Page 225] theory of aesthetics and its relation to his teaching on faith, reason, creation, Scripture, divine providence in history, etc., remain fundamentally unchanged throughout his works. Thus there is nothing in the early thought of Augustine which contradicts the latter with the exception of terminological differences (pp. 196-97). But has Harrison pushed her debate with O'Connell too far? A case for a "unified" theory of aesthetics, and hence a "unified" Augustine, must still take into account that there are other theological constructions originating from the same writer which reveal essential alterations of thought over a forty-year span of publication. Even thematic studies are not immune from such problems. Harrison does speak of the "early thought" of Augustine by acknowledging that his presentation in the 380s was more strongly dominated by a Platonic model of epistemology, or, that the...