Theological Aesthetics Research Articles

Droga duchowa Hansa Ursa von Balthasara – lata 1940–1988

Hans Urs von Balthasar był jednym z najwybitniejszych teologów XX wieku. Jego biografia stanowi interesujące wprowadzenie zarówno do jego oryginalnego teologicznego dorobku, jak i do zrozumienia zasadniczych motywów całej XX-wiecznej teologii. Okres przypadający na lata od 1940 do 1988 to czas w życiu von Balthasara obfitujący w ważne wydarzenia i spotkania z osobami, które decydująco wpłynęły na jego losy i teologiczną twórczość. W tym czasie Balthasar związał się z miejscem, z którym najczęściej jest kojarzony, tzn. z Bazyleą w Szwajcarii. Tam właśnie poznał Adrienne von Speyr. Spotkanie to miało kapitalne znaczenie zarówno dla jego dzieła, jak i dla jego osobistej biografii (zwłaszcza doprowadziło go do trudnej decyzji opuszczenia szeregów Towarzystwa Jezusowego).Owocem ich – według oceny Balthasara – wspólnego posłannictwa było powstanie nowej wspólnoty (Johannesgemeinschaft), nowego wydawnictwa (Johannes Verlag), a przede wszystkim nowej myśli teologicznej, które inspirował św. Jan Apostoł. Jest to także oczywiście czas II Soboru Watykańskiego, który miał wielkie znaczenie dla życia i dzieła von Balthasara. Te i inne ważne wydarzenia i spotkane osoby pomagają nam zrozumieć, jak doszło do napisania słynnej Balthasarowskiej „trylogii” (Estetyka teologiczna, Teodramatyka i Teologika), skąd płynęły inspiracje do Teologii Wielkiej Soboty i co doprowadziło do wyrażenia myśli chrześcijańskiej przy pomocy instrumentarium zaczerpniętego z teorii teatru.

Metafísica y percepción de la forma de Cristo. Herencia europea en la estética teológica de Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Estas páginas presentan la intuición central de la estética teológica de Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jesucristo como forma de la revelación de Dios, subrayando su capacidad de integrar la tradición metafísica, incluido el mito, lo que es constatable en la Biblia misma y en la teología. Europa ha heredado no sólo una cultura, sino una visión configurada del mundo en torno a los misterios cristianos, pero esta herencia tiene su vigor sólo en el amor que sabe ver, honrar, acoger y servir al Amor absoluto encarnado y sacrificado por los hombres.

Preface

Preface Michael C. Jordan Archbishop Bruno Forte in his book, The Portal of Beauty, suggests that there exists a widespread indifference or hostility to beauty in the contemporary world, while also demonstrating that a Christian theological understanding of beauty can show us what it means to say that beauty can call us to salvation.1 Forte’s reflections are deeply grounded in the Christian tradition of thought about beauty from Augustine through Hans Urs von Balthasar, and it is of particular benefit to readers of the English translation of Forte’s book that we also gain access through Forte’s work to the fruit of Italian scholarship on this tradition. In addition, Forte calls to our attention in his final chapter significant poems by Italian poet Eugenio Montale and Catalan poet Joan Maragall. Forte enables us to reach a fresh understanding of what it means to recognize the precarious position of beauty and he revitalizes our recognition of beauty’s theological importance. As Forte indicates in his chapter on Balthasar titled “The Glory of Beauty,” it is the great merit of Balthasar’s theological aesthetics to have called attention to the contemporary urgency of recovering a theological understanding of beauty. Forte’s exposition of key arguments from Balthasar is cogent, but especially helpful is the [End Page 5] expanded contextualization of the contemporary cultural conditions that have obstructed cultural openness to beauty’s theological power. Forte draws upon Italian writer Cristina Campo to ask in the opening words of his final chapter, “Is not beauty the place where we must necessarily begin?”2 Campo in turn draws our attention to American poet William Carlos Williams who in Paterson explores the fear of beauty in the modern world: “But it is true, they fear/it more than death, beauty is feared/more than death, more than they fear death.”3 The text quoted by Campo is from Book III of Paterson, but Paterson’s Preface to Book I immediately names the centrality of the theme of beauty: “Rigor of beauty is the quest. But how will you find beauty when it is locked in the mind past all remonstrance?”4 This confluence of cultural sources suggests the contemporary predominance of a troubling spiritual condition: there are elements in modern culture that cultivate hostility and avoidance of beauty, and yet it is beauty that points the way to overcoming spiritual depletion. Forte builds his analysis of the sources of hostility to beauty by indicating the close association between beauty and death: like death, beauty disrupts the seeming autonomy, self-sufficiency, and tranquility of an enclosed worldly horizon and induces a restlessness that calls us to seek beyond the familiar temporal world. As Forte says, “beauty unsettles us in a way we often seek to avoid: we flee from beauty as we flee from the thought of death.”5 Therefore, the modern project that sees death as something to be conquered through scientific and technological mastery over the natural world also predisposes us, even if only as an unforeseen consequence, to regard beauty as an indication of a fragility that we seek to overcome. Just as Forte’s book provides an expanded understanding of the hostility to beauty, so also the intense focus on the deep implication of beauty in the Christian understanding of the Trinity and the Incarnation helps us see what it means to speak of the saving power of beauty. The opening sentence of the book provides what we might call a Christian distillation of the concept of beauty, that is, a concept that implies an understanding of Christian revelation as the foundation [End Page 6] for this approach to beauty. “Beauty is an event; beauty happens when the Whole offers itself in the fragment, and when this self-giving transcends infinite distance.”6 While this account of beauty is sufficiently broad to accommodate aesthetic theories that do not draw upon Christian revelation, the formulation is prepared, so to speak, to be especially suitable to a Christian trinitarian and incarnational vision of the world. Forte follows the insight of Balthasar according to which the human person, having been created in the image of God, is endowed with...

Excess, Artifice, Sentimentality: Almodóvar's Camp Cinema as a Challenge for Theological Aesthetics

Camp is defined as a style that is characterised by excess, artificiality, theatricality, exaggeration, sentimentality. What could this possibly contribute to Christian theological aesthetics, the study of God and theological issues through the aesthetic, art, beauty? This paper proposes, through a discussion of camp in its “incarnation” in Pedro Almodóvar’s cinema, that it has several aspects to offer. Camp uncovers and challenges the categories of truth and reality in theological aesthetics as well as the artforms in which this truth can be discovered. Its embrace of the superficial and material can be seen, in theological terms, as an incarnational aesthetics that offers redemption through the affirmation of the material, not its disruption or negation. Camp underlines the subversive power of pleasure and laughter against tendencies that dismiss pleasure as escapism, and challenges theological aesthetics to acknowledge the wisdom that lies in emotions and affects. It criticizes by fostering solidarity and empathy, rather than antagonism. Thus camp represents a challenge to self-critically reflect on processes of exclusion on an aesthetic and a social level, and challenges us to imagine a different world, a world of beauty, love and passion.

Universal Beauty: The Nature of Beauty and the Christian Response

The problem of beauty’s nature has been the subject of debate in the field of theological aesthetics for many centuries. In general, the classical idea of objective beauty has been contrasted with the modernist assertion of beauty’s subjectivism. This article evaluates the nature of beauty in art so as to see what the Christian response to beauty ought to be. This is done first by analyzing the historical claims of beauty’s nature and by looking at various contemporary responses to beauty. Next, we assess the theological method of George Lindbeck, which allows one to see the objective reality of beauty once the subjective nature of the cultural-linguistic system is grasped.

“But Do the Lord Care?”

The slain rapper Tupac Shakur contributes indispensably to two contemporary theologies centered around the crucified people, the theological aesthetics of liberation presented by Roberto Goizueta and the theology of the lynching tree articulated by James Cone. Placing the pioneering work of Goizueta and Cone in conversation with existing scholarship on the theological importance of Shakur’s music, I argue that Tupac crafts a theological aesthetics of liberation aimed at illuminating the injustice and Christological implications of the hypersegregated ghetto and the black mass prison

“Metaphysics as Aesthetics”: Aquinas' Metaphysics in Present‐day Theological Aesthetics

“Metaphysics as Aesthetics”: <scp>A</scp>quinas' Metaphysics in Present‐day Theological Aesthetics

Can Music “Mirror” God? A Theological-Hermeneutical Exploration of Music in the Light of Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel

A theological exploration of the potential of non-liturgical instrumental music for the transmission of religious Christian faith experience, based on a hermeneutical tool drawn from Jean-Jacques Nattiez as applied to Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel. The article explores musical composition, reception, as well as the piece of music in itself, to discover common traits and keys to understanding its “meaning”, and relate it to current thought and development in theology; in particular to themes of creativity, theological aesthetics, the Ascension, the artistic vocation and meaning-making in contemporary culture, through music and films.

Preface

Preface Michael C. Jordan Wiseblood Books in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has impressively inaugurated a series titled Wiseblood Essays in Contemporary Culture with the publication of a slightly revised and expanded version of “The Catholic Writer Today” by Dana Gioia, which originally appeared in the December 2013 issue of First Things.1 That Wiseblood has published the essay in two handsomely designed formats, one hand-bound, exemplifies the important point articulated concisely but fully by Gioia that the Catholic tradition exhibits a “glorious physicality” (29). Although Gioia deliberately refrains from directly grounding his essay in the broader thinking of theological aesthetics, the essay is infused with the understanding that the truths spoken by Catholicism reach the heart most directly when offered to culture through their beauty. This essay makes evident with respect to the contemporary condition of American literature and cultural life the truth of the broader claim put forward by Hans Urs von Balthasar in the opening pages of The Glory of the Lord that “Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated [End Page 4] and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.”2 As he reviews the extent to which Catholicism seems to have retreated from contemporary American cultural life, Gioia offers a warning: “Whenever the Church has abandoned the notion of beauty, it has lost precisely the power that it hoped to cultivate—its ability to reach souls in the modern world” (30). Throughout the essay, Gioia attends judiciously to what he calls the “two vast impoverishments”—the impoverishment suffered by the Church and the impoverishment of American culture—that result from the “virtual surrender” (26) of Catholicism from the artistic life of the culture. This attentiveness to both Church and artistic culture brings to mind another great work of reflection on these issues on a much broader level, the “Letter to Artists” of Blessed John Paul II. Gioia helpfully brings to bear in his focus on contemporary American literature a local version of the dialogue between the Church and art that John Paul engages in his apostolic letter. In that letter he asserts that “the Church needs art” and then provocatively asks “does art need the Church?”3 Gioia joins John Paul in answering that question affirmatively and in the view that the Church needs art as his essay points to what he calls the “disfigurement” (7) suffered by Catholicism through a contemporary neglect of the arts. Gioia also argues that even those who dislike Christianity should lament the retreat of Catholicism from American literature because this absence diminishes culture. In keeping with his observation that the Catholic writer has the advantage of drawing upon a temporally and spatially capacious tradition (but is therefore also faced with the challenge of achieving the mastery needed to participate in such a tradition), Gioia even while focusing on contemporary American literature remains mindful in the essay of the scope and depth of the Catholic artistic tradition beyond its strands based in the United States. In what ways can Catholicism be said to suffer a disfigurement, as Gioia remarks, as a result of its detachment from contemporary American cultural life? The image suggests a wounded deformation [End Page 5] that makes it more difficult to recognize and receive Catholicism in its fullness. The saving truth that the Church enacts repeatedly is addressed respectfully and lovingly to all persons in all states of life and so is expressed in its fullness to all of the senses through which we participate in the world in our endlessly variable ways. Literature in particular—which, again, is the focus of the essay—from the very start in biblical narrative and poetry shows human beings rendered defiant or forgetful or blind by sin and who must be repeatedly offered the grace of divine presence through the many different modes in which that presence can be expressed. Literature, then, provides us with an opportunity to recognize human beings in the shadow of sin and sharpens our perception of the ways in which sin...

The Beauty of Healing: Covenant, Eschatology, and Jonathan Edwards' Theological Aesthetics toward a Theology of Medicine

The Beauty of Healing: Covenant, Eschatology, and Jonathan Edwards' Theological Aesthetics toward a Theology of Medicine

The sacred community: art, sacrament, and the people of God

Liturgical, sacramental, and historical, The Sacred Community is a masterful work of theological aesthetics. David Jasper draws upon a rich variety of texts and images from literature, art, and religious tradition to explore the liturgical community gathered around—and most fully constituted by—the moment of the Sanctus in the Eucharistic liturgy. From art and architecture to pilgrimage and politics Jasper places this community in the midst of the contemporary world.

Actualism and Beauty: Karl Barth's Insistence on theAuchin his Account of Divine Beauty

AbstractHans Urs von Balthasar claimed that Barth'sChurch Dogmaticsdemonstrates a weakening of his distinctive actualism in order to make space for ‘the concept of authentic objective form’, a point illustrated by the discourse on divine beauty inCDII/1. There Barth treats the divine being as an objective form to be contemplated, a seeming departure from Barth's privileged conceptualisation of God as personal subject whose free action humbles our theoretical gaze and graciously provides the material content for proper speech about God. Bruce McCormack has challenged von Balthasar's general thesis, arguing that no weakening has in fact taken place in theChurch Dogmatics. If this is the case, what then of Barth's discourse on divine beauty? Is it consistent with his actualistic doctrine of God? Is it possible to speak of God both as a free, dynamic event and an object of beauty? Can theological aesthetics find a home within Barth's actualism? This article answers in the affirmative by demonstrating the systematic integrity between Barth's claims about divine beauty and the actualism permeatingCDII/1. First, the article examines the ambiguity of Barth's specific claims about divine beauty. Barth is both enthusiastic and hesitant in speaking about divine beauty, affirming the concept yet placing careful qualifications on its use. Next, the article illustrates how the nature of these claims is anticipated by the actualism ofCDII/1, specifically by (1) Barth's clear rejection of divine formlessness, (2) his argument that God's act of self-revelation in Jesus Christ implies an objective triune form for God's being and, lastly, (3) how he grounds discourse on divine beauty in the event of God's dynamic, free love. The article finally contends that the key to Barth's puzzling position on divine beauty is in understanding the precise reason why he registers beauty as a necessary but insufficient theological concept. This qualification is rooted in an important content–form, spirit–nature distinction which frames all discussion about God's being-in-act. ThroughoutCDII/1, objective form is a necessary condition for divine self-expression, but objectivity is always grounded in the freedom of the Spirit. Thus, the freedom-to-love at the heart of God's triune existence is the ground of our experience of God as beautiful, not any continuity with our contemplation of created forms. As such, the creative freedom animating God's triune life provides the space for, but also the limit to, theological aesthetics by imbuing divine beauty in mystery.

Preface

Preface Michael C. Jordan The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, recently concluded an exhibition titled Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet.1 Although the association is perhaps idiosyncratic, the title brings to mind for me the statement in the opening pages of Aristotle’s Politics, in which he reflects famously that the person who does not need to be part of a state is either a god or a beast. The paintings in the exhibition from the early post-World War II period seem to annul the familiar social context of the human person and are largely in the stylistic neighborhood of abstract expressionism. Perhaps a deep weariness with the position of the human person enmeshed in society and the state was to be expected after an extended period of state-directed violence, and in rebellion against oppressive social and political contexts a search would be undertaken at the far reaches of the human spirit for a renewed understanding of the mystery of our nature. Jackson Pollock explored a path even more free of figural representation than had been attempted in the disruptions of artistic tradition preceding him, and Jean Dubuffet explicitly called for a new style of art he called “Art Brut” that aspired to as complete a renunciation of culturally conditioned sensibilities [End Page 5] as could be accomplished. In their midst, the Catholic artist Alfonso Ossorio extended the use of Christian iconography while understanding much sooner than most the spiritual dimension to be found in the work of his two friends and artistic colleagues. Art historian and critic B. H. Friedman offers a concise identification of artist Alfonso Ossorio (1916–90): “The Manila-born son of a Spanish sugar processor and a Filipino-Spanish-Chinese mother, the Eurasian product of Benedictine training and Oriental refinement.”2 Friedman elsewhere speculates that Ossorio was probably a lapsed Catholic who was closer to what Friedman calls “existential pantheism” in his religious vision and understanding.3 But Ossorio’s younger brother Frederic, speaking at the interment of Ossorio on June 5, 1991, called Alfonso a “prophetic paradox—in that he was both, even from a Roman Catholic perspective, canonically correct, yet wholly-holy ecumenical.”4 Ossorio tells us that his earliest memories of art included the decoration of the Spanish colonial churches in Manila when he was a young boy, together with the art reproductions in popular magazines.5 He was educated at St. Richard’s, a Roman Catholic school in England, and then at a Benedictine school, Portsmouth Priory (now Portsmouth Abbey School) near Newport, Rhode Island, before completing his undergraduate education at Harvard, where he graduated in 1938 after completing a thesis titled “On Spiritual Influences on the Visual Representation of Christ.” Although the term “theological aesthetics” probably would not have been used at that time, Ossorio’s account of his thesis as an exploration of the relationship between religious attitudes and artistic images would place his thought in that territory. Ossorio’s best known work is probably the mural he painted in 1950 in the chapel of St. Joseph the Worker in Victorias on the island of Negros Occidental in the Philippines. He enjoyed the freedom of having the family wealth derived from his father’s sugar mill providing patronage for the work, and he painted a large and imposing mural depicting Christ seated with his arms open wide, each [End Page 6] arm supported by a hand of God the Father, Christ’s face stern in judgment. He described the work in these terms: “It’s a continual last judgment with the sacrifice of the mass that is the continual reincarnation of God coming into this world. And it worked out beautifully because the services take place usually very early because of the heat and the church had been oriented so that the sun would come in and strike the celebrant as he stood at the altar with this enormous figure behind him.”6 Belgian-born liturgical artist Ade Bethune provided mosaics for the church, and in an article in Liturgical Arts she describes Ossorio’s work in terms that emphasize its theological force: “[Christ] sits in triumph over sin and death. . . . He...

Theo‐Drama as Liberative Praxis

Theo‐Drama as Liberative Praxis Roberto S. Goizueta In Latin American liberation theology, the God of the poor is a Dios Compañero, a God who accompanies us in our everyday struggles. The religiosity of the poor, or “popular religion,” is a privileged locus for experiencing this divine nearness; the rituals and symbols of the people's lived faith are places of divine–human encounter. Yet such an encounter presupposes that God is indeed revealed and made present in the rituals and symbols of popular religion, that is, that these are not merely human constructs that express human needs and longings but are, in fact, revelations of a divine reality that is given to us in and through symbol and ritual. For the poor, God is not a concept that persons and groups conjure in order to express human needs and ideals; God is a self‐communicating reality made present in the world around us and thus received by us as pure gift. If this is not true, then neither is the possibility of hope and liberation. Consequently, I will submit, the lived faith of the poor gives rise to a theological aesthetics of liberation that subverts modern and post‐modern notions of the symbol as an arbitrary, interchangeable sign with no intrinsic connection to its referent. While some European theologians such as the Swiss scholar Hans Urs von Balthasar have effected a retrieval of a premodern understanding of symbol in order to articulate a Christian theological aesthetics, they have not paid due attention to the sociopolitical, liberative import of such a retrieval. Balthasar, for instance, fails to appreciate how the lived faith of the poor gives expression to a theological aesthetics of liberation which resists both the reduction of liberation to sociopolitical praxis and the reduction of theological aesthetics to an apolitical, merely affective experience of the Beautiful. As the retrieval of a premodern symbolic realism which posits that God is really made present and available to us in the cosmos and in history, Balthasar's intellectual project represents an attempt to retrieve both the embodied and the receptive character of Christian faith; God is “the Beautiful” and, as such, can be known only insofar as we surrender ourselves to its intrinsic power, a power utterly gratuitous and beyond our control. “What is here called an ‘aesthetic’,” writes Balthasar, “is therefore characterized as something properly theological, namely, as the reception, perceived with the eyes of faith, of the self‐interpreting glory of the sovereignly free love of God.” Yet Balthasar's aesthetics remains socially and politically ambiguous. In this essay, I will argue for the importance of Balthasar's project. At the same time, I will suggest that only when undertaken in the context of a preferential option for the poor can a methodological attentiveness to the aesthetic character of Christian faith make possible a retrieval of both the normative character of religious faith, as a response to “the True,” and the liberative character of faith, as response to “the Good.” To make this argument, I will draw not only on Balthasar's work, therefore, but also on the insights of Latin American liberation theology, as represented especially by the Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez (the so‐called father of liberation theology). More specifically, I will contend that, while theological aesthetics represents a necessary corrective to modern and postmodern theologies, liberation theology represents an equally necessary safeguard against the opposite danger, a reduction of aesthetics to an apolitical religious experience wherein the Beautiful does not irrupt in the world, transforming it, but is simply a legitimating reflection of that world. For an authentically Christian theological aesthetics, the fundamental criterion of beauty will be the body of a tortured, scarred criminal hanging from a cross—and, therefore, the bodies of those whom Jon Sobrino calls the crucified people of history. Such an expression of the Beautiful can only subvert all merely human preconceptions of beauty, pre‐conceptions that legitimate the exclusion and exploitation of those persons whom the dominant culture considers “ugly.” Christian faith as lived faith For Christians, the act of faith is a lived response of the whole person to a God who, as Love, freely gives Godself...

Following the Traces of God in Art: Aesthetic Theology as Foundational Theology: An Introduction

Following the Traces of God in Art: Aesthetic Theology as Foundational Theology: An Introduction Davide Zordan and Stefanie Knauss In the last forty or so years, the field of aesthetics has provided a rich source of stimuli for new developments in theological thinking. For far too long, theology has remained focused on the study of texts, theories, and concepts, neglecting the experiential, affective, and sensory dimensions of human life. And even in those respects that underscore the intrinsic relation of the theological to the aesthetic, theology has limited itself to a strictly metaphysical framework, such as with regard to the concept of the beauty of God, which was conceptualized abstractly as an “attribute” of the divine, but an attribute that is sensitively unattainable and thus merely nostalgically evoked. It is certainly Hans Urs von Balthasar's merit to have rediscovered the aesthetic dimension of theology and to have opened up theological reflection to the contributions of aesthetic theory. His theological aesthetics, based on the concepts of “form” and “splendor/glory,” combines a theme of foundational theology, namely the discovery of the figure of God who reveals Godself (i.e., the issue of how God's revelation can be perceived and received by human beings), and a dogmatic theme, the doctrine of participation in the divine life (in the form of ravishment or entrancement in God's beauty). Von Balthasar is revolutionary for his time in that he declares that a theology that takes seriously the challenge of the aesthetic cannot be content with an analogical reflection on concepts like “beauty,” “light,” or “measure,” but has to dare to take new roads looking for new categories. “Aesthetics must surrender itself and go in search of new categories.” As such, von Balthasar has had a decisive influence on the development of theology and in particular aesthetic theology, which also reflects in some of the papers collected here. These articles, however, also point to a second aspect that has motivated and shaped the development of aesthetic theology in recent years, namely the challenge that contemporary culture, the aesthetic sphere itself, issues to theology. Paul Tillich has prepared the ground for this with his thesis of the absolute ground of being that appears in creative activity itself and in its products and artworks, to varying degrees, depending on style and form. However, his method of correlation between the existential questions implied in human existence that emerge in culture or cultural products such as visual arts, and the answers supplied by theology on the basis of revelation (as transmitted in Scripture and tradition) has been criticized later on. Indeed, art itself can provide, if not perfect answers to these questions, at least building stones that can contribute productively to theological reflection, and be a part of the continuous self‐revelation of God in history. In a theological‐aesthetic perspective understood as hermeneutic and epistemological, art is truly a locus theologicus in the classical sense, a space where new theological insight is generated, and where religious experience is possible. More recent theological approaches to the aesthetic therefore appreciate the autonomy of art and aesthetic experiences and take it seriously as an authentic expression of existential human questions, sincere attempts at meaning and sense, and reflections of a (maybe anonymous or unconscious) human desire for the transcendent. If the developments of theological aesthetics have seemed slow and at times even to turn in circles, this is due to the fact that apart from a general, and easy enough recognition of the proximity between the theological and the aesthetical, the further delineation of their relationship and their respective positions has not been easy. On the one hand, it is all too tempting to use art as a simple appendix to, or illustration of, theological concepts, or to limit aesthetic‐theological reflections to an enumeration of religious motifs in artworks. On the other hand, aesthetics and art theory appear hesitant to appreciate a religious dimension of arts, insisting on the separation of cultural and religious spheres. What would be needed to move out of this impasse and define better the relationship between aesthetics and theology? On the part of theology, it would be helpful to appropriate a concept of...

Aisthesis: Theology and the Senses

Aisthesis: Theology and the Senses Stefanie Knauss Aesthetic theology deals by definition with the senses, with the knowledge of God and religious experience derived from sensory perception in the encounter with the arts, with the beautiful. With this paper, I would like to tease out what it means that homo religiosus is always a homo aestheticus and to bring aesthetic theology back to its senses, contributing to its development in two respects. On the one hand, a focus on the sensory experience of works of art helps to overcome the tendency to intellectualize the aesthetic experience. On the other hand, it broadens the horizon of aesthetic theology by showing that theologically relevant aesthetic, or better “aisthetic,” that is, meaningful sensory experiences can be made not only through “high art” (Mozart's operas, Rembrandt's paintings, etc.), but there are many more forms of “art” that address the senses in manifold ways: taste in the art of cooking, smell in the art of perfumery, or touch in the art of textiles and design. I use the term “aisthetic” here to remind ourselves of the meaning of the Greek aisthesis, to perceive with one's senses, in order to underline the sensory dimension of aesthetic experiences over against the traditional focus on intellect and metaphysics in aesthetic theory. Thus, the following can be read as a theological companion piece to Brent Plate's recent publication “The Skin of Religion,” in that it attempts a reflection on how human beings live their relationship with God through their senses and in their bodies, knowing‐sensing God in a unique way. After a brief sketch of the (Western) cultural history of the senses, I will discuss their treatment in the Christian theological tradition in order to conclude with some thoughts on what I would call an aisthetic theology. A cultural history of the human senses Although all human beings are sensory beings by nature, this does not mean that sensations are perceived and understood in the same way across cultures: Senses and sensory perception are both culturally constructed and construct culture. While the system of the five senses (vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch) is typical for the Western context, other cultures have widely different sensory systems, including, for example, senses that can perceive the moral character of a person or a ghost. But even within Western culture, the number, organization, and hierarchy of the senses, how they function and their tasks have been conceptualized in many different ways: A history of the senses is always also the history of a culture and a society. The reduction in the multiplicity of sense perceptions to five, motivated by their connection to the visible sense organs, has a long tradition from Antiquity up to today as the result of a need to bring order to the chaos of perception. But the idea of a “sixth sense,” or other senses for equilibration, magnetism, proprioception, etc., as well as theories of a common sense, a kind of meta‐sense that perceives and organizes the processes of perception themselves, or yet the postulate of a universal sense shared by all persons, show that the system of the five senses is not quite sufficient to capture the complexity of sensory reality. And yet, over the centuries, it has proven to be robust enough to serve at least as a partial and generalizing systematization of sensations. As often happens, a hierarchization of the senses comes along with their systematization, illustrated, for example, by the fact that insurance companies pay more in case of loss of sight than of hearing. Traditionally, the senses have been differentiated in superior senses of distance (vision and hearing) and inferior senses of proximity (touch and taste). Smelling takes on a middle position because it allows a sensory perception at a certain distance, but is still more “bodily” than the distant senses: Thus, Kant sees smell as a sense of taste “at a distance” and thus groups it with the subjective senses (the senses of pleasure, as he defines them), while touch, vision, and hearing are for him senses that transmit objective information. The distant senses are generally perceived to be superior, nobler, because they are less physical, more...

Following the Traces of God in Art: Aesthetic Theology as Foundational Theology

Following the Traces of God in Art: Aesthetic Theology as Foundational Theology

Bridge to Wonder: Art as a Gospel of Beauty. By CECILIA GONZALEZ-ANDRIEU.

Bridge to Wonder is built on two key metaphors; the practical but also aesthetic connector which is a bridge, and the complex dynamism of interlacing in a multi-stranded rope. González-Andrieu argues that art and religion can be a bridge connecting us to beauty and that the diverse areas of inquiry in the arts and the religious are the strands which, interlaced, form the equivalent of a rope or cable. The two metaphors are brought together in the Golden Gate Bridge spanning San Francisco Bay, which is suspended across the Bay and able to move in response to its environment by means of its multi-stranded cables. In a similar way, the effectiveness of art and the religious as they work together in their bridging function is seen through the perspectives and collaborations of inquiries into art and the religious. These are valuable metaphors for the theological aesthetics which González-Andrieu unpacks throughout this book. In doing so, she is particularly adept at utilizing personal experiences in her writing, including of course the central experience of travelling over and under the Golden Gate Bridge. Her approach is also deeply rooted in her own cultural experience and therefore brings a vibrant strand of US Latino theology into the debate about theological aesthetics. This is apparent in those she holds up as exemplars of the approaches she articulates; the founder of modern Chicano theatre and film Luis Valdéz, the poet-playwright Federico García Lorca, and the artists John August Swanson and Sergio Gomez. She steps outside her own cultural milieu with instructive analyses of responses to the National Gallery’s Seeing Salvation exhibition and Germaine Richier’s Christ d’Assy crucifix at Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce in Le Plateau d’Assy.

Alejandro García-Rivera: A Legacy in Theological Aesthetics

Alejandro García-Rivera: A Legacy in Theological Aesthetics Michelle A. Gonzalez (bio) In this article I will consider the contributions of the aesthetics of Alejandro García-Rivera in the field of Systematic Theology. It is difficult, if not impossible, as García-Rivera’s former student, to disassociate the personal from the academic. But personal testimony is also a form of speaking the truth. García-Rivera’s theological aesthetics had a profound influence on my intellectual development. If it were not for him, I never would have read Hans Urs von Balthasar, and it was from a seemingly casual suggestion by him that I discovered, and fell in love with, the writings of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Along with Nancy Pineda-Madrid, we worked closely with him as he was writing The Community of the Beautiful (1999), and I can honestly say the many hours we spent with him discussing this text are one of my fondest memories as a student and academic. My essay focuses primarily on García-Rivera’s first two books, St. Martín de Porres and the Semiotics of Culture (1995) and The Community of the Beautiful.1 In defining theological aesthetics, García-Rivera states, early in The Community of the Beautiful, that a foundational question for this field is, “What moves the human heart?”2 This simple question that is so profound, transforms the manner in which we approach theology. Prior to its publication, academic theology, and in particular theology in the Americas that engages racial/ethnic minority communities, had distanced itself from the affective, instead reducing theology to either discourse as a socio-scientific rational model that has little to do with the human experience of, and response to the sacred, or to ethical actions. Theological aesthetics reminds us that this attention to Beauty is the most authentic manner in which to speak of the Mystery of the Sacred in regards to human encounter. In evoking Beauty, García-Rivera introduces the categories of love, awe, and desire into our theological language. Beauty is inherently attractive, meaning that it draws contemplators out of themselves and into a direct encounter with the phenomenon manifesting itself, and this Beauty, the contemplator knows, testifies to itself in a way that the other transcendentals of the True and the Good cannot. Latino theologian Roberto S. Goizueta sees this role of aesthetics as integral and organic to Latina/o theology: “If Tridentine Western theology stressed the fact that God is known in the form of the True (Doctrine), and liberation theology [the fact] that God is known in the form of the Good (Justice), U.S. Hispanic theology stresses the fact that God is known in the form of the Beautiful.”3 For too long revelation has been understood as truth (to be known) or good (to be chosen). As defined by García-Rivera, “Theological aesthetics recognizes in the experience of the truly beautiful a religious dimension.”4 In other words, theological aesthetics contends that Beauty is a result of divine initiative: Beauty not only exists, the human receives it. “Theological aesthetics attempts to make clear once again the connection between Beauty and the beautiful, between Beauty’s divine origins and its appropriation by the human heart.”5 Drawing from the work of von Balthasar, García-Rivera notes that in addressing both the objective and subjective dimensions of Beauty and its reception, theological aesthetics attempts to address modern suspicions surrounding the experience of Beauty.6 Situated as the first part of von Balthasar’s enormous trilogy, his aesthetics seeks to recover the aesthetic form of theology. The trilogy itself is based on the three transcendentals of being: the Beautiful (Herrlichkeit), the Good (Theodramatik), and the True (Theologik). The order of the trilogy is not arbitrary. The manifestation, or theophany, of the aesthetics leads to the encounter of the dramatics. As von Balthasar writes, “God does not want to be just ‘contemplated’ and ‘perceived’ by us, like a solitary actor by his public; no, from the beginning he has provided for a play in which we all must share.”7 The theo-drama, in turn, is followed by...

Theological Aesthetics and the Many Pragmatisms of Alejandro García-Rivera

Theological Aesthetics and the Many Pragmatisms of Alejandro García-Rivera