Theological Aesthetics Research Articles

Struck by the Arrow of Beauty: Saturated Phenomena and the (Theo)Drama of Subjectivity

ABSTRACT This article is concerned with theological aesthetics and aims to show how aesthetic modes of experience create a context in which a subject can understand their existence in terms of (Christian) spiritual drama. It considers the ideas of twentieth-century Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar and of contemporary phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion in order to show how aesthetic experience acts as a gateway through which the experiencing subject enters into a new, dramatically constituted spiritual space. Finally, this article illustrates this conception of a dramatized spiritual life by considering the writings of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Saint Thérèse, the author argues, models how a life that is otherwise obscure and “undramatic” may be “lifted” into the dramatic mode through experiences of faith as filtered through what Marion calls “saturated phenomena.”

The transcendent call from aesthetic experiences

In this article, I discuss theological aesthetics in light of various descriptions of experiences of transcendence that art can provide for human beings. The American author Patti Smith describes, e.g. how works of art “call her” so that she must respond with art productions of her own. This looks similar to what German sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls “resonance”. He describes art as one of the places where an experience of vertical resonance can take place. Smith’s experiences also correspond to the description of the basic experience of transcendence of human beings as they are interpreted by the Danish philosopher Dorthe Jørgensen. However, she reduces these experiences to be immanent in nature because they are objectless. I suggest that systematic theology can contribute with a distinct theological interpretation of aesthetic experiences through a three-fold argument. First, to combine beauty and infinity in the being of God. Second, to reinterpret the notion of the incarnation as God’s continuous presence in the world. And third, by combining natural theology’s point that creation speaks of God with a reinterpretation of the artefacts that humans can create. As such, this paper proposes how systematic theology can contribute to the interpretation of aesthetic experiences of transcendence.

John E.Thiel, Now and Forever: A Theological Aesthetics of Time. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2023, 203pp. $50.00

John E.Thiel, Now and Forever: A Theological Aesthetics of Time. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2023, 203pp. $50.00

A Pied Theological Cosmology: Alejandro García-Rivera’s Gift to Science

The work of the late Alejandro García-Rivera has been overlooked as a contribution to theological engagement with science. A significant obstacle to appreciating it as such is the view that his theological cosmology marks a problematic shift from Latinx theological aesthetics to an uncritical engagement with the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. This article engages his oeuvre in response to that critique. Using Hans Urs von Balthasar’s concept of “theo-drama,” it argues that García-Rivera not only fits Teilhard into the broader mosaic of his work successfully, but that García-Rivera’s final work illumines his whole oeuvre as a “gift to science.” It shows how García-Rivera adapts his account of the beauty in the “little stories” of the pueblo to little places in the natural world, in order to help us see their beauty as an objective reality calling us to participate in their care. Thus, the article portrays García-Rivera’s body of work as a way to engage the scientifically-minded through a sensibility for natural beauty, born of mestizaje, popular piety, and the cross.

Mass of the Ages 18–39: The Sudden Revival of the Tridentine Latin Mass and Lessons for a More Robust Post-Conciliar Theological Aesthetics in Liturgy

The Tridentine Latin Mass (TLM) is rapidly growing in popularity. The movement that has formed around it has grown so attached to it as to threaten the unity of the Catholic Church. I attended TLMs in multiple distinct settings, studied the worshippers’ ordinary theology, and proceeded hermeneutically using the Circle Method. The most useful insight to emerge from this is that the theological aesthetics of the post-Conciliar Mass could be more deeply symbolic and synergistic with Conciliar intellectual theology. The TLM’s aesthetics offer worshippers assurances of certainty, but these assurances are empty. Therefore, parishes should facilitate the self-expression of the faithful, both to foster engagement with mystery and to inspire liturgical aesthetics. From these expressions, contextually meaningful symbols will emerge, which, through communal discernment guided by the Holy Spirit, may prove worthy to the task of enhancing liturgical aesthetics.

Beauty, Ugliness, and Black Theology

In this paper, I argue that theological aesthetics speaks powerfully to black experience in light of this very situation. It does so, I find, through the Beauty of the Cross. While the Beauty of the Cross constitutes its own tradition developed through art, architecture, liturgics, and devotion, I use it to gesture broadly to the cruciform character of beauty in theology. The Beauty of the Cross shows how a theological account of beauty necessarily encompasses ugliness. I draw out the implications of this dynamic with regard to three doctrinal areas and related debates in black theology: theological anthropology, soteriology, and eschatology. I aim to show the utility of theological aesthetics for black experience, and center it as a vital resource for black theology.

Beauty, Ugliness, and Black Theology

In this paper, I argue that theological aesthetics speaks powerfully to black experience in light of this very situation. It does so, I find, through the Beauty of the Cross. While the Beauty of the Cross constitutes its own tradition developed through art, architecture, liturgics, and devotion, I use it to gesture broadly to the cruciform character of beauty in theology. The Beauty of the Cross shows how a theological account of beauty necessarily encompasses ugliness. I draw out the implications of this dynamic with regard to three doctrinal areas and related debates in black theology: theological anthropology, soteriology, and eschatology. I aim to show the utility of theological aesthetics for black experience, and center it as a vital resource for black theology.

Abundantly more.

Abundantly More is far more than another monograph on theology and the arts, or a dummy’s guide to theological aesthetics. It is a Christian apologia in the classical sense – a carefully reasoned and theologically astute response to a world struggling for abundant life but seduced by the reductionist consequences of secularism and scientism. But, argues Begbie, “there is more to the world than we will ever be able to account for, more than could ever be fully discovered, thought, or spoken.” This “more” is beyond philosophical proof; it is discerned by the theological insight that it arises “from the sustaining presence of the infinitely living God”, that is “from the world’s being upheld by a limitless plenitude of meaning and significance.” (p. 177)

Confluences of the Islamic in Hans Urs von Balthasar's Theological Aesthetics: Toward a Comparative THEO‐POETICS with Islam

AbstractThis essay is an excavation of Islamic theological confluences in Hans Urs von Balthasar's theological aesthetics. It likewise demonstrates how comparative theology facilitates the de‐essentialization of religious traditions. This essay uses the Swiss theologian as a case study in exposing how someone apparently closed off from interreligious learning is still inadvertently shaped by non‐Christian traditions. Being adjacent to the work of Anne Carpenter, who seeks to save his theological project from Eurocentrism, this essay seeks to save it from theological exclusivism and Orientalism. It will argue that in the case of Christian theology, confluences of the Islamic in the past offer possibilities for future exercises in comparative theology. It looks back to look ahead by suggesting theo‐poetics as a new direction for Christian comparative theology with Islam.

Hans-Urs von Balthasar – La théologie de la culture entre la théologie transcendantale et la théologie esthétique

"Hans-Urs von Balthasar – the Theology of Culture between the Transcendental Theology and the Aesthetic Theology. Von Balthasar is a theologian of the 20th century who proposes an approach in the continuity of patristic traditions and schools of Christian philosophy through a translation of the concept of revelation in a language that sends us towards the aesthetic experience. God, the union of the absolute values Verum and Bonum manifests itself through a theophany that brings out the transcendental category of Pulchrum. God reveals his Glory, the aesthetic experience becoming a mystical, natural contemplation, by understanding the history of salvation as a Theo-drama that is completed by the ""end game"" of salvation and the fulfillment of the eschaton. Keywords: Truth, Good, contemplation, culture, aesthetics, Glory, Beauty, Theo-drama, transcendentalia, Von Balthasar."

Theological Aporia and the Cultivation of Desire: Reading Eriugena’s Creatio Ex Nihilo through an Islamic Theo-Poetics

This comparative theological article expands on John Thiel’s article on aporias in theological method. Through an Islamic theo-poetics, it complements the import of hermeneutics in theological method with poetics. In an Islamic theo-poetics, aporias are inverted: they are not impassable walls, but “liminal spaces” through which creative imagination and revelation emerge. Reading Eriugena’s Periphyseon through two Persian love lyrics by Ḥāfiẓ (and a later commentary) draws out the poetics of the former, a dialogue often described as an exercise in dialectical reasoning. Attention to the poetics of aporetics offers another way to understand the role of aporia in theology: to cultivate (infinite) desire for God. Theology is a theo-poetic reflection on the mystery of our communal theo(poïe)sis. Along the way, I indicate how theology construed as poetics—not merely hermeneutics—makes theological aesthetics possible, underscores the role of affective knowledge, and reveals how Eriugena the poet shaped Eriugena the dialectician.

Spirituality of Artistic Service

In the document Letter of his Holiness Pope John Paul II to Artists, John Paul II pointed out that artists, with their creation, perform a professional social service for the benefit of the common good through the “spirituality of artistic service”, which, through the perspective of “educational art,” contributes to the life and revival of the individual and society. Since that document does not specify what a model of such spirituality would consist of, the goal of this paper is to offer a proposal for the theoretical elaboration of its potential framework. The topic is discussed from the perspective of Christian theological aesthetics. The starting point for the development of the spirituality of the artistic service model is Christian artistic creation. The indicated theoretical framework of the spirituality of artistic service is based on three dimensions of Christian artistic creation. The first represents Christian artistic creation that points to the depths of the mystery of the sacred through Christian symbols. The second dimension of Christian artistic creation relies on the contemporary form of religious imagery in changed cultural circumstances in order to adequately present a transcendent perspective of the meaning of existence. The third dimension of Christian artistic creation awakens admiration in the recipients through artistic contemplation, thus enabling a spiritual transformation and serving as the bearer of eschatological hope. In the end, it is shown that this model of spirituality in artistic service can serve as a good theoretical framework for the implementation of three new dimensions of Christian art suitable for the contemporary cultural environment: mystagogic, existential, and contemplative.

The Prophet Muḥammad between Lived Religion and Elite Discourse: Rethinking and Decolonizing Christian Assessments of the uswa ḥasana through Comparative Theological Aesthetics

ABSTRACT Previous Christian assessments of the Prophet Muḥammad generally fall within two categories. The first asks whether or how he may be considered a post-canonical prophet. In the second, both Christians and Muslims sidestep the inquiry and advocate for the ‘two Words’ analogy (comparing Muḥammad to Mary and the Qur’an to Jesus the incarnate Word). However, attending to Muslim lived religion in postcolonial and diasporic contexts reveals an alternative, emic account of the meaning of prophecy and revelation in Islam: the embodied, emplaced and enacted experience of Muḥammad through poetry in praise of the Prophet and Prophetic beauty. Theological aesthetics prepares us for decolonizing Christian assessments of the Prophet Muḥammad through Muslim popular piety and vernacular traditions. A decolonial understanding of the experience of the Prophet suggests that his place in the experience of Muslims is unlike the way Christians relate to prophets, generally, and more akin to how Christians relate to Jesus—in both lived religion and elite discourse. While the ‘two Words’ analogy still has an important role to play, Christians would do well to rethink and decolonize their assessments of the Prophet Muḥammad through the lived religion—and elite discourses—of poetry in praise of the Prophet.

Überlegungen zur Rezeptionsgeschichte des Neuen Testaments im Gespräch mit Régis Burnet

AbstractThe present article first presents and explains the theses that emerge from Régis Burnet's monograph ‘Exegesis and History of Reception’ (Tübingen 2021) and from his SNTS Main Paper published in NTS 2023, ‘Why “Reception History” Is Not Just Another Exegetical Method: The Case of Mark's Ending’ (Leuven 2022). It then develops questions and perspectives that result from the dialogue between Burnet's approach and my own approach and continue this productive, unfinished discussion. It should be postulated that the history of interpretation and the reception history belong to the field of theological encyclopaedia and have the potential to lead to an ‘aesthetic theology’.

Lyric Theology: Art and the Doctrine of Creation. By Thomas Gardner

In the Introduction to Lyric Theology: Art and the Doctrine of Creation, Thomas Gardner notes how the recent upsurge in scholarly interest in the lyric has provided resources for a greater understanding of the theological significations of lyric thinking. This book is timely, not only due to its engagement with current developments in lyric theory. It also resonates with movements in the theological sphere where, building on the major contribution made by reflections on the narrative and dramatic modes to discussions of theological method and theological aesthetics, interest is now turning to lyric modes of God-talk. Gardner writes as a literary critic and lyric essayist with a deep interest in theology, as attested to in his earlier work, John in the Company of Poets: The Gospel in Literary Imagination (Baylor University Press, 2011). His treatment of his subject is theologically literate, rooted in the Reformed tradition of Jürgen Moltmann, Colin Gunton, Belden Lane, and Jeremy Begbie, but also drawing more widely across the theological spectrum, from figures such as David Bentley Hart and Rowan Williams. Gardner presents lyric as a form that understands a truth by inhabiting it. Describing reading as ‘a lyric act’ (p. 9), Gardner presents his book as itself a lyrical exercise that draws the reader into the experiences it describes. He employs this perilous power of the lyric voice adeptly and sensitively, resulting in a work that goes beyond scholarly discourse towards a meditative and spiritual form of writing that is a demonstration of lyric theology in action.

Grave as space for grace – “Come you sweet hour of death!

Within the ineluctable contingency of death and dying as horrifying and terrifying existential prospects, the notion of “grave” immediately corresponds with the natural facticity of human decomposition and the fear for death and dying. Decomposition is, in fact, a natural process beginning several minutes after death, with a process called autolysis, or self-digestion. From a pastoral and spiritual perspective, the following research questions surface: Could a Christian spirituality of grace and a theological aesthetics of brokenness contribute to start seeing in the loss of body physique and the exposure of life to the inevitable process of existential disintegration and eventual decay, a growth perspective (embodied spirituality) that contributes to the beautification of both living and dying? Rather than a nihilistic approach, it is argued that in a Christian meta-physics of resurrection hope, an eschatological approach discovers in decay, aging and deterioration, a “more” than dust-of-death-perspective. An aesthetics of immortality implies a “spirituality of more” transcending the death and funeral formula of “ashes for ashes, dust to dust”. It even surpasses an epistemology of empirical seeing and observational reasoning reducing human embodiment to the decomposition of a mortifying body, lying under the ground: “Stinking like a rotting carcass, and consumed by maggots and worms” (Martin Luther). According to Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 15:37–38, the natural body (psychikon), and the so called “soulless corpse”, are in fact not to be reduced to organic processes of decomposition. In an aesthetics of mortality, human embodiment is about a spiritual process of pneumatic germination bodies (pneumatikon). Perhaps, the reason why J. S Bach wrote a cantata with the challenging title “Come you sweet hour of death”.

Analisis Reflektif Teologi Estetika John Navone

ABSTRACT:
 The presence of the media as one of the determinants of ideal body standards in self-esteem and beauty is a product of popular culture that has been created for a long time The ideal body standard is constructed through products from well-known brands advertised by Selebgram, influencers and celebrities through social media platforms. One standard of beauty and body beauty displayed by them is to have white skin. Women who have white skin are considered to have privileges, luxury, cleanliness and show an auara of beauty. One of the product that is being advertised, namely the Scarlett Whitening product, most women have reconstructed their minds so that being beautiful and beautiful does not have to be white. The author argues that basically true beauty and beauty can be achieved if we are not attached and able to respect ourselves as we were created by looking at the point of view of feminist criticism and aesthetic theology by John Navone.
 Key words: Advertising, Aesthetic Theology, Feminist, Social media, Women.

Hans Urs von Balthasar: Najsvätejšia Trojica v srdci teológie

The aim of the article is to approach the doctrine of the Holy Trinity in the theological concept of the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. First, we approach the sources of inspiration for his theology. We analyze the analogy of being, transcendentals, the relationship between reason and faith. Then we reflect on theological aesthetics, the relationship of God as good to human freedom, and the relationship between God and truth. The trinitological concept of Hans Urs von Balthasar is still relevant not only for theology, but also for Christian philosophy.

A Beautiful and Dangerous Memory

Miguel A. De La Torre rejects hope as the ethical basis for a politically effective and truly liberative form of solidarity. Kelly Brown Douglas, on the other hand, articulates a critical retrieval of hope emphasizing the interpretive relationship between the cross, the lynching tree, and the resurrection. Reading De La Torre and Douglas’s works through Natalie Carnes’s theological aesthetics suggests that their respective works can be engaged as “iconoclasms of fidelity,” or the salutary breaking of idolatrous images toward recovering faithful ones. Examining #SprayTheirNames murals that were created in response to state violence against Black people in the United States, I argue that Carnes’s aesthetics framework holds the violence of the crucifixion and promise of resurrection in visual tension, thus decrying violent oppression while offering a beautiful and dangerous memory that catalyzes hope-filled movement in defense of Black lives.

Odnos islamske teologije i poezije

The relationship between religion and poetry is a complex and dynamic subject that requires consideration of many factors, including theological, cultural, historical, and personal contexts. The relationship between these two spheres throughout history was motivated differently, which is why various questions were raised on the theoretical level, such as: is literature a part of theological discourse and/or is theology a part of literary discourse? It is possible that literature and theology intertwine and influence each other in different ways, but accepting their definitive affiliation with each other remains a matter of theoretical debate. In the Eurocentric circle, the most pronounced relationship between theology and literature continues intensively in medieval literature, when the Bible becomes the paradigm according to which all other forms of human and cultural activity are determined, while in the Balkans (from the end of the 15th to the end of the 19th century) the Qur'an will also be literature of the oriental-Islamic circle. Based on several shorter theses that we presented from the Islamic theological aspect, we concluded that Islam allows, even praises, poetry, but does not give it complete autonomy. These restrictions are depicted in the form of the necessary respect and adherence to the norms of Islamic belief and religious laws, which the poet must not renounce, nor express himself poetically in terms of content, while the form of the poem itself is left to the poet's full freedom of choice. The beginning of the 21st century was marked by several literary-critical works that point to the problem of naming and classifying Islamic religious poetry in our speaking area, which indicates the necessity of forming the principles of Islamic theological aesthetics and literary theory.