A Grace of Sense - theological aesthetics

The Hungarian Béla Bartók (1881-1945) was one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. He was also an outspoken atheist. Therefore I am puzzled by the recurrent religioso markings of his late works. The viola concerto (Sz 120) and the 3rd piano concerto (Sz 119) include a middle part titled adagio religioso (to be precise, the viola concerto has it in the version made by Tibor Serly). What does this religioso stand for? The Bartók biography by Kenneth Chalmers uncovers the composer's thoughts on religion to some degree. An important source is Bartók's letter to the violinist Stefi Geyer, who was some kind of a femme fatale to Bartók. Bartók dedicated his first violin concerto (that remained unperformed during the composer's lifetime) to Geyer, to whom he had a crush on. It is possible that they parted because of their opposite views on religion. In the letter to Stefi Geyer, Bartók describes his atheist stance. It becomes clear that Bartók is not a straightforward...

The Aesthetic View of Christianity Christianity can be viewed as a non-aesthetic stance, remote from outer appearances and physical phenomena. Soren Kierkegaard is an advocate of this existentialist reading of Christianity that emphasizes the paradox. “To believe that the artistic helps one into actuality is just as mistaken as to believe that the more artistically complete the sermon, the more it must influence the transformation of life — alas, no, the more it influences life esthetically, the more it influences away from the existential.”  This view is discernible in the thinking of modern theologians like Karl Barth or Rudolf Bultmann. Basis for Christian understanding of beauty: creation and incarnation Most of Christian theology can approve the words of John Keats: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” Unlike Kierkegaard’s mistrust of the aesthetic, Friedrich Schleiermacher defines religion as an aesthetic endeavor: “Religion’s essence is neither thinking nor actin...

The Word of God is the basis for Christian theology. Only very modern, liberal theologies may claim that there is some other source of Christianity that would be more important, such as "human religious experience". All great traditions of Christian spirituality attest that the Word of God is the source of theology. However, "the Word of God" may have several different meanings. In the protestant world, the Word of God is equivalent for "the Holy Bible". This view is correct, yet inadequate. Everything in the Church is based (in one way or another) to the Bible. It is the major litarary source of Christianity, even if not the one and only. Fundamentalist theologians tend to ignore the significance of creeds and ecumenical symbols. There is no direct access to the Bible that could take no notice to the two millennia of Chriatian thinking. Nevertheless, there is no way getting rid of the Bible. For a Christian, the Bible is neither a historical document ...

After Luther’s death in 1546, the real presence of the body of Christ in the Lord’s Supper became the shibboleth of orthodoxy in Lutheranism. It was thought that one could thereby distinguish between Philippists or Crypto-Calvinists and genuine Lutherans. A major proponent of the Lutheran position was the Reformer of Württemberg, Johannes Brenz (1499-1570). The writings that gave Brenz a place in the history of theology are De personali unione (1561) and De maiestate Domini (1562). In these treatises he continues and deepens the argumentation of the real presence advocated in the Stuttgart Confession (1559). His opponents were Swiss reformers Peter Martyr Vermigli and Heinrich Bullinger, who commented his writings. Vermigli died while writing a reply for De personali unione . At his deathbed, his friend Bullinger comforted him with the word of God: “But our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 3,20) and Vermigli replied: “But not in Brenz’ heaven, that is nowhere.” The Christologi...

"Beauty redeems the world” says the protagonist, Prince Myshkin, in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot. For many reasons, he sounds like an idiot—today even more than before. Nothing redeems the world anymore; terms like redemption or justification have disappeared from the public sphere and come to be religious gibberish. Moreover, if there is anything in Christianity that brings hope to this world, it is not beauty. One may suggest justice, human dignity, or peace for the Christian agenda for the world, but not beauty. Even those who consider art the source of meaning in this world find the word beauty old-fashioned and inadequate. Aesthetic value has replaced beauty in the philosophy of art. In this article, I nevertheless maintain that Prince Myshkin was right. The Christian faith is an aesthetic view of the world: it perceives beauty even where beauty is not apparent. This is possible because a Christian is a person who is beautiful in God’s sight. For Protes...

"We know God by two means: First, by the creation, preservation, and governmentof the universe, since that universe is before our eyeslike a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God: God’s eternal power and divinity, as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1,20." (The Belgic Confession § 2) As a point of departure in this post there is a quotation from a classic Reformed text. Reformed Church is readily thought as the anti-aesthetic branch of Christianity. The Reformed do not have the liturgical richness of the Catholic Church, the musical heritage of Lutheranism, not to mention the visual imagery of the eastern Orthodox Christianity. That notwithstanding, Reformed theology maintains that the beauty of the universe is a way to attain knowledge about God. Jean Calvin himself ( Institutes 1.5.1.) spoke about the "workmanship of the universe", that eventually compels even stupid people to s...

How about them who experience their daily being as burdensome and unbearable? Do they have their share in the beauty we are talking about? I claim that they do. To quote Marsilio Ficino, amor est desiderium pulchritudinis , love is the longing for beauty. Someone may have a life that seems devoid of both love and beauty, and I am afraid that there are plenty of such people. But life without longing, without hope or desire for something better, is unthinkable. Life that has no expectations, even if it were nothing more than getting drunk or waiting for the next meal, is inevitably going to its end. Hence beauty is present even in the struggle for survival, amidst hunger and violence. One should not forget that many of the great masterworks of art are created at the time when famine and plague tortured mankind (e.g. the frescos of Michelangelo and the cantatas of Bach). This does not mean that outer hardships per se benefit artistic work, but that even the hardest times can not...

“A grace of sense” is a quote from T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton (from Four Quartets). What makes it of interest for me is its ambiguousness. One could either read it as “unmerited blessing of meaning” or “elegance of perception” , why not “beauty of reason” or eventually “gratification of senses”. In all these aspects, this phrase illuminates the scope of theological aesthetics. The key values in aesthetic theology are beauty, gratuitousness, expertise, sensory perception, a feeling of significance and intrinsic enjoyment.  “A grace of sense” refers also to the way an aesthetic experience often occurs when one least expects it to happen. All artistic occasions – concerts, exhibitions etc – are intended to arouse “a grace of sense”, but one cannot guarantee that it takes place. When an aesthetic experience happens, one cannot but gratefully accept it. In this regard the aesthetic experience resembles greatly the religious experience of grace. That the world makes sense ...

Luther als ein ästhetischer Denker vorzustellen, heißt nicht nur zu behaupten, er sei persönlich künstlerisch begabt oder habe gelegentlich ästhetische Fragen überlegt. Vielmehr könnte man sagen, dass Luthers Theologie ein ästhetischer Grundcharakter habe. Dieser Charakter stellt sich dar nicht nur mit Luthers Sprachgebrauch, dem man auch ästhetisch und ausdrucksvoll benennen kann, sondern beschreibt seine Theologie als Ganzes. Um diesen ästhetischen Grundcharakter nachzuweisen, ist es nicht genügend, Luthers berühmte Äußerungen über die Musik zu wiederholen (obschon Theologie der Musik hat mir dies ursprünglich geöffnet), sondern dieser Grundcharakter muss unbedingt in Luthers reformatorischen Hauptschriften wahrnehmbar sein. Deshalb werde ich im Folgenden Die Heidelberger Disputation untersuchen (mit einem kurzen Exkurs zum großen Galaterkommentar). Diese Disputation rechnet zweifelsohne mit die wichtigsten Darstellungen der Theologie Luthers. In diesem Text sagt L...

Having accomplished the work of creation, "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good." (Gen 1,31) This is the ultimate statement of Christianity (and Judaism, and, probably, Islam) about the world in God's sight. It is the basic conviction of theological aesthetics and its biblical ground. The word "good" might as well be read as "beautiful." In the biblical narrative it became soon apparent, that this approach to the world is problematic. On the very next page of Genesis there came the Fall. In many theological traditions (mainly Western ones) the Fall caused large destruction to the primeval beauty of the creation. Nevertheless, the mainstream Christianity (whatever it might be) has never believed in the total depravity of the Creation. According to the Church Fathers, to say that the bodily existence of ours is an evil thing, is a heresy. The most important thing pertaining to the view of God to the world is, that God never gave se...