Beauty Redeems the World, part 2

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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 acting, but intuition and feeling. It wishes to intuit the universe, wishes devoutly to overhear he universe’s own manifestations and actions, longs to be grasped and filled by the universe’s immediate influences in childlike passivity.”  
Neglect of beauty would be — for a Christian — neglect of creation, that would in turn be neglect of God. “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Gen.1:31). “Good” (tov) means at this point aesthetic goodness, that is, beauty. Of course, one could surmise that everything was morally perfect or technically functioning, but the verb “see” (yare’) has to do with aesthetic perception: the world was beautiful in its Creator’s eyes. The possibility of perceiving beauty is based on the fact that God has created the world and that it is “very good” in his sight.
In the very next page of the Bible there comes the Fall. The reality of sin darkens the beauty of the creation. Nonetheless, sin does not destroy the beauty, and God’s opinion of the world does not change for it (even though God may have grieved that he had made humans, Gen 6:6). Sin fatally altered the relationship between God and humankind, it equally violated the interhuman relationships and the relationship between humans and nature, but it did not hide the beauty of the creation altogether.  
In protestant theology, there is often a gap between the first and the second articles of faith (i.e. creation and redemption). As if the work of Christ were something totally different from what God did in creation. To maintain the unity of the Triune God of Christianity, one should agree with the major contemporary aesthetic theologian, David Bentley Hart: “The incarnation tis the Father’s supreme rhetorical gesture, in which all he says in creation is given its perfect emphasis.”  That the Word became flesh, that the Son of God was born human, warrants the ultimate beauty of the world, in spite of death, sin, or hell. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16) This celebrated verse is often read with reference to faith to the salvation or what it means to be rescued from the eternal damnation. However, its basic statement is that God loves the world — the world we live in, this physical world we inhabit.

Incarnation is the act of God that indeed overrules the ban of images uttered in the Ten Commandments (cf. Ex 20:4-6). In the iconoclastic controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries, defenders of icons like John of Damascus and Theodore of Studios taught that images of the divine should be allowed on the basis of the incarnation. “He who in his own divinity is uncircumscribable accepts the circumscription natural to His body.”  If God has not despised the bodily existence of ours, neither should we. The averseness to body is not a biblical, but rather a Platonic trait in Christianity. This incarnation aesthetics has some bearing on other contemporary theological concerns: the hostility towards body has resulted in suspicion towards sexuality, which meant (in a male-dominated tradition) suppression of women. 

(with the kind permission of Word & World. Published before in the journal's Volume 39, Number 1
Winter 2019)

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