Delight in Creation: the aesthetic imperative and Robert Jenson

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 Robert W. Jenson writes: We too may enjoy the world in this purely aesthetic fashion. We may do so because to be human is to participate in the triune conversation that is finally pure music and so pure delight, and because all creatures are the matter of this conversation. Unbelieving “ecological” reflection always seems to end with one of two dour possibilities: other creatures are to be valued because of their possible usefulness to us, or we are nihilistically to value other creatures as we value ourselves. But when we acknowledge our place in God, we may perceive a better way: we may after all expand the second “great commandment” to include not only our human neighbors but all our fellow creatures, if only we modulate to the aesthetic mode: “You shall delight in each creature as in yourself.”

What we may do about Pleiades and Orion is have fun with them, even from our distance. This delight can take many forms, from the writing of sonnets to lying on the grass staring at them to probing their chemistry and physics. All such delights are great gifts of the Creator to us. (Systematic Theology vol 2: The Works of God. p.130)

If we do believe that God was delighted in creating the universe, as Genesis states it, we may postulate an aesthetic imperative to human beings (created as they are in the image of God). The term "aesthetic imperative" echoes Kant's categorical imperative, which enjoins to act according to principles that could become universal laws. The core principle requires acting out of duty and respecting the intrinsic worth of individuals. The aesthetic imperative points beyond morality, outside the confines of duty and regulations. There is no obligation whatsoever to stare at the stars or to listen to music, yet these phenomena belong to the human life, someone might say: ineluctably

Jenson recurrently employs musical imagery in order to decipher the mystery of Trinity. He takes advantage of the medieval idea of transcendentals, i.e. concepts that had such a relation to being that they were "convertible" with being. Medieval thinkers found four of them: unity, truth, goodness, and beauty (although there has been some academic discussion on whether beauty was truly one of them).

"Whatever is, must be true and good and beautiful. God is being, and therefore he is truth and goodness and beauty; adjectivally, he is knowable and lovable and enjoyable. None of the three can be understood in isolation from the others." (Systematic Theology vol 1, 225) About the last one of the four transcendentals, Jenson states:

"God is beauty; to be God is be enjoyable. In that the triune conversation is righteousness, it is the perfect harmony of the triune communal life. And the harmony of discourse taken for itself is its beauty; more precisely, its music. The necessary doctrine here is analogous to that about God's truth and goodness and need not be developed at length; God's beauty also is not a dispositional property, waiting for our action, in this instance for our enjoyment. God's beauty is the actual living exchange between Father, Son, and Spirit, as this exchange is perfect simply as exchange, as it sings. The harmony of Father, Son, and Spirit, the triune perichoresis, transcends its character as goodness because it has no purpose beyond itself, being itself God. And the harmony of a discourse thus taken for itself and for the sake of itself, is its beauty, its aesthetic entity." (ibid. 235)

Jonathan Edwards is an important theologian for Jenson, because Edwards saw these transcendentals other way round than most Christian thinkers. Usually it was thought that God is goodness and beauty because He is truth. "Edwards ranked the transcendentals otherwise: God is truth and goodness because he is beauty, beauty of the sort that music has."

It appears that music is the most appropriate way to think about the Holy Trinity. "Therefore the discourse that is God may be thought of not only as singing but even as "pure" music. It is the peculiarity of the aesthetic that in apprehending beauty we abstract from the content of discourse without becoming abstract in our understanding. God, we may thus say, is a melody. And as there are three singers who take each their part, a further specification suggests itself: the melody is fugued." 

Jenson declares that God is roomy. We humans are included in the great fugue that God is. The triune perichoresis (being-in-one-another) is the place we creatures belong to.

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