The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth

by David Bentley Hart

Nietzsche prophesied correctly: what now always lies ahead is a choice between Dionysus (who is also Apollo) and the Crucified: between, that is, the tragic splendor of totality and the inexhaustible beauty of an infinite love.

and here he strikes a vein far richer, and far more faithful to the "economic" trinitarian dynamism of atonement, than that represented by the mere exclusion of a reciprocal Thou from the thought of God - is one of self-oblation, according to which each "I" in God is also "not I" but rather Thou; for the divine circumincession is always a relationality of "self"-renunciation in favor of - an opening out to - the other.22 It is thus that God in himself is, as Hilary was fond of observing, never solitary.23 One might even say that, in God, divine "substantiality" is the "effect" of this distance of address and response, this event of love that is personal by being prior to every self, this gift of self-offering that has already been made before any self can stand apart, individual, isolate; God is as the

differing modalities of replete love (to speak like Richard of St. Victor), whose relatedness is his substance.24 And the revelation of this infinite condition of person-as-gift, "before" every "I," is a revelation also of what the only true meaning of person is, even when applied to creatures. Certainly the essence of salvation is that souls and bodies should be drawn into the dynamism of the trinitarian life, as the Spirit integrates them into the coinherence, the sobornost, of the body of Christ, where one becomes a true - that is, selfless - person: a person in communion. The sanctification bestowed by God's Spirit is also a light cast upon humanity, as it stands within Christ, the one true man: a light that shows the isolated self to be a trace only, the effaced emblem of a forgotten gift, given before the self is a self, before the I has arrived.25