The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth

by David Bentley Hart

Is the beauty to whose persuasive power the Christian rhetoric of evangelism inevitably appeals, and upon which it depends, theologically defensible?

K6ploS 'Irlaous - meant nothing less radical than that Christ's peace, having suffered upon the cross the decisive rejection of the powers of this world, had been raised up by God as the true form of human existence: an eschatologically perfect love, now made invulnerable to all the violences of time, and yet also made incomprehensibly present in the midst of history, because God's final judgment had already befallen the world in the paschal vindication of Jesus of Nazareth.

it is this presence within time of an eschatological and divine peace, really incarnate in the person of Jesus and forever imparted to the body of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, that remains the very essence of the church's evangelical appeal to the world at large, and of the salvation it proclaims.

What this book interrogates, then, is the difference between two narratives: one that finds the grammar of violence inscribed upon the foundation stone of every institution and hidden within the syntax of every rhetoric, and another that claims that within history a way of reconciliation has been opened up that leads beyond, and ultimately overcomes, all violence.

Making its appeal first to the eye and heart, as the only way it may "command" assent, the church cannot separate truth from rhetoric, or from beauty.

It is just such a continuous theological account of beauty that is this book's task, and the conviction that guides it is that the Christian tradition embraces an understanding of beauty unique to itself: one in which the thought of beauty and the thought of infinity uniquely coincide.

the opposition between two narratives of infinity: one that conceives of the infinite in terms of a primordial and inevitable violence, and one that regards the infinite as originally and everlastingly beautiful.

whatever Christians mean when they speak of truth, it cannot involve simply the dialectical wresting of abstract principles from intractable facts.

Christian thought has no stake in the "pure" rationality to which dialectic seems to appeal - the Christian ratio, its Logos, is a crucified Jew - and cannot choose but be "rhetorical" in form; but it must then be possible to conceive of a rhetoric that is peace, and a truth that is beauty.

For Christian thought there lies between idolatry and the ethical abolition of all images the icon, which redeems and liberates the visible, and of which the exemplar is the incarnate Word: an infinite that shows itself in finite form without ceasing to be infinite - indeed, revealing its infinity most perfectly thereby.

Beauty seems to promise a reconciliation beyond the contradictions of the moment, one that perhaps places time's tragedies within a broader perspective of harmony and meaning, a balance between light and darkness; beauty appears to absolve being of its violences.

One might add that to grasp the aesthetic character of Christian thought is also to understand the irreducible historicality of the content of Christian faith:

Beauty is objective.

This priority and fortuity allow theology to hear, in the advent of beauty, the declaration of God's goodness and glory, and to see, in the attractiveness of the beautiful, that creation is invited to partake of that goodness and glory.

glory calls not only for awe and penitence, but also for rejoicing;

The Christian use of the word "beauty" refers most properly to a relationship of donation and transfiguration, a handing over and return of the riches of being.

Beauty is the true form of distance. Beauty inhabits, belongs to, and possesses distance, but more than that, it gives distance.

No instance of the beautiful (say, the form of Christ) can be contained within a dialectical structure of truth, or recognized apart from its aesthetic series; it is always situated in perspectives, vantages, points of departure, but is never fixed, contained, exhausted, or mastered. The appeal - the rhetoric - of the beautiful, its excess over any form's singularity or isolation, is thus always composing and recomposing the distance. Because this distance that allows for an endless setting out from and homecoming to the object of attention belongs to beauty, the questions a theological aesthetics must ponder are what the shape of that distance is, what is its original content, how it is most truly inhabited and disclosed; for Christian thought the answer must, in every case, be peace.

Beauty evokes desire. This should be emphasized for two reasons. First, beauty is not simply the invention of a fecund, unpremised, spontaneous exuberance of will, a desire that preexists and predisposes the object of its velleity or appetite (as certain contemporary schools of thought suggest), but precedes and elicits desire, supplicates and commands it (often in vain), and gives shape to the will that receives it. Second, it is genuinely desire, and not some ideally disinterested and dispirited state of contemplation, that beauty both calls for and answers to: though not a coarse, impoverished desire to consume and dispose, but a desire made full at a distance, dwelling alongside what is loved and possessed in the intimacy of dispossession.

Beauty crosses boundaries.

Beauty's authority, within theology, guards against any tendency toward gnosticism, for two reasons: on the one hand, worldly beauty shows creation to be the real theater of divine glory - good, gracious, lovely, and desirable, participating in God's splendor - and on the other, it shows the world to be unnecessary, an expression of divine glory that is free, framed for God's pleasure, and so neither a defining moment in the consciousness of God nor the consequence of some defect or fall within the divine.

The theology of Rudolf Bultmann provides perhaps the most striking example from the last generation of theology of how pervasive the inclination still is, and how thoroughly it depends upon a deficient aesthetics of creation.

But the real danger that Bultmann's thought represents is a gnostic etiolation of the gospel, its transformation into a fable of the soul, whose true meaning is a wisdom and peace vouchsafed inwardly, in the intactile depths of the self. His theology demonstrates with extraordinary clarity that to demythologize is not to demystify; its ultimate effect is not to ground faith in history or the worldliness of creaturely being, but to de-historicize, to unworld the soul, to make faith the experience of a mystical eschaton in perpetual advent, in the inner core of the present, imparted to the self in its most inviolable subjectivity. The church as a society in time (and society, therefore, as potentially the church) is displaced from the center of faith by the story of the self as a homeless wanderer seeking escape from history.

Whenever theology abandons the biblical notion of glory, it immediately succumbs to that venerable gnostic melancholy for which the sphere of fixed stars, the stellatum, is not the shining raiment of God cast over the heavens, but merely the final barrier through which the exiled nvEUpa or Funklein must pass in order to return to the rratjpwpa or Abgrund Gottes. This is the gnosis - with its distressingly easy leap across Lessing's ditch and, in consequence, over the world - that a theological aesthetics serves chiefly to resist; theology should take its lead from the "inauthenticity" of beauty, its superficiality, its exclusive dwelling in the intensity of surfaces, the particularity of form, and the splendor of created things.

Beauty resists reduction to the "symbolic."

But symbol as I mean it here, in the abstract, is not this, but is rather always an afterthought, a speculative appropriation of the aesthetic moment in the service of a supposedly more vital and essential meaning; the symbol is that which arrests the force of the aesthetic, the continuity of the surface, in order to disclose "depths"; it suspends the aesthetic in favor of the gnoseological, in order to discover something more fundamental than whatever merely "accidental" form might manifest it.

But the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus tell us nothing in the abstract about human dereliction or human hope - they are not motifs of a tragic wisdom or goads to an existential resolve - but concern first what happened to Jesus of Nazareth, to whose particular truth and radiance all the general "truths" of human experience must defer. The "symbol," extracted from the complexities of its many contexts, is pure transparency, the paralysis of beauty, yielding before the figureless glare of an abstraction.

for theology beauty is the measure and proportion of peace,

and whether the intervening distance (which is, in fact, the world) is regarded as a vast desert or a region of delights - wasteland or garden, exile or paradise - depends upon whether it is viewed from one city or the other.

Reminiscient of C.S. Lewis's idea that Eaeth will have always been Heaven or Hell dpending on one;s viewpoint.

This, at least, is the pagan metanarrative that Milbank - to return to his argument - extracts from Nietzsche (who does not resist) and from his disciples (who are somewhat more restive): rr&VTa XWPET, OW V v ttv€t - and all peace, civility, harmony, or beauty is accomplished by limiting a preexisting discord.

theology must not be so flattered as to forget to respond to his critique, and to do so "genealogically": to show, that is, that Nietzsche's narrative rests upon premises it dissembles, and that this narrative is accounted for and already surpassed within the Christian story.