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
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