The Beauty of the Infinite Quotes

“God's pleasure--the beauty creation possesses in his regard--underlies the distinct being of creation, and so beauty is the first and truest word concerning all that appears within being; beauty is the showing of what is; God looked upon what he had wrought and saw that it was good.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth

“[O]nly if the form of Christ can be lived out in the community of the church is the confession of the church true; only if Christ can be practiced is Jesus Lord. No matter how often the subsequent history of the church belied this confession, it is this presence within time of an eschatological and dvine 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. (1-2)”
― David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth

“God's love, and hence the love with which we come to love God, is eros and agape at once: a desire for the other that delights in the distance of otherness.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth

“Christ is a persuasion, a form evoking desire, and the whole force of the gospel depends upon the assumption that this persuasion is also peace: that the desire awakened by the shape of Christ and his church is one truly reborn as agape, rather than merely the way in which a lesser force succumbs to a greater, as an episode in the endless epic of power. (3)”
― David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth

“For if indeed God became a man, then Truth condescended to become a truth, from whose historical contingency one cannot simply pass to categories of universal rationality; and this means that whatever Christians mean when they speak of truth, it cannot involve simply the dialectical wresting of abstract principles from intractable facts. One”
― David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth

“But desire must also be cultivated; the beautiful does not always immediately commend itself to every taste; Christ's beauty, like that of Isaiah's suffering servant, is not expressed in vacuous comeliness or shadowless glamor, but calls for a love that is charitable, that is not dismayed by distance or mystery, and that can repent of its failure to see; this is to acquire what Augustine calls a taste for the beauty of God (Soliloquia 1.3-14). Once this taste is learned, divine beauty, as Gregory of Nyssa says, inflames desire, drawing one on into an endless epektasis, a stretching out toward an ever greater embrace of divine glory. And,”
― David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth

“The truth of no truths becomes, inevitably, truth: a way of naming being, language, and culture that guards the boundaries of thought against claims it has not validated.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth

“For if indeed God became a man, then Truth condescended to became a truth, from whose historical contingency one cannot simply pass to categories of universal rationality; and this means that whatever Christians mean when they speak of truth, it cannot involve simply the dialectical wrestling of abstract principles from intractable facts. (5)”
― David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth

“Lyotard has described the postmodern condition succinctly as "incredulity towards metanarratives":' an attitude commendable in itself, no doubt, but also one that can easily be translated into a dogmatic metanarrative of its own. In”
― David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth

“The soul is a story that can always be retold.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth

“Sin is the repetition of an absence, whose logic is suppression, aversion, and privation.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth

“it is the soul's refusal to become (as Gregory says) the expanding vessel into which the beauty of God endlessly flows.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth

“Hell is with us at all times, a phantom kingdom perpetuating itself in the wastes of sinful hearts, but only becomes visible to us as hell because the true kingdom has shed its light upon history. In”
― David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth

“[I]n every theology or system, every tradition or discursive practice, a story is being told whose peculiar force should be allowed priority over the abstract categories by which the critic might seek to reduce all narrative to the same bare framework of elementary functions.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth

“In God, though, nothing is lost, and the substance of hope lies in the knowledge that God has given - and will give - again.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth

“But Christian theology has no stake in the myth of disinterested rationality: the church has no arguments for its faith more convincing than the form of Christ; enjoined by Christ to preach the gospel, Christians must proclaim, exhort, bear witness, persuade - before other forms of reason can be marshaled.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth

“The great project of "modernity" (the search for comprehensive metanarratives and epistemological foundations by way of a neutral and unaided rationality, available to all reflective intellects, and independent of cultural and linguistic conditions) has surely foundered;”
― David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth

“In the beautiful God's glory is revealed as something communicable and intrinsically delightful, as including the creature in its ends, and as completely worthy of love; what God's glory necessitates and commands, beauty shows also to be gracious and inviting; glory calls
not only for awe and penitence, but also for rejoicing; God's ordinance is also ordonnance, so to speak. There”
― David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth