THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS BY BEN QUASH

[Music] so one of the big questions is what is theological aesthetics and I think one of the first things to establish is that it's not necessarily the same thing as a theology of beauty nor is it about making beautiful theology and that's I think one of the distinctions that underlines answers one Balthazar's famous statement that he wasn't concerned to do aesthetic theology he wanted to do theological aesthetics and I think that also picks up on Kierkegaard's worry about the aesthetic as a realm in which as he saw it the dilettante and the voyeur were most at home and which was concerned with pleasure and simply the kind of satisfaction of a pleasure principle those that I think is an extreme expression of something that theology has been worried about for for a great deal of time which is to say the fact that aesthetics might compromise their theologies own concern with truth and the serious of the moral seriousness of the theological tasks that said there's been a huge revival of interest in theological aesthetics in the twentieth century and it's a kind of rearguard action against the separating out of aesthetics as a science as a subdivision of philosophy which really follows on various developments in enlightenment thought and theologies sought to reclaim the aesthetic as a domain in which it has something significant and distinctive to say and in doing so has gone back to very ancient sources so to tell the story of theological aesthetics we need actually to go back to the Bible and to to the classical sources to Plato and Aristotle in order to tell a story that then fizzles out or loses its way at the time of the Enlightenment and then experiences a recovery in the late 19th and then the 20th century having said all that beauty does have something to contribute to the discourse of theological aesthetics it might not be the only thing that needs to be addressed in that context to theologically statics particularly in the light of the fact that at the center of the Christian gospel is a crucified man who is not beautiful to look at even though there's a great tradition of Western art that's made very beautiful images of the crucifixion there is this paradox that at the core of the Christian message is the figure of a bloodied and tortured and dying figure who has to echo that biblical phrase has no beauty that we should we should look on him and and find him attractive the attraction of Christ is something that's going to happen it's a different level that's going to be of a different order of beauty and that runs as a sort of complexify in all the way through the history of Western Christian aesthetics so we can't exclude the role of beauty from from theological aesthetics we just need to approach it with a certain awareness of how complicated a category it is in Christian terms it's not though uniquely a Christian paradox this tension between ethical goodness which might not be something you see on the surface of things and that sensory appeal that you do get on the surface of things or indeed through the other senses through the senses of hearing or touch taste and so on the Bible itself uses the word Beauty very sparingly certainly the New Testament uses it very sparingly indeed and in the Old Testament we actually have a whole range of words that to some degree or another suggests an aspect of beauty but none of which has aware stands straightforwardly and simply as the beauty word so for example one of the key Old Testament that were key Hebrew words that's often translated as Beauty is a word that in Hebrew its root is tan and can just as well be translated integrity so the quality for example that job is celebrated as having in the opening of the book of Job is this quality of integrity the reason that is a word that could also mean beauty is because there's a sense of being without blemish that beautiful is as it were being blemish-free fault free which is a very interesting a very physical it's definition of what beauty is and I think it's often said that part of what the Hebrew Bible has and which is sometimes lost sight of in a and a later plate a nice Christian tradition is this materiality of things Hebrew languages body language and the way that that the Old Testament understands Beauty is very physical it's about being intact being whole being without blemish and the sacrifices that are offered to God sacrifice they're acceptable to God are animals that are without blemish that's the sense in which God is pleased with their beauty which would suggest that the opposite of beauty is not so much the ugly as we might tend to think but that simply which has a fault in it doesn't necessarily mean it's ugly it's just not it's not intact it doesn't have the integrity that the Bible celebrates the Old Testament is also aware of the the dangers of certain sorts of physical beauty and in particular the books of wisdom if you look in the book of Proverbs for example there's an awareness that certain sorts of physical attraction can also lead one astray that they can be the source of moral difficulties or lapses so there is there's an awareness which we see then again in the poor line epistles particularly that there's a dangerous aspect to sensory pleasure and one of the great stories of the Old Testament is the story of David son Absalom whose hair is celebrated as especially beautiful and as precisely his downfall he dies if you recall he dies because his hair gets caught in a tree and he ends up I'm dangling from his beautiful hair and and and that is his down that is his undoing what we also get in the Old Testament is a very significant distinction between the beauty that can be ascribed to creatures whether human creatures or indeed aspects of the nonhuman natural world and the attribute of God which is typically translated as glory and so there's a distinct word for that in God which is [Music] impressive or inspiring and and in some ways by extension becomes a quality of Zion the dwelling place of God there's a distinct between that which Beauty doesn't quite catch and the beauty that might be ascribed to creaturely things so some very interesting and complex things go on in the biblical language and in this respect Christian tradition is going to be deeply indebted though as well as to this biblical material it's deeply indebted to the ways in which beauty is constructed by the great classical tradition of Aristotle and Plato and it involves drawing perhaps a slightly over drawing a slightly crude distinction but one of the key and one of the key embassies of Aristotle perhaps more in line with the scriptural tradition is on beauty as a quality of material things and the particular aspects of proportion and and symmetry which are observable empirically so to speak in the material order Plato by contrast with Aristotle has a sense that the quintessential form of beauty is is an ideal form an ideal form of beauty which is only approximated to by the material things of the world it can be perceived in lesser forms in in the things that surround us in the world it can be ascended towards three or more and more refined appreciation of the ideal in those material things but in the end there's a sense that there is a beauty as a perfection which lies beyond or behind the material things of the world rather than being manifest within them as it is for Aristotle and that that becomes a crucial and very deeply ingrained aspect of the way that many Christian thinkers in subsequent centuries tend to think about about beauty beauty as some sort of ideal principle that radiates through matter that said a center of Christianity and this is to echo again the significance of Christ at the heart of the Christian gospel at the center of a Christian understanding of God's self disclosure is a material form the form of Christ who as the Bible tells us is the perfect expression of the Father he who sees Christ sees the father and in that sense there cannot ever be a complete detachment from the material world and in in on the contrary the fullest expression of the beauty of God will be found it precisely in the way it takes form in Christ so if you like this there's a constant tension in Christianity between an attraction to the idea of beauty as an ideal or perfect form and an insistence on the income in the because of the Incarnation and insistence on the material presence of beauty in in the world and one of the characteristic ways in which that gets emphasized and we see versions of it in Augustine and again in Thomas Aquinas is the sense that what what we see in a Christian aesthetic is the radiance of God the perfection of God precisely shining through form you need both form and light or this sense of a more immaterial ideal beauty if you didn't have form you would have no capacity as a creature for seeing this light form is as a world what become is part of the communicability of the divine beauty if you had form without light there would be nothing to see because the form needs to be irradiated in order to become communicative in order for us to receive it the form as it were comes alive and becomes something perceivable because the light of God activates it and transmits it to us so light and form become central aspects of a Christian aesthetic and that involves borrowings from Plato from Aristotle and also the maintenance of a certain sort of incarnation or materialist biblical tradition one of the great appears controversy in the life of the early church is the iconoclastic controversy which comes to a head at various points but most famously in the early 8th century provokes the response offs and John of Damascus who at a time when the Pope had had actually supported the idea that the veneration of images was problematic indeed that it should stop wrote a classic defense of the use of holy images in in churches and this if you like is one of the very earliest examples of a theology a specific theology that specifically engages with aesthetics or at least with the use of images in in the life of the church and John of Damascus is argument is twofold one is that by analogy with words that images are a fundamental medium of communication and in particular that that images can be the Bible of the illiterate that that images serve to transmit the Christian gospel to people who may not be able to read or understand it in verbal form but secondly and again this is the incarnation or principle absolutely at the heart of a defence of the use of images he argues that because Christ uses because God uses matter to to achieve our Redemption he uses not only the physical flesh and blood of Christ body but the wood of the cross and so on that all matter is worthy of honor and worthy of veneration and there should be no shame for Christians in as a were using matter as a medium for honoring and the redemption that God himself wrought in matter if God is if you like if God is prepared to use and honor matter in that way then there's no shame in our similarly honoring it and actually not just no shame but it's a positive and call upon Christians to to seek God through the medium of the material world and that defense of images that John of Damascus and was successful I think in promoting has remained a very important touchstone for subsequent theologies of of beauty or theological aesthetics which of course is an anachronistic term in this period but in a sense we see a proto theological aesthetics at work in an a theologian like like John of Damascus interestingly there's one third defensive images hidden in John of Damascus is text not as obvious as the appeal to math the importance of matter on the basis of the Incarnation and to the importance of instructing the illiterate and that's the idea that they simply refresh one he talks about entering a church and being confronted with the beauty of images and feeling one soul refreshed and that I think is a an aspect that is because again become important in a lot of the discussion of the role of images in in the 20th century but we'll come to that in due course it's a historical leap but this tradition remains relatively stable throughout the medieval period and I think the classic definition of Thomas Aquinas that beauty is that which pleases when seen if you like sums up what is one of the what is the characteristic appreciation of the importance of the senses to a Christian understanding of the world and precisely of the world as God's gift that God as aware has established a world that can be meaningfully perceived by the senses and that in infull through the census one also perceives the the god-given Asst of that world that it has an order it has a structure it has a radiance it seeks to be known because God has established the world and precisely as as something that is knowable and if you like it it's an aspect of the doctrine of Providence that God's good ordering of the world for its good and for the good of all those creatures within it is in part perceived in its beauty God's good ordering as a has a beautiful aspect because it is also seeking the good of the creatures within that world and this opens on to a fundamental medieval idea which is the the intrinsic relation of the beautiful to the good wherever there is being necessarily and everywhere one will also find beauty goodness and truth because these are intrinsic properties of being they are transcendental properties of being to say they accompany existence wherever wherever an existent thing is and the medievals often talked about the convertibility of the transcendentals that's to say if you could say something had being or existence one then could automatically also say it had truth goodness and beauty one can if one was able to say something was true one was also via this convertibility of the transcendental as one was also effectively saying that it was beautiful and good and vice versa so so a fundamental affirmation of the intrinsic relation of the beautiful to the good and the true in the context of an understanding metaphysical understanding of being as manifesting necessarily all of these qualities because they are the qualities of God God in creating imparts these qualities to all that he creates this is something that will be thrown into serious question indeed lost in the context of a complete recasting of the notion of the beautiful that we see in the modern period and perhaps first most importantly and most significantly in in the thought of um British or Anglo Irish philosopher Edmund Burke who would in turn have a profound influence on the thought of Immanuel Kant because it's Burke who in a long treatise on the on taste and then on the idea of the beautiful and the sublime undertakes to ground our experience of beauty in a philosophical discourse that makes no direct or virtually no direct relevance to the idea of God in other words a non theological discourse of beauty and this is a fundamentally important shift in Western thought fantastically significant shift away from the idea that an account of how the senses perceive beautiful things or indeed things that are monstrous but which are nonetheless perceived as part of a coherent cosmos in which God orders all things including those including the Devils and those things that might disturb us a shift away from that cosmic sense to an account of our aesthetic responses which is really just grounded in an analysis of how we respond in other words it's a new science of aesthetics which is I'm not seeking to tell us anything about God or indeed necessarily about principles of cosmic order but to tell us more about ourselves and about our own critical responses to things the way of subjectivity works but we'll do this largely through an empirical method through the observation it's not exactly exhaustive observation often it's quite anecdotal but the detailed observation of how people react to different sensations which will include a preference for example for the smooth over the rough for the light over the dark here in them in a way that I think we often will find quite amusing as modern readers explores why it is that we might and enjoy the taste of tobacco we'll take some time to get used to it and why we might prefer the look of a swan to that of a goose or a flower to a cabbage but all of these things are is aware empirical explorations of the world around us and our and our responses and that attempt to ground an aesthetics and empiricism is as well a typical feature of Berks aesthetics and and his way of seeking a non theological account of beauty and indeed of aesthetics more generally Kant is very aware of Burke's work and adopts some of his principles but cants method can't be described as empirical in that same way it shares with Burke and a desire to ground aesthetics non-theological II but Cannes method is much more concerned with an analysis of if you like the way that we are hardwired critically to exercise aesthetic judgment it's about the specific domain of human rationality in its interaction with the senses and the way that human rationality organizes sensory experience through through a series of judgments and clans key work in exploring aesthetics is the critique of aesthetic judgment the critique of judgment which as has often said is the third part of a trilogy of of works the first of which is the critique of Pure Reason and the second the critique of practical reason some people have remarked that that this echoes the three transcendentals the three medieval transcendentals that I refer to just a short while ago in the sense that Pure Reason is concerned with questions of truth the critique of practical reason can turn concern with with questions of goodness and the critique of judgment concerned with the beautiful and Kant like Burke is very interested in the distinction between the beautiful which is which are aesthetic which which please us which we feel are able to manage and organize through our normal categories an aesthetic of the sublime which overwhelms our son often suggest to us feelings of threat terror or and reminds us of our mortality but as I say he wants to defend these as it were a priori on on the back of an understanding of how human reason works are not simply by accumulating more and more empirical evidence for it count as ever is concerned with what what all human rationality shares what is what are the universal features of human rational judgment and and and and so in that sense it's a kind of a transcendental method which is not the same as Burke's empirical method so what we've seen in these Enlightenment thinkers and others like them is if you like a separatist discourse a desire to take aesthetics away from its theological heritage and explore it on different grounds whatever they might be and and in principle what we've seen is a subjectification if you like of ethics or aesthetics rather a subjectification of a concern with how it is that our own internal critical processes disclose themselves in the making of aesthetic judgments and it's a process that you you might argue finds an almost inevitable culmination in the art for art's eight movement which we see arising in the 19th century the cult of beauty which in asserting that that principle of art for art's sake is effectively saying aesthetic experience is its own justification it needs doesn't need to to be explored through any unnecessary appeal to other questions like what is good or or true since art is simply art and that's good enough to justify it in fact the freer it is of any other use or the freeters of any other moral or religious justification the more truly it is itself more purely it's it's it's art it's simply and the satisfaction of our desire for pleasure and the expression of our free creativity an art made or an aesthetic constructed for God's sake or indeed to serve some sort of pre-existing Canon of value is a betrayal of the free creativity of the artist and so there's a sense that art is most itself when it breaks away from the expectations and the traditions that once shaped it you

Channel: Timeline Theological Videos

Views: 9,429

Rating: 4.9069767 out of 5

Keywords: THEOLOGICAL, AESTHETICS, BY, BEN, QUASH

Id: y1WVevycW3k

Length: 24min 57sec (1497 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 04 2012