God's beauty: the aesthetics of faith

GREGORY WAS ONE of the three theologians (along with Basil aim Gregory of Nazianzus) from Cappadocia, in modern-day Turkey, who, more than any others, developed the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. These Cappadocians are often identified as strongly dependent on Plato's philosophy, but Hart argues that Gregory, at least, broke more radically with the Platonic tradition that pervades Western philosophy than even the most daring of post-modernists.

Plato believed in two realms: the unchanging, perfect world of the divine and its inadequate image, the world of change, imperfection and matter. One has to escape the second world to have hopes of reaching the first.

Such a dichotomy has no room for a divine Son who becomes incarnate, but a great many Christian theologians have nevertheless at least tried to remain Platonists. But not, Hart insists, Gregory of Nyssa. Gregory said that God's unchangeableness is not static. Rather, within the Trinity, God keeps overflowing in mutual love: "God's impassibility is the utter fullness of an infinite dynamism." God is unchanging because that flow of love never stops or slows down, and God's love of creatures (as manifested in the act of creation and in the incarnation) is thus not an aberration from God's nature but an expression of it.

At the same time, it is not the nature of creatures to be simply frozen permanently in the world of imperfection. Rather, we are constantly (infinitely and therefore without ever reaching our goal) striving toward God.

   For Gregory Cod is to be understood
   first as ... an unanticipated beauty,
   longed for, but without certain hope, ...
   'seen' only by the infinite inflaming of
   desire, whose savor draws one on into
   ever greater dimensions of his glory, so
   that one is always at the beginning of
   one's pilgrimage toward him, always discovering
   and entering into greater dimensions
   of his beauty.

Both God and creatures are always in motion a motion inspired by beauty.

Talk of beauty in theology leads Hart to the Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988). Balthasar is often identified these days as a "conservative" because of his views on the role of women and some other hot-button topics among Catholics. But in his openness to the Protestant theology of Karl Barth, his hope for universal salvation, and his understanding of Christ as the one who is present in suffering even with those who have rejected God, Balthasar was anything but theologically conservative. His three multivolume works--on theological aesthetics, theological drama and theological logic--add up to the only theological master piece of the 20th century in the same league with Barth's Church Dogmatics.

WHAT INTERESTS HART most about Balthasar's works is their order. Over 200 years ago, Kant wrote three great "critiques," addressing, first, what we can know; second, ethics; and third, aesthetics--and that order became standard. After all, what we can know about the world, ourselves and God does seem like the first thing that needs to be settled, before we can ask how we should live our lives. As to what's beautiful--well, that can come as a sort of afterthought.