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God's beauty: the aesthetics of faith
Christian Century, Sept 7, 2004 by William C. Placher
As Hart points out, Balthasar reversed the order. Start with aesthetics: the first thing for Christians to establish is that God is beautiful, glorious. That sets the primary context for ethics, how we ought to live our lives. What we seek to understand about the world and what we are willing to accept as mystery (questions about the nature of knowing) then follow in tuna. So Hart begins his own book with a careful analysis of beauty, and his whole project is, as his subtitle notes, an "aesthetics of Christian truth."
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As he points out, we do have aesthetic reasons for our faith. Like scientists arguing in favor of a theory because of its beauty, we wonder at the infinitely complex orders of the universe, or the narrative power of the gospel, or the mystery of the liturgy. Hart is offering, he explains, "a defense of the suasive loveliness of Christian rhetoric" which regards the infinite not "in terms of a primordial and inevitable violence" but "as originally and everlastingly beautiful."
Like Dante, Hart has written a kind of divine comedy--not in the current sense of comedy as a series of jokes, but in the old meaning of a story that ultimately ends happily. The tragic view of life invites us to admire the hero dying bravely. Hart finds that too easy, too optimistic. The hero is dead. He will someday be forgotten. Death-doomed as we are, we cannot ourselves make enough meaning to give a happy ending to our stories. Christianity, Hart believes, offers hope only on the other side of a despair worse than tragedy contemplates.
This is a hope like that of Kierkegaard's knight of faith, or those strange late Shakespeare plays in which the dead come back to life and women condemned to prostitution turn out to have remained virgins: "It places all hope and all consolation upon the insane expectation that what is lost will be given back, not as a heroic wisdom (death has been robbed of its tragic beauty) but as the gift it always was."
IN SUM, FROM Milbank we learn that Christianity cannot prove its ease but must offer a rhetoric of peace in contrast with our age's dominant Nietzschean rhetoric of violence. Gregory of Nyssa teaches that both God and creatures, in radically different ways, are always in motion inspired by love. Balthasar makes the case that theology begins with the aesthetic appreciation of God. Put the three together and one has the beginning of the argument of David Bentley Hart's remarkable book--part one a Milbankian treatise on theological method, part two a survey of the Trinity, creation, incarnation and eschatology influenced by Gregory and Balthasar, part three Hart's own conclusions.
What to make of it? First, there is the aforementioned difficulty. Much of the argument evolves in dialogue with the most obscure of contemporary. Continental philosophers. If I counted right, the text includes untranslated quotations in five languages. While some sentences achieve a complex beauty, others verge on parodies of academic prose. I have been in this theology, business for a while, and I thought I knew the vocabulary, but Hart regularly uses words I had never seen before. Sometimes his prose is complex because he is making a technical point with precision. Sometimes he is just not thinking about his audience and how to explain things for them. Sometimes, I worry, he is just showing off.
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