The Father of Lights (Theology for the Life of the World)

A Theology of Beauty

Johnson, Junius

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781493427208
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

"Every good giving and every perfect gift is from on high, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning" (James 1: 17). This verse conveys a powerful image of God as the source and referent of all beauty. This book demonstrates how the experience of beauty is related to our inherent longing for the God who is reflected in such moments. Richly informed by Junius Johnson's expertise on Bonaventure and von Balthasar, the book offers a robust, full-orbed theology of beauty, showing how it has functioned as a theological concept from biblical times to the present day.

Part 1
The Encounter with Beauty

1
Eternity in Our Hearts

Memory, Beauty, and Divinity

For there are many who love beauty, but beauty lies not in external things, but in His likeness.

Bonaventure, Hexaemeron, col. 20, no. 24 (my translation)

It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me. . . . It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? . . . Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased.

C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

Beauty is a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence. It is an invitation to savour life and to dream of the future. That is why the beauty of created things can never fully satisfy. It stirs that hidden nostalgia for God which a lover of beauty like Saint Augustine could express in incomparable terms: “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you!”

John Paul II, Letter to Artists

“Beauty is the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendour around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another.”1 Consistent with this claim, beauty in all its senses has remained famously resistant to definition, so much so that many who have come to the task have either intentionally or unintentionally taken refuge in merely characterizing it. It is my intention to go beyond that here, but it will be helpful to begin with a characterization of it, both to introduce operative intuitions and to clear the ground of certain things that seem attendant upon the experience of beauty but that do not, strictly speaking, enter into its definition.

Characteristics of Beauty

Pre-argumentative

No arguments or reasons have to be given to enable the experience of beauty. While we may offer such arguments after the fact, these arguments are no part of the moment of recognition. We notice the beauty of the thing apart from any arguments.

Now, it may seem that this is not so, as the following counter-examples show. First, there are what may be called intellectual beauties: concepts or thoughts that are the stimulus for experiences of beauty (for indeed we may find ideas beautiful, and this is often stronger than their logical coherence in determining our acceptance of them). One cannot find a concept beautiful until one has understood it, and often this requires explanation and argumentation. In fact, it could be argued that one often sees the beauty of an idea only when one “sees the truth of it,” and that these two moments coincide in such a way as to count as the same thing. But if seeing the beauty of an idea is synonymous or even merely coterminous with seeing the truth of it, then precisely because it is possible that the truth of it only be seen after argumentation, it is also possible that the beauty of it may be seen precisely as the result of such argumentation.

This account flounders on a misunderstanding of the nature of argumentation and the process by which a mind comes to accept something as true. It assumes that to accept a proposition as true is the result of being convinced (one is tempted to say “compelled”) by the force of the argument: undeniable premises and a valid syllogism lead one to a certain conclusion by necessity. At the earliest, recognition of the beauty of the conclusion is contemporaneous with the acceptance of its truth and perhaps occurs at some time subsequent to that moment. But this just is not the way that belief formation works. Such an account does not help us explain why some minds reject valid syllogisms built on premises they accept and find undeniable, and also why so many accept invalid arguments. To go further, and much more to the point, such an account is weak on explaining why an argument that begins from premises that I do not accept may yet be successful in convincing me to accept not only its conclusion but also its premises. There is another dynamic entirely going on here than the irresistible force of deduction.

What is happening in such moments is that I am seeing the beauty of the idea before I have come to be convinced of its truth and that the beauty of it does work in convincing me. I am willing to allow myself to be persuaded of the conclusion, and even to shift ground on certain premises, because it is worth it to hold an idea of such beauty. Indeed, sometimes I do not have to get to the end of the argument to know that I want to accept the coming conclusion, because its beauty is already apparent. (This may be disturbing from the standpoint of a desire that logic be objective or dispassionate, but it is just the way that fallen human minds work. It is also not clear that such a desire is even to be lauded.) This means that the beauty may be perceived before the truth and that it may be seen before the process of argumentation has reached its conclusion.

I take this to mean that the recognition of the beauty of the idea is not tied to the process of argumentation. Argumentation may cause it to appear, but it may also appear apart from that process. One does not see the idea as beautiful because one has been argued into it; rather, one sometimes needs help just to really see the idea. But once it is seen, its beauty does not depend on arguments.

The same is true in a second case, the case of something physical that may not be seen as beautiful at first, but that one later comes to think of as beautiful. Much art may be this way: an observer may not find a ballet, a piece of music, or a painting beautiful until someone has explained it. What is happening in such moments is not that the person is being argued into finding it beautiful but that the person is being helped to really see it. But once seen, if it is not judged to be beautiful, no amount of arguing about its importance or its objective qualities will convince one that it is beautiful. Thus, again, the experience of beauty lies beyond the realm of argumentation.

Imperative

Beauty greets us with an over-mastering force, and there is an immediate recognition of this force on our part, and often as immediate a submission. Even when we resist, we often find ourselves incapable of eradicating that first powerful moment of encounter. The beautiful is rarely resisted, and even more rarely conquered.

I do not mean that beauty overrides our freedom or agency. We are always free to decide how to respond to beauty—with, for example, reverence or hatred. But that we find this thing beautiful does not respect our intentions or agency. We have very little say in what we find beautiful.

But what about the case of changing tastes, and the fact that one can even purposefully override the beautiful? In the first instance, what one once found to be beautiful may cease to seem beautiful with the passage of time; in the second instance, one may intentionally train oneself to stop finding beautiful what one previously found beautiful.

It will be easier to respond to this objection about changing tastes when we have defined beauty, because then it will be clear that what is happening in such cases is that one’s idea of the divine is changing. The next chapter will add the ability to assess the degree to which moral culpability is to be assigned to such change. For now it is enough to point out that one is not defeating the imperative character of the beautiful in such moments; one is resisting and redirecting it. For in the examples in question, the one thing that one cannot do is to make it the case that one never found a particular thing beautiful. I may not like that song anymore, but before I convinced myself that the lyrics are deplorable and the music formally bankrupt, I did like it. It got to me, and while I may be ashamed of that or angry about it, it is nevertheless true. Indeed, to truly unlearn seeing such things as beautiful is very difficult, and perhaps more rare than we would admit if we could be truly honest with ourselves.

Subjective

The same things are not found by all to be beautiful, and there are striking instances where some things generally acknowledged to be ugly are considered beautiful by a very few. This is the other challenge of taste: that it is not universal, whether across cultures, within cultures, within subcultures, or within families. No amount of homogeneity produces identical responses to things; different individuals always have non-identical senses of beauty.

Expansive

Generally, we celebrate the ability to see beauty where others cannot. This is why the artistic soul is prized—these are the ones who can see beauty in rare places and who can therefore open the eyes of others to recognize beauty where they do not otherwise see it. In this instance, the old German proverb is true: “The one who sees more is more correct.”

However, this must not be allowed to trespass: there is a distinction between calling the ugly beautiful and seeing the beautiful within the ugly. The latter is laudable, but the former is reprehensible. There appears to be such a thing as sinning against the notion of beauty, and this occurs when we call what is ugly beautiful. A visceral reaction ensues, and we instinctively feel this to be a most dangerous error.

If we begin to call the ugly beautiful, we will lose our ability to distinguish between the two. And whenever we find our ability to distinguish things diminished, we tend, because of original sin, to distinguish improperly. Thus, if we lose the ability to recognize the difference between the beautiful and the ugly, we risk converting everything into the ugly. Only the fact that the beautiful does not allow us escape—that it comes pre-argumentatively and imperatively—keeps us from applying the touch of evil (and it seems that the lightest touch would do) to utterly wipe beauty from the face of the earth.

The Theological Definition of Beauty

The central claim of this book is that beauty in the third sense, as the experience of the beautiful, is a moment in which we are being reminded of God. To find something beautiful is for that something to remind you of God. To be reminded is to have a memory activated; thus, the experience of the beautiful is founded on memory, anamnesis. And since it is specifically of God that one is reminded in such moments, the nature of this anamnesis is theological. Thus, an experience of beauty is a theologically anamnetic moment.

This definition assumes that we know God, or at least that we have known God. There must be some memory that is activated in such moments if this account is to work. I take it to be revealed in Scripture that there is such a memory in every one of us, in a twofold way.

First, both Psalm 19 and Romans 1 declare a minimal natural theology, a base level of knowledge about God that humanity cannot be excused for not possessing. Romans 1:20 is especially clear: “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” This passage teaches not that we should know God and so cannot be excused for not knowing God but rather that we do in fact know God and that attempts to claim that we do not are a suppression of the truth (v. 18). Taken seriously, this constitutes a claim that there is an empirical knowledge of God that is basic to every human, however much we may attempt to diminish it or deny it.

Second, Ecclesiastes 3:11 says, “He made the whole beautiful in its time; indeed, he gave the whole to their hearts so that humans will not discover the deeds that God is doing from beginning to end” (my translation). The divine strategy for suspense, to ensure that we will not be able to lift the curtain on the world and see exactly what God is doing, is not to hide the divine work from us but to give the whole to us. We have implanted in our hearts a sense of the whole, and it is on the basis of this that we cannot grab hold of it: it is placed in our hearts as an irreducible knowledge and an unshakeable desire, and as such we are able neither to thematize it sufficiently (for it lies at the root of all our thinking) nor to be truly satisfied with any substitutions. We are driven by what already lies within our hearts to seek what we would not seek if we were not already in possession of it. But it is bigger than we are, and bigger than we could ever be: it is very eternity. As such, we possess such knowledge not comprehensively but apprehensively—that is to say, we do not grasp it but are rather grasped by it. The law of subject/object holds true here: the lesser belongs to the greater. Since we are the lesser, we belong to this eternal whole that lies within us, and so at the center of our being there is an ecstatic knowledge that constantly pushes us beyond the bounds of our systems and methods. It is a semper maius (always more) that haunts and drives our being.2

Only God is eternity: eternity is not something other than God that contains God, is co-extensive with God, or is co-primal with God; rather, it is a quality of God. Thus God’s relation to time is analogous to God’s relation to space: there is no place where God lives. Heaven is not the place where it is proper for God to live, for Heaven is a creature (that is, a created thing).3 It is the dwelling place of God because it is the place God created in order to live at one with God’s creatures. Likewise, there is no time that God inhabits, nor is eternity a never-ending but successive present. It is no time, but is rather the ground of time, an expression both of the idea that God always was and always will be and of the fact that God is immediately present to every time, and so for God the end is in the beginning and the beginning is in the end. This is not to say that the end is latent in the beginning or that the beginni...