Redeeming Beauty

Soundings in Sacral Aesthetics

Aidan Nichols O.P.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780754660019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351906074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Redeeming Beauty explores the richness of orthodox Christian tradition, both Western and Eastern, in matters of 'sacral aesthetics' - a term used to denote the foundations, production and experience of religiously relevant beauty. Aidan Nichols investigates five principal themes: the foundation of beauty in the natural order through divine creative action; explicitly 'evangelical' beauty as a quality of biblical revelation and notably at its climax in Christ; the legitimacy of making and venerating artworks; qualities of the self in relation to objective presentation of the religiously beautiful; and the difficulties of practising a sacral aesthetic, whether as producer or consumer, in an epoch when the visual arts themselves have left behind not only Church but for the greater part the public as well. The thought of theologians such as Augustine, Aquinas, Balthasar, Ratzinger, Bulgakov, Maritain and others are explored.

PART 1

Foundations, in Creation and Grace

Chapter 1

Aesthetics in Augustine and Aquinas

Introduction

Our first task is to investigate the foundations of beauty in the natural order through divine creation, and, furthermore, the specificity of explicitly ‘evangelical’ beauty, considered as a quality of biblical revelation – notably at the latter’s climax in Jesus Christ. Thus this opening chapter lays out the account of these first two themes in the two principal theologians of Latin antiquity and the Middle Ages: Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.

Except in the question of the metaphysics of beauty, which Neo-Scholasticism, to its credit, found worthy of investigation and expansion, it might be thought that Thomas’s works are not especially susceptible to the treatment called, in the wake of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s raids on the tradition, ‘theological aesthetics’. Balthasar, theological aesthetician par excellence, did not think fit to include Thomas among the representatives of the theology of God’s glory, beauty’s revelatory analogate, in the series of monographs which constitute volume two of his Herrlichkeit. It is Bonaventure, not Thomas, who saves the honour there of the Western high mediaevals, filling the gap between Anselm and John of the Cross. That absence is the more striking given the pivotal role Thomas plays elsewhere in Herrlichkeit – specifically at the very midpoint of the third double volume, which considers metaphysics. There Thomas’s ontology is seen as the paradigm of a study of being that does justice simultaneously to being’s abundance and indigence, and more especially to the kenotic aspect of being, Sein, whereby it so gives itself as only concretely to be in existents, die Seienden.¹

Of course, the metaphysics of beauty picked out of Thomas’s writings by authors as different as Jacques Maritain and Umberto Eco is itself no bagatelle.² It is a valuable area of enquiry with an important background in Augustine’s creation metaphysics and theological cosmology. When to Augustine’s influence there is added that of Denys we might even speak (as we shall see) of Thomas’s vision of reality as ‘pankalic’ in character. In some sense – just what, remains to be established – all things are beautiful. But the question can also be raised: is there not implicit in Thomas’s presentation of creation and salvation an evocation of beauty more specifically revelatory and evangelical in character, just as there is, surely, in Augustine’s, for in his mature writings Augustine proved ready to bring together the content of the Gospel revelation with the concept of the beautiful?

Augustine

That is the discovery of the Durham patrologist Carol Harrison in her study Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine³. In that book she describes how, after Augustine’s early sorties in the realm of thinking about the beautiful, a shift was prepared to a more ‘incarnational’ aesthetic. Her underlining of the term ‘temporal medicine’ as a key to the mature Augustine’s theological aesthetics is helpful, for the ‘shift’ in Augustine’s attitude, which not for nothing coincides with his increasing ecclesial responsibilities as in turn servus Dei, presbyter and bishop, can be explained by his enhanced concern for pastoral care. Pastoral utility guides Augustine to discern the temporal medicine to be found in creation, in the language of Scripture⁴, in man as the image of God and, supremely, in Jesus Christ. Harrison dislodges a sometimes lamentably exclusive focus of attention on Augustine’s ex professo discussions of what we might term the ‘nominally’ beautiful in his early, more philosophical, writings, and points up instead the significance of what we might call by contrast his ‘adjectival’ use of the language of the beautiful to qualify the theological realities with which the mature homiletic and dogmatic texts that have come down to us largely deal.

Augustine’s first literary effort was directed to aesthetics, the De pulchro et apto. No copy was extant by the time he was writing the Confessions less than 20 years later, in 397. Judging by the account given there⁵, it appears to have been a mishmash of pagan sources with a definitely Manichaean cast to it. In all probability it was based on anthologies by doxographers, those ‘chroniclers of intellectual gossip in antiquity’.⁶ The distinction of terms found in the title seems to resolve into two kinds of aesthetic fittingness: one, the pulchrum, is the pleasingness of the widest possible whole; the other, the aptum, the fittingness to some whole of a part. What Serge Lancel has called ‘the varied readings and temptations of the still very eclectic Augustine’⁷ stood in utter contrast, however, to a work he read some few years after this youthful effusion which later, when a bishop, he found somewhat embarrassing. Plotinus’s Peri tou kalou, with its superlatively anti-Manichaean account of the sheer transcendence of the eternal intelligible realm of the Supreme Beauty, was surely one of the libri Platonicorum which helped Augustine towards the acceptance of the Gospel as understood in Milanese Catholicism, in the circle of Ambrose.⁸

In 386, at Cassiciacum, the live-in seminar on that Lombard estate looking toward the Alpine foothills, Augustine is following the twofold path of philosophy and Christianity. From the texts of that time, his ontology of beauty is indeed indebted to Plotinus, whose discussion of the Supreme Beauty by reflection of which all beautiful things are lovely had come as such a revelation to the Manichee hearer. It is with the help of the Neo-Platonists that in the Soliloquies he recognises beauty as a Name of the true God,⁹ as will Thomas, by way of commenting the treatise of the Syrian monk Denys on the Names of God, eight centuries later. However, we remember that at Cassiciacum while Augustine re-read the Platonists he also read the Psalms. Augustine will retain a ‘facility for marrying the symbolism of the Scriptures with the Plotinian dialectic of degrees’.¹⁰

The lion’s share of Augustine’s theoretical discussion of the beautiful comes from the early period of his writing – which has enabled the impression to be formed that his aesthetic is ultra-spiritual, and even rationalistic.¹¹ For the Contra Academicos, where Philokalia and Philosophia are compared,¹² beauty is in principle synonymous with Wisdom – or what in the famous ecstasy scene at Ostia Augustine calls ‘the Principle of all that is, has been and will be, without having been made’.¹³ The Beauty (capitalisation appropriate here) we should seek dwells in the realm of reason and the soul. Conversely, the beauty found in things of sense captivates negatively through ensnaring the mind on ground level. But not, be it emphasised, because the very ontology of material things embodies what is evil. Rather, as the De quantitate animae will explain¹⁴: since the soul is in the divine image,¹⁵ it is itself the closest to divine truth of all creatures in the hierarchy of existence – a doctrine anticipated in the Soliloquies and confirmed in the De immortalitate animae. The soul, accordingly, should turn to itself, and then from there to its Source with a view to finding Beauty directly.

Those imperatives reflect the mystical experience of Augustine’s first or intellectual conversion described retrospectively in the Confessions,¹⁶ where, as Lancel writes, that experience is:

put into words which evoke specifically Plotinian themes, but are freely adapted in a spiritual context that may already be said to be Christian.¹⁷

In the words of the Confessions themselves,

I felt myself drawn to you by your Beauty, but soon was dragged from you by my own weight and fell groaning to the ground. That weight was my carnal custom.¹⁸

Here the context of Plotinian ascent is, evidently, biblical, and especially Pauline, post-lapsarian struggle. But if the early Augustine recommends a flight from the senses, this is in no paranoid religious temper. Looking back, he explains in the Retractationes how in the De immortalitate animae:

Through the intermediary of corporeal things I myself wanted to attain or lead others to attain, incorporeal things.¹⁹

In particular, Augustine recognises the nobility of sight and hearing, as Aquinas will do likewise. For Augustine, the superiority of these senses lies in the way their objects yield to judgement by rational categories.²⁰ The delight hearing and sight afford is itself rational – something Augustine characteristically understands as well-measured. Thus, in the De musica, music’s optimal expression is not so much its actual performance as the knowledge it affords of number and metrics. Whether writing at Cassiciacum, in the De ordine, with its study plan for the liberal arts, or, on his return to Africa, at Thagaste, in the De vera religione, that treatise on the essence of Christianity, he applies to the world of sense ideas of beauty expressed in largely rational and especially mathematical terms. He uses for illustration such things as the proportion and symmetry of windows and doors in architecture, the rhythmical movement of a dance, or the measured syllables of a verse in poetry.²¹

In the perspective of theological aesthetics, this is the most modest of beginnings. But owing especially to the deeper ecclesial rooting Augustine acquired through commitment as ascetic, presbyter, bishop, his thinking became increasingly shaped by the Church-carried revelation, to inevitably transforming effect.²² In Carol Harrison’s words:

The Christian doctrines of Creation ex nihilo, of the Incarnation, of a historical revelation, and of the resurrection of the body, to mention but a f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1 Foundations, in Creation and Grace
• Part 2 Twentieth-Century Theologians of the Image
• Part 3 The Difficulties of Practice
• Index of Names