Faith and Beauty

A Theological Aesthetic

Edward Farley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351937368
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

'Aesthetics' and 'theological aesthetics' usually imply a focus on questions about the arts and how faith or religion relates to the arts; only the final pages of this work take up that problem. The central theme of this book is that of beauty. Farley employs a new typology of western texts on beauty and a theological analysis of the image of God and redemption to counter the centuries-long tendency to ignore or marginalize beauty and the aesthetic as part of the life of faith. Studying the interpretation of beauty in ancient Greece, eighteenth-century England, the work of Jonathan Edwards, and nineteenth and twentieth-century philosophies of human self-transcendence, the author explores whether Christian existence, the life of faith, and the ethical exclude or require an aesthetic dimension in the sense of beauty. The work will be of particular interest to those interested in Christian theology, ethics, and religion and the arts.

Chapter 1

Beauty as the Beast: Traditional and Postmodern Expressions

…no longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from it face like a mask. (Hans Urs von Balthasar)¹

Protestantism – the adroit castrator

Of art; the bitter negation

Of song and dance and the heart’s innocent joy –

You have botched our flesh and left us only the soul’s

Terrible impotence in a warm world. (R.S. Thomas)²

This book is about beauty, a topic no longer central in the ‘high’ arts, philosophy (including aesthetics), belles lettres, culture studies or (Western) religion.³ This does not mean that beauty has been successfully expelled from the world, culture or human experience, which is very difficult to do, as the next chapter will argue. Rather, beauty is only rarely part of the postmodern episteme – that is, the taken-for-granted societal consensus about what is important and what is real.⁴ Beauty has ceased to be an important notion both in discourses that interpret ‘the way the world is’ and in discourses that express primary human values – those of human experience, the arts, ethics and religion. Western postmodern societies more or less understand themselves, what they are about and the world at large without it. Indeed, they are able to conduct their politics, worship, education and even arts without that notion. This chapter has a modest aim – namely, a brief account with only a minimal explanation, of this discursive absence, this cultural and religious disinterest in beauty. Further, I offer this account without attempting a precise definition of beauty, a task I put off to a later chapter.

In the old French tale, Beauty is initially repulsed by the Beast. By eliminating it from the discourses of interpretation, postmoderns turn Beauty into the Beast. As the Beast, beauty is idolatrous, seductive, effete, amoral, elitist, essentialist and quaint – ‘an ornament on the bourgeois past’, as Hans Urs Von Balthasar says.⁵ A variety of discursive devices can bestow a beastly status on a selected cultural symbol or value, thus rendering it irrelevant, discredited or linguistically invisible. One way in which a term can undergo conceptual and cultural discreditation is by opposition to another term that has self-evident importance or validity. By way of the rhetorical device of dichotomy, a term is located on the ‘bad’ side of a column and thus in polar opposition to the ‘good’ term. Thus arise discursive dualisms that place beauty (and sometimes even aesthetics) on one side, moral good (and religion) on the other. In opposition are beauty versus faith, beauty as hedonism and aestheticism versus the real world of suffering, oppression, and politics or, in more deconstructive mode, beauty as reference, meaning and sobriety opposed to difference, novelty and play.

Because the roots of beauty’s beastly status are multiple, and in some cases very old, a serious account (a Nietzschean genealogy?) of these roots calls for extensive inquiry into the texts and institutions of Western history. I shall take up this task only in the most minimal way, assembling some selected evidences for beauty’s discursive suppression. I do this in the three areas of present-day postmodern culture, Christian religious piety and Western Christian theologies.

Beauty and the Postmodern

Over 50 years ago, Simone Weil left us with a devastating picture of modern beautyless societies:

Today one might think that the white races had almost lost all feeling for the beauty of the world, and that they had taken upon themselves the task of making it disappear from all the continents where they have penetrated with their armies, their trade, and their religion.⁶

Her complaint was both a lament at the end of an era and a glimpse of what was to come – a summation of a 150 years’ long movement that we now call the ‘modern’ and sometimes ‘romanticism’.

These cautionary movements were protests and holding patterns against the powerful economic and cultural shifts that finally produced the postmodern. The theme of beauty is prevalent in nineteenth-century European literature, poetry, painting and the arts. Aesthetic theory incorporated beauty into its very definition and self-understanding.⁷ But throughout the period of the modern, beauty rapidly disappeared as an important motif in itself and as a way in which Western peoples experience and interpret the world. And this is why both ‘romanticism’ and ‘modernism’ have elements of cultural nostalgia.⁸ Nostalgic are the lines from one of the late Romantic poets:

No soft Ionian laughter moves the air,

The Thames creeps on in sluggish leadenness,

And from the copse left desolate and bare

Fled is young Bacchus with his revelry.⁹

Protested here is the kind of society and even the kind of human being that walked onto the stage of human history with the Industrial Revolution. The nostalgia is for a pre-industrial, pre-urban, immediate relation to nature. The ‘modern’ then paradoxically included both the new industrialized societies with their new economics, politics, modes of warfare, population growth, and urban culture, and the nostalgic ressentiment against these things.¹⁰

In using the term ‘postmodern’, one faces not only the many meanings that have now gathered around the term, but a primary ambiguity.¹¹ According to Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Charles Jencks and others, the postmodern refers to a certain orientation at work in a variety of late twentieth-century undertakings (physics, architecture, art, literature, philosophy), an orientation that understands itself to be a departure from the modern. On this side of the ambiguity, we find a second division of meanings. A postmodern orientation can be primarily idealizing and utopian – that is, a departure from the modern that understands itself to be redemptively iconoclastic and liberative. Here, the postmodern means a societal resistance to, a ‘detoxification’ of, modes of thinking (foundationalism, reality reification, essentialism) that serve as instruments of past and present oppressive regimes and epistemes.¹² On this idealizing side, detoxifying postmodernism retains important continuities with the protests – romantic and otherwise – that arose with the modern. On the ‘realistic’ and less idealizing side of the postmodern is an orientation that is more or less indifferent to societal transformation. Here, the postmodern understands itself as radical criticism and departure (again, in philosophy, literary criticism, the arts) which in extreme form would eschew discourses of reference, value, reality, depth, presence and meaning. At work in various cognitive and cultural locations, this postmodernism is anti-structure, anti-subject, differentiating and playful.¹³ In the sense of an orientation, the postmodern is an identifiable movement in culture, something going on in universities, academic fields, various arts and other cultural practices such as law. It resides in the studio, the concert hall, the classroom and, possibly, the laboratory.

On the other side of the ambiguity, the postmodern refers not to something in culture (an interpretive elite, for instance) but a culture-wide shift. The ‘postmodern’ describes what happened, historically and culturally, to the ‘modern’.¹⁴ Historians, social scientists and philosophers such as Frederic Jameson, Christopher Lasch and Jean-François Lyotard track the way in which contemporary industrial (or post-industrial) societies of the West have departed from the modern. For the most part, this is not a utopian literature. The ‘postmodern turn’ may have destabilized the conventions and institutions of both the premodern and the modern that created gender and other hegemonies, but what came with these destabilizations had little or no liberative or redemptive interest. Postmodern culture names what happens to art, religion, morals, education, governments, leisure and entertainment and everyday life when commodification, consumerism and the secondary mediations of ‘spin’ communication replace all the ‘deep symbols’ – that is, prevailing cultural values and all gender, ethnic, regional and religious identities which in the past were the bearers of moral consciousness. In this sense, the postmodern is both a development and epoch of recent history and also a human type beset by multiple identities, bombarded constantly by an all-pervading marketing machine, and alienated from the immediacies of nature, the deposits of wisdom in human traditions and the interdicts that arise with communities of personal relations.¹⁵ The postmodern tends to displace conventional loyalties, appeals to value, and strong convictions with multiple interpretive schemes.¹⁶ Because this multiplicity destroys the whole order of representation and the real, thus the conditions for self-transcending criticism, the postmodern is an antiaesthetic ‘culture of narcissism’.¹⁷

Despite the power and popularity of these accounts, we need not conclude that the ‘postmodern turn’ (cultural narcissism, plurality of psychological identity, and radical relativism) utterly dominates all the human beings and institutions of late twentieth-century societies. Much still goes on in these societies that looks and feels very un-postmodern: popular religion, little changed from the nineteenth century, remnants of older aesthetics, antiquated cultural undertakings, various fundamentalisms, ethnic stabilities and even cultural isolations. Huxley’s ‘brave new world’ (the postmodern) may have arrived but the traditional ‘natives’ still live and work in its cities. Thus, a truly comprehensive account of tum-of-the-millennium Western societies needs to explore how and why premodern and modern strands persist in the postmodern tum. The two senses of the postmodern – the radical critique of the modern and the cultural shift – are not utterly isolated from each other. Break-up, destabilization, anti-modernism, multiple frameworks of meaning, play and polemics are themes that occur in both the interpretive orientation and the social descriptions of the postmodern turn.

What is beauty’s fate in the postmodern turn – that is, in a culture marked by iconoclasms towards all past traditions, pervasive marketing, narcissistic orientations and multiple identities? Because contemporary society is only partially receptive to the postmodern, it may be that beauty (as a deep value, a discourse and a way of interpreting and experiencing the world) still survives in nostalgic, antiquarian and traditionalist strands of culture. But in society’s most powerful institutions, dominant discourses and cultural ‘tones’, beauty seems to be very much the beast.

The suppression or marginalization of beauty in human societies is certainly not simply a postmodern phenomenon. It comes with virtually all ancient and modern oppressions such as slavery, ghetto isolation, serfdom, peonage and classism. Because an impoverished and marginalized life makes it is very difficult for the slave, the poor or the disenfranchised to develop aesthetic sensibilities, beauty as a culturally accessible value tends to become the possession of the citizen, the nobility, the gentry and the educated classes. With the Industrial Revolution came not only a democratization of education and a blurring of older lines of wealth and privilege, but also factories, wide economic swings, urban concentrations, new locations of wealth and consumerism that brought about aesthetic impoverishment for the worker and even for the new middle class. It was precisely this beauty-less social environment that evoked the protests of the Romantics.¹⁸

The postmodern turn brought with it new forms of cultural alienation from beauty. Postmodern societies are, of course, industrialized societies insofar as they still depend on the products of various industries. However, their ‘cultural tone’ and quality of life are no longer dominated by factories but by massive bureaucratic institutions that market, record, and distribute information, entertainment, food, travel, education, religion, war, government and health. The typical environment of those who work is not the factory but either an office or a specific service delivery location (the small speciality shop, the fast food restaurant). These environments on which the postmodern population depends for income almost all survive by marketing. The most visible, utilized and valued entities of the post-industrial society are the car (and other means of transport), places and sources of entertainment (television, sports stadiums), locales of purchasing (shopping centres, mail-order catalogues) and the popular arts. Postmoderns have become accustomed to their waking hours being filled with the aggressive visual and audio marketing of these valued entities, a marketing which is the cultural air the postmodern human being breathes. Further, these valued entities and their marketing spill over into and set the tones and agendas that deliver society’s humanizing and artistic values: family, religion, education and the ‘high arts’.

So far, this description has been formal and abstract, concerned with general classes of things such as institutions, sports or entertainment. Although their pre-eminence, their function as society’s most serious preoccupations, is central and pervasive, these things in themselves do not constitute the postmodern. Less formal is the observation that these valued entities and their marketing are relatively empty of content, that ‘the medium is the message’. At this point, the other sense of postmodernism – a certain epistemological and even global orientation – is pertinent. For the epistemological orientation of play, difference, anti-foundation, non-reference, non-system, multiple frames of meaning and identity are not just phenomena of elitist acad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Beauty as the Beast: Traditional and Postmodern Expressions
• 2 Beauty as Being: The Irrepressible Character of Beauty
• 3 Beauty as Sensibility
• 4 Beauty as Benevolence
• 5 Beauty in Human Self-transcendence
• 6 Paths to Beauty in Twentieth-century Theology
• 7 The Beauty of Human Redemption
• 8 Beauty, Pathos and Joy
• Synopsis
• Index