A Peculiar Orthodoxy

Reflections on Theology and the Arts

Begbie, Jeremy S.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781493414529
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

World-renowned theologian Jeremy Begbie has been at the forefront of teaching and writing on theology and the arts for more than twenty years. Amid current debates and discussions on the topic, Begbie emphasizes the role of a biblically grounded creedal orthodoxy as he shows how Christian theology and the arts can enrich each other. Throughout the book, Begbie demonstrates the power of classic trinitarian faith to bring illumination, surprise, and delight whenever it engages with the arts.

1
Created Beauty

The Witness of J. S. Bach

When speaking with others about the arts in a theological setting, I have found that the topic of beauty tends to make an appearance very early in the discussion. There is little point in wishing this were not so, but we have every reason to ask about why the concept is invoked and about how it is informed (and re-formed) by the Christian faith. In this essay I attempt to sketch what I see as the main contours of a theology of beauty and relate them to the music of J. S. Bach. Crucial, I argue, is an orientation to the self-identification of the Christian God as triune. This means being wary of adopting concepts of beauty that, however ancient and venerated, turn on very different axes than those implicated in what has been played out in Jesus Christ, the one in whom and through whom all things are created (Col. 1:16). This essay should be read along with the next (they originally appeared together, arising from a conference at Wheaton College).

Among the millions of words spoken and written about J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations of 1741, few are as intriguing as those of the musicologist Peter Williams when he stands back from this dazzling tour de force and reflects:

I think myself that it “feels special” because, whatever antecedent this or that feature has, its beauty is both original—seldom like anything else, even in Bach—and at the same time comprehensible, intelligible, coherent, based on simple, “truthful” harmonies.1

Most of what I want to say in this essay is suggested by that observation (even though Williams himself would probably demur at the theological slant I shall be giving to his words). The matter he brings to the surface is the interplay between two types of beauty: on the one hand, the beauty that is in some sense already “there” in the nature of things (the beauty of “truthful harmonies”), and on the other, the beauty human beings make (the “original” beauty of a piece like the Goldberg). Put more theologically, there is the beauty directly given to the world by God and that which we are invited to fashion as God’s creatures. Taking our cue from Williams, the question we shall pursue in this essay is, how might an engagement with Bach’s music, especially as considered in its time and place, assist us in gaining a clearer theological perception and understanding of these two senses of created beauty and of the relation between them?

Theological Bearings

We shall turn to Bach in due course. The first task, however, is to say something about the concept of beauty itself, to clarify what we might intend by this fluid and much-contested notion and, in particular, what might be entailed in a specifically theological perspective on it. With limited space, I cannot attempt anything approaching a comprehensive “theology of the beautiful,” but we do at least need to gain some theological bearings—that is, to highlight key features of the theological landscape that are especially relevant to a responsible Christian account of beauty and the ways in which such an account is shaped by them.

Our primary orientation will not be to an experience of the beautiful, nor to an aesthetics, but to the quite specific God attested in Scripture—the gracious, reconciling, self-revealing God of Jesus Christ. If an account of beauty is to be theo-logical in Christian terms, its logos, or rationale, will take its shape primarily from the being and acts of this theos. Crassly obvious as this may seem, even a casual survey of religious treatments and theologies of beauty over the last thirty years will frequently show a marked lack of attention to the identity of the deity or deities being presumed. Difficulties are compounded if the de facto basic allegiance is to some prior and fixed conception of beauty, especially if it relies on a metaphysical scheme whose consonance with the testimony of Scripture is anything but clear. If we are to think of the phenomenon of beauty, at least initially, in terms of the main strands that inform the so-called great theory (and I see no compelling reason not to do so)—in other words, proportion and consonance of parts, brightness or resplendence, perfection or integrity, and affording pleasure upon contemplation2—then these strands need to be constantly re-formed and transformed, purged and purified by a repeated return to the saving self-disclosure of Scripture’s God.

Needless to say, this approach will sound to some like an appeal for a sectarian retreat into a Christian ghetto, an isolationist “fideism” that rules out conversation with all but Christians. Nothing of the sort is intended. The point is not to close down dialogue about beauty with those outside or on the edges of the Christian tradition or with the vast corpus of philosophical writings on beauty. The issue is at root about the norms shaping our language. If a conversation about beauty is to be fruitful, one cannot but care about the criteria governing the deployment of such a historically loaded and polysemous word—for how can speech bear fruit if it has ceased to care about its primary responsibilities? And to care about these criteria, for the Christian at any rate, is ultimately to care about the God to whom the church turns for the shaping of all its words.

A Christian account of beauty, then, will be oriented to a particular God. Let me press the matter. According to the Christian tradition, this God has identified himself as irreducibly trinitarian. The deity celebrated in Christian faith is not an undifferentiated monad or blank “Presence” but a triunity of inexhaustible love and life, active and present to the world as triune and never more intensively than in the saving life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If, then, we are to speak of God as primordially beautiful—however we may want to qualify this—then strenuous care must be taken to ensure it is this God of whom we speak.3 If we speak of divine proportion and consonance, can these be any other than the proportion and consonance of this Triune God? If we speak of divine brightness, integrity, or perfection, can these be any other than the brightness, integrity, and perfection of the trinitarian life? Everything depends here on refusing all a priori abstractions and maintaining a resolute focus on the saving economy of God in Jesus Christ. Divine beauty is discovered not in the first instance by reference to a doctrine (still less to a philosophy of beauty) but by strict attention to a movement in history enacted for us—supremely the story of Jesus Christ the incarnate Son, living in the Father’s presence in the power of the Spirit. Trinitarian beauty has, so to speak, been performed for us.4

To begin to unfold the implications of this notion: if beauty is to be ascribed primordially to the Triune God, and the life of God is constituted by the dynamism of outgoing love, then primordial beauty is the beauty of this ecstatic love for the other. God’s beauty is not static structure but the dynamism of love. The “proportion and consonance” of God, his “brightness” or radiance, his “perfection” and his affording “pleasure upon contemplation” are all to be understood in the light of the endless self-donation of Father to Son and Son to Father in the ecstatic momentum of the Spirit. Hence we find Hans Urs von Balthasar insisting that we must go to the economy of salvation to discover God’s beauty (and thus the ultimate measure of all beauty) since the incarnation, death, and raising of Jesus display God’s love in its clearest and most decisive form; here, above all, we witness the mutual self-surrendering love of the Father and Son in the Spirit for the healing of the world.5 This linking of beauty with outgoing love requires giving a full and crucial place to the Holy Spirit in connection with beauty. Insofar as the Spirit is the personal unity of the mutual outgoingness of Father and Son, the impulse toward self-sharing in God’s life, we might well describe the Spirit as the “beautifier” in God.6

Giving the trinitarian character of God its formal and material due means that we will resist the temptation to drive apart beauty and the infinite, something that is very much a mark of modernity and postmodernity. Here we can sympathize somewhat with John Milbank and others who lament what they see as the modern rupture of beauty and the sublime, evident especially since the eighteenth century.7 As understood in the tradition represented by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the experience of the sublime is an awareness of being overwhelmed by something uncontainable, beyond our grasp. In Kant this is either mainly “mathematical,” when we are overwhelmed by size and are confronted with the limits of our sense perception (such as we might experience under a starry sky or when suddenly faced with a mountain massif), or “dynamical,” when we are overwhelmed by a power that makes us acutely aware of our own finitude and physical vulnerability (such as we might feel in a raging storm).8 On this reading, it should be stressed, the sublime is unrepresentable to the senses and the imagination, and as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Created Beauty
• 2. Beauty, Sentimentality, and the Arts
• 3. Faithful Feelings
• 4. Openness and Specificity
• 5. Confidence and Anxiety in Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius
• 6. The Holy Spirit at Work in the Arts
• 7. Natural Theology and Music
• 8. Room of One’s Own?
• 9. The Future of Theology amid the Arts
• Index
• Back Cover