Thomist Aesthetics: A Guest Post by Chris

Below is a guest post by my friend Chris. On our seminary bulletin board, we had a dialogue similar to the one currently in process on these pages, regarding Christian aesthetics. Specifically, how does Christianity adress the question of artistic form?

Within my own communion, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, there is quite a bit of tension between the shape of the liturgy received from the Catholic (that is to say, the universal, and not specifically Roman) tradition, and between forms intended to be innovative and attractive to those without a background in the Church.

At least one of the problems facing a Christian aethetics in the Western Church, is the reality of division. Our common life is fractured and diverse. How can we, together, affirm those forms which best express the content of the gospel? How can we bring the riches of our world’s cultures into the culture of the Church, which is the body of Christ? Can we “baptize,” so to speak, any type of cultural form and thus make it fit for Christian worship & devotion? Even heavy metal or hard-core gangsta-rap?

Here is Chris’ helpful parsing out of some relevant issues:

“ It is one thing to hold that certain cultural forms "cannot be baptized," and quite another to say that some are more beautiful, and therefore more true and Christ-like, than others. To say that something cannot be baptized is to beckon a charge of Manicheanism, as it contradicts God's declaration that His Creation is good. To say that some particular form possesses a surface quality that is not only not hostile to the Gospel, but especially suited to it by virtue of one or more [of its] attributes, is quite different from a coarse dualism. I think there may be an analogy that one could make along Thomist lines by recalling a sort of "preparation for the Gospel" motif. Some cultural forms may possess greater participation in natural truth due to their reasonableness. Grace building on nature, or, if that is too hard to swallow, then grace more easily elevating and sanctifying what is not as much degraded.

I think that, in this precise sense, cultural elitism is called for. There are more reasonable, and more beautiful, cultural forms than others. I think the Great Tradition of Christianity as it has providentially developed by way of Athens and on into Europe has been well supported and expressed. This was one of the points that Benedict recently made at Regensburg . It is, or course, hard to come up with a non-fanciful thought experiment whereby Christianity thrived on different cultural soil (though Africa prior to Muslim tyranny comes to mind, but even this Africa was Latinized). I do not believe that these are mere quirks and jags of historical senselessness. My contention is that the major threads that make up the fabric of this European Christianity are worth conserving: the emphasis on reason and the philosophical tradition of reflection upon aesthetics, and the major aesthetic forms, principally.

We need also to define what is meant by "beautiful." This is not something that we can do easily, short of pointing to an icon of our Lord's image. It remains a crucially important task, if we are to actually make progress towards aesthetics worthy of the Church.

The first thing I can do to advance towards a definition is to uphold that variety of early Christian Platonism, and of Thomism, that God is a simplicity of excellences. God’s being is identical to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Therefore, those things are beautiful that share God’s very being in a more perfect way. There are some ways in which we can make this very basic assumption touch our own experiences via analogy. As God is rational, (well ordered by His own essence) then all things that are rational participate in this attribute in a limited manner. Hence, those things that are rational are also participating in the Beautiful – since God’s essence is simple – and therefore possess beauty.

Since we are dealing with aesthetics, which is, for us, largely confined to the realm known through the senses, we must consider how we can have sensible knowledge of God’s being. We need a form that is sensible to guide our aesthetic judgments. The “glory” or kabod of the Lord first appears as Creation. Creation itself is superfluous other that declares God’s Goodness. The Wisdom tradition of Israel connects Wisdom to God and to Creation in a fundamental manner. Within this, there are Theophanous events with specifically available surfaces that serve as a form for our sense of the Beautiful.

Ultimately, these surfaces are unified and made available in an unsurpassable manner in the person Jesus of Nazareth. He is the exact mirror image of the Father and the fullness of his being made flesh. The pre-existent Son, who is the eternal form for Creation, comes into Creation and makes Himself recklessly available to our senses.

The life of submissive self-oblation towards that Father, the eternal pattern of giving that is the Son, is identified in history as an accessible life lived, with shape and sensible form.

This form is the one that must become our definition for the beautiful. Anything that is beautiful will look like Christ. The similitude of beauty to a phenomenon is the proportion of its resemblance to Christ.

A brief concrete example: I like Radiohead (especially OK Computer), but it is very difficult for me to discern this music’s similitude to Christ. In fact, there are anti-Christian sensibilities that comprise the work. There may in fact be such a similitude to Christ, at some abstract level, but it is not easily intelligible. Hence, it is not easy for me to call the work, in a proper sense, beautiful (every phenomenon possesses some degree of beauty or it would not exist, but I cannot use the term in the sense I have just attempted to define). It is more likely that my own sinfulness has warped my aesthetic sense in some quite profound ways, and this perversion of aesthetic sense is what accounts for my attraction. I am certain that this is the case for me sometimes. It is important to recall that some of those who consider themselves to have rarified and cultured aesthetic sense are those who flock to see abominations like [Andres Serrano’s] “Piss Chri__” (I will not blaspheme).

Radiohead is a complex phenomenon, but I’m not entirely convinced by David Dark’s apology. I was three years ago, but not any longer…”

I might add to Chris’ statement that a number of other cultures have brought their riches into the Church and share appropriately in God’s glory—African-American spirituals to name just one.

One must offer a nuanced account of history to both attend to the very deep currents of Christian thought running through European art for the past millenia, but also to see how other cultures have offered their gifts to Christian humanism, and to appreciate the ways in which well-developed art forms that originated in other traditions could enrich the Church now and in times to come. Christians are bound to affirm that the triune God's providence is at work everywhere, bringing all things-- even other religions-- to fulfillment.

I don't feel nearly well-enough informed about world music, but I do love some of what I've heard. As anyone who has seen the recording of the 1967 Moneterey Pop Festival knows, Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar on fire is really quite boring; it is not really worth the “legendary” status that is attached to it. In my opinion, Ravi Shankhar steals the show with an amazing fifteen-minute classical Indian raga. I think that this is a superb example of how other cultures can exhibit just how repugnant western nihilism and self-indulgence is!

It seems that with the cultural suicide of the West, the "global south" (Africa, South America) and Asia, too, are inheriting the riches of the Christian faith. While emptied cathedrals echo in France, Taiwan’s churches are packed to the gills. It will be interesting to witness the continuities and discontinuities between the European forms of the faith and the cultural forms of "the next Christendom” of the Global South.