Theological Aesthetics

Abstract

This book explores the role of aesthetic experience in our perception and understanding of the holy. The book's goal is to articulate a theology of revelation, examined in relation to three principal dimensions of the aesthetic realm: feeling and imagination; beauty (or taste); and the arts. The book concentrates on the theological significance of aesthetic data provided by each of the three major spheres of aesthetic perception and response. Throughout the work, the underlying question is how each of these spheres serves as a source of revelation. Although the book frames much of its argument in terms of Catholic theology, it also makes extensive use of ideas from the Protestant theologian of the arts, Gerardus van der Leeuw, and draws insights from such diverse thinkers as Hans Goerg Gadamer, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Iris Murdoch. The analysis is enlivened by the artistic examples the book selects: the music of Mozart as contemplated by Karl Barth, Schoenberg's opera Moses und Aron, the sculptures of Chartres Cathedral, poems by Rilke and Michelangelo, and many others. What emerges from this study is what the book terms a transcendental theology of aesthetics. In Thomistic terms, it finds that beauty is not only perfection, but transcendental. That is, any instance of beauty, rightly perceived and rightly understood, can be seen to imply divinely beautiful things as well. In other words, the book argues, God is the absolute and necessary condition for the possibility of beauty.

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