Niagara Falls
[Photo By: KPA]
I came across David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (via Thomas F. Bertonneau's post "What are you reading" at the Orthosphere, where he linked to The University Bookman, a book review site in which he participates).
I went searching for the book in various bookstores. From what I understand, it is out of print, or out of stock. In any case, it is available on Amazon.com ($26 for a used book, from the original price of $40!).
I searched for online versions, and there is an almost complete Google Books version. There is a page missing every few pages, but until I get a hold of a hard copy, I will suffer through that.
This will be a great book to review as I work on my own modest contribution to beauty. One of the sections in my book Reclaiming Beauty is titled: Beauty in the Worship of God. I'm approaching this from the "human" angle, that one of the ways we worship God is through our creation of beauty, of which art plays a large part. But there is also the beauty in the perfect, or perfectible, logic of science. And beauty in the elegance in even the clumsiest of sports (wrestling or even boxing). The true worship of God includes our creation of beauty, as well as our appreciation, recognition and inclusion of beauty.
But Bentley's book has given me a different perspective, although I would have reached it at some point in my research and writing.
From Part 2 of the table of contents of The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (see the list of contents below), Bentley introduces us to the concept of beauty that comes from God, who is a God who would rather win us over through beauty, with "shared regard, delight, fellowship, feasting, and joy." I will venture to say that God created the world to fill it with beauty, to share this world with us, and to bring us closer to Him. We should delight in beauty, as He does, if only to show our appreciation as the chosen partakers of beauty.
I quote Pope Benedict XVI in my chapter Seek and Ye Shall Find (which I've reproduced here as one of a few select chapters to introduce my ideas):
Beauty, whether that of the natural universe or that expressed in art, precisely because it opens up and broadens the horizons of human awareness, pointing us beyond ourselves, bringing us face to face with the abyss of Infinity, can become a path towards the transcendent, towards the ultimate Mystery, towards God. [Meeting with Artists. Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI. Sistine Chapel. November 29, 2009. ]
Ecclesiastes 3:
He hath made every thing beautiful in his time
Here are the detailed table of contents of The Beauty Of The Infinite: The Aesthetics Of Christian Truth:
Introduction
The Question
Terms Employed
Beauty
Final Remarks
Part 1: Dionysus against the Crucified
The Violence of Metaphysics and the Metaphysics of Violence
I. The City and the Wastes
II. The Veil of the Sublime
III. The Will to Power
IV. The Covenant of Light
Part 2: The Beauty of the Infinite
A Dogmatica Minora
I. Trinity
1. The Christian understanding of beauty emerges not only naturally, but necessarily, from the Christian understanding of God as a perichoresis of love, a dynamic coinherence of the three divine persons, whose life is eternally one of shared regard, delight, fellowship, feasting, and joy
i. Divine Apatheia
ii. Divine Fellowship
iii. Divine Joy
2. The Christian understanding of difference and distance is shaped by the doctrine of the Trinity, where theology finds that the true form of difference is peace, of distance beauty
i. Divine Difference
ii. Divine Perfection
3. In the Christian God, the infinite is seen to be beautiful and so capable of being traversed by way of the beautiful
i. Desire's Flight
ii. Changeless Beauty
iii. The Mirror of the Infinite
iv. Infinite Peace
4. The infinite is beautiful because God is Trinity; and because all being belongs to God's infinity, a Christian ontology appears and properly belongs within a theological aesthetics
i. God and Being
ii. God beyond Being
iii. Analogia Entis
II. Creation
1. God's gracious action in creation belongs from the first to that delight, pleasure, and regard that the Trinity enjoys from eternity, as an outward and unnecessary expression of that love; and thus creation must be received before all else as gift and as beauty
i Analogia Delectationis
ii. The Gift
iii. Desire's Power
2. As God is Trinity, in whom all difference is possessed as perfect peace and unity, the divine life might be described as infinite music, and creation too might be described as a music whose intervals, transitions, and phrases are embraced within God's eternal, triune polyphony
i. The Divine Theme p. 275
ii. Divine Counterpoint p. 282
3. As God utters himself eternally in his Word, and possesses all the fullness of address and response, and as creation belongs to God's utterance of himself (as a further articulation, at an analogical remove, of the abundant "eloquence" of divine love), creation may be grasped by theology as language
i. Divine Expression
ii. Divine Rhetoric
iii. Analogia Verbi
III. Salvation
1. Salvation occurs by way of recapitulation, the restoration of the human image in Christ, the eternal image of the Father after whom humanity was created in the beginning; thus salvation consists in the recovery of a concrete form, and in the restoration of an original beauty
i. The Form of Distance
ii. Christ the Sign
iii. "What Is Truth?"
iv. The Practice of the Form
2. In Christ, totality's economy of violence is overcome by the infinity of God's peace, inasmuch as one order of sacrifice is overcome by another: sacrifice as the immolation of the beautiful is displaced by a sacrifice whose offering is one of infinite beauty
i. The Economy of Violence
ii. A Gift Exceeding Every Debt
iii. The Consolations of Tragedy, the Terrors of Easter
IV. Eschaton
Christian eschatology affirms the goodness of created difference, reveals divine truth to be inseparable from beauty, and exposes the totality as false and marked with a damnable finitude
i. Time's Surface, Eternity's Light
ii. The Last Adam
Part 3. Rhetoric without Reserve
Persuasion, the Tyranny of Twilight, and the Language of Peace
I. The War of Persuasions
II. The Violence of Hermeneutics
III. The Optics of the Market
IV. The Gift of Martyrs
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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