Here, from his book the Beauty of the Infinite, is David Bentley Hart’s vision of what theology can be,
"If it seems that, in using such language, I am merely advocating a return to philosophical naivete, making a theological virtue out of a truculent impatience with modern thought's critical rigor, and attempting to represent rhapsody as reason, I can say only that it is not until one adequately recognizes the degree of sheer faith that inheres in every employment of reason that one can turn again to recognize what degree of rationality is or is not present in any given act of faith. It is true that I want to defend a theological reappropriation of what! have called the "covenant of light" - a trust in the evidence of the given, an understanding of knowledge as an effect of the eros stirred by the gift of the world's truth - but this is because (among other things) I wish to see modern theology free itself from any superstitious adherence to the arid dogmatisms of transcendental logic (modern or postmodern).
What is the noumenal freedom that the sublime adumbrates, or the noumenon that sensibility never reaches, or the "chaosmos'' that only a dissonant sentiendum an- nounces, or the event that representation occludes, or differance - and so on - but an empty concept, an object of simple irrational fideism? To move from the thought that there may be that which exceeds knowing to the conclusion that all knowledge is representation, dissimulating this invisible excess, and that the tragic dialectic between appearance and hiddenness is the event of absolute qualitative contradiction, is to allow one's reflections to be governed by a kind of pure, unreflective religious sentimentality.
I believe that what, in part, I mean to advocate is simply a phenomenology liberated from transcendental stricture: beginning from the phenomenological presuppositions that being is what shows itself, and that the event of the phenomenon and the event of perception are inseparable, I wish nonetheless to say that only a transcendental prejudice would dictate in advance that one may not see (or indeed does not see) in the event of manifestation and in the simultaneity of phenomenon and perception a light that exceeds them as an ever more eminent phenomenality: not only the hidden faces of a given object, or the lovely dynamism of visible and invisible in presentation, but the descending incandescence and clarity of the infinite coincidence of all that grants world and knower one to the other.
This is not to say that one can simply deduce Christian metaphysics from empirical perception, obviously; but it is to insist that such a metaphysics is scarcely the founding of the visible in the simply invisible, of the immanent in a merely posited transcendence: rather it is a way of seeing that refuses to see more - or less - than what is given. It is a passage to the infinite that does not depart from the beautiful to pass through the paradox of the sublime toward the featureless abyss of an otherness available only to reason, but one that attempts to advance into the beautiful forever, finding the world ever more fully even as one enters into its transcendent truth.
To use the language of Maximus the Confessor, it attempts to see in everything its logos: that is, its essential openness to the Logos, to the transcendent light of infinite being - an openness that gives every being its be- ing, an openness "displacing" the nothingness from which every being is called (though, as Maximus would say, only perfect love is capable of such vision).
….the theologian must always proceed according to the essential attitude of such a "transcending" phenomenology: an initial trust in the goodness and veracity of being, a self-surrendering availability before the testimony of creation (always, of course, embraced within and consummated by an even more essential faith in God revealed in Christ). Why is it, after all, that one can speak meaningfully and intelligibly of beauty, in any instance of experience, though one is not referring to any discrete object alongside the object of attention? How is it that one may say that a thing is beautiful and another recognize the truth or error of the remark, understanding in either case what has been said?
It is, I want to say, because beauty- which is no thing among things - is being itself, the movement of being's disclosure, the eloquence by which everything, properly and charitably regarded, says infinitely more than itself. Beauty is the transcendence of being in the gift of the immanent, and so my intendings are never adequate to the fullness of its address, to the ever greater meaning that I do not constitute but that always constitutes me, within my desire. The experience of the beautiful is the sudden intimation of the fortuity of necessity, of the contingency of a thing's integrity; it is an awe that awakens one to the difference of being from beings, of "existence" from "essence;' allowing one to see within the very concord, within their difference, of any phenomenon and its event a fittingness that is also grace.
This is an original agitation, a discovery not of sublime "beyond" the beautiful or qualitatively different from beauty, but the sublime within beauty, a surfeit of splendor that demands wonder. One then sees that though the "what it is" of anything is never commensurate to the delightful or terrible truth "that it is," it is always good (though sin and death may distort any object and any vision of it) that this is this, and that this is. And this mysterious coherence of the wholly fitting and utterly gratuitous urges reflection toward the proportion of their harmony: toward, that is, the infinity where "essence" and "existence" coincide as the ontological peace of both a primordial belonging and an original gift.
Thus the experience of beauty is a knowledge of creatureliness and a hunger that can never have done with the things of earth. It is also an insatiable hunger for God. Apart from the language of beauty, then, and all it may allow one to say, theology becomes destitute and fruitless. Only with regard to beauty and the "openness to being" it both answers and provokes, can Christian thought say adequately how it is that the Light that "shineth in darkness" is also "the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world."
Again, Christ (God's full and everlasting Word) is a persuasion, a form - incalculably various in the facets he shows - offered outward to the world as the real shape of creation, the true grammar of being. He stands precariously within human understanding, on the far side of Lessing's ditch, intractable to abstraction, and yet in all his particularity extending himself to human eyes and minds as the way, the truth, and the life. His beauty, if grasped, is the true story of being, told from before the foundations of the world to the end of time.
But this means that Christ must have real aesthetic force; he must be able to appear not as a docetic phantom, nor even as only an impossible possibility, but as a real and appealing form of being, a way of dwelling among others, a kind of practice. It is not enough to say Christ "happened": he must be available to vision, as a concrete shape and motion that it is still· possible to extend, to compose variations upon, to reappropriate and rearticulate: in Christ, in the practice of Christ as a real style - a real presence - within history, one must be able to taste and see that the Lord is good.
As I have argued, totality - pagan, Hegelian, Nietzschean, postmodern - simply cannot grasp Christ as powerful in his powerlessness, cannot interpret him except as an evanescence. But Christ is no beautiful soul; nor does he come to the rescue of Sittlichkeit and its ethics of responsible action; he comes as the fire of the infinite, proclaiming another kingdom, another order, a story of being at odds with that of the totality he overcomes.
To accept Christ as a real and appearing beauty, capable of assum- ing and sustaining his shape within time, is to be confronted by the limitations of the aesthetic of totality, its wearisome motifs of the hero, the peasant, and the occasional beautiful soul; the beauty Christ discloses remains invisible to anyone who finds beauty in a violent stilling of violence, in tragic grandeur lifted up above the squalor of creaturely abjection.
Christian beauty is also a hidden beauty, prior to all "essentialist" representations, a messianic secret, a kenosis. The form of Christ, whose appeal requires a real response, enjoins a love that alone reveals a beauty more primordial - and more prodigally be- stowed - than Apollonian armistice. The God who goes to the outermost of being, in the form of a slave, and even past the limits of being into the silence of death, but who then nevertheless - and in just this particular and "slavish" shape - offers himself anew as a radiant and indestructible beauty, forever present in the midst of those who love him, has violated all Apollonian order and, at the same time, left no room for the Dionysian to occupy: the madness, turmoil, chaos, and cruelty of being, the ungovernable violence of the pagan infinite and postmodern sublime, is shown to be falsehood, lying everlastingly under the damnation of the cross, because the infinite that is has crossed all the boundaries of totality (even death, its defining horizon) and remained- forever - form.
Nietzsche has every right to be appalled. Christian rhetoric, therefore, offers Christ as rhetoric, as beauty, but also as presence, mediated aesthetically by an endless parataxis of further "statements" for just that reason all the more present (a presence that is rhetoric cannot be estranged from itself or made remote by the interminable deferral of rhetoric, so long as the style of its excess is sustained); the church's only task is to enact and offer this form.
As the story of Thomas's doubt emphasizes, the resurrection of Christ imparts anew the real presence of this same Jesus of Nazareth, and in the power of the Holy Spirit he draws ever nearer, becomes ever more present, in an ever greater display of the various power of his presence.142 This is a beauty that does not hover over or beyond history, recalled as privation and hoped for simply as futurity, but pervades time as a music that now even the most frenetic din of violence cannot drown out.
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