04.26.08
The Absurdity of “Christian” Aesthetics
The idea that one can develop a Christian aesthetic implies that one can create art which only Christians can enjoy. Of course, it may be true that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” but when we are talking about aesthetics I believe we are attempting to figure out what makes things universally beautiful.
First of all, let’s deal with the silliness of Ms. Witt’s post, http://wittingshire.blogspot.com/2005/02/thoughts-on-christian-aesthetics.html.
Ms. Witt has an imperfect understanding of the history of philosophical thought in the western world. As Bertrand Russell has pointed out in his classic tome on western philosophy, early philosophers were concerned primarily with ethics–or, what is good? As philosophy matured during the Enlightenment the questions became more existentially focused–in other words, why do we exist?
It was not the “sentimentality” of the Victorian era that divided faith from reason. Immanuel Kant had already done this in the late eighteenth century with his “Critique of Pure Reason.” Jon Duns Scotus and William of Ockham had done it in the fourteenth century, reacting to the then prevalent scholasticism of the Church–made popular through the writings of Thomas Aquinas and others. For those of you unfamiliar with scholasticism, this is the late medieval attempt to unify faith and reason. This intellectual movement followed the so-called “dark ages” when faith repudiated most of what the Greek and Roman world had left to Europeans in the way of an intellectual heritage. Of course, this would be reversed with the Renaissance.
Duns Scotus, Ockham, and Kant all challenged the idea that faith and reason could be used to the same end. However, these men did not reject reason; they saw it as a tool limited to the physical world. These men of God saw the irreconcilable difference between faith and reason, and were unafraid to rest the fate of their souls on faith alone—something modern Christians seem unable to do because they fear that without reason their faith is made invalid.
It is for placing miracles and knowledge before faith that the Apostle Paul once chided the Corinthians. He writes, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” He goes on to challenge the Corinthians with these words, “Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block for Jews and foolishness to Gentiles . . . .” (I Corinthians 1:18, 22-23)
There is one point on which Ms. Witt and I can agree and that is that most of what passes for art in the modern “Christian world” is not art at all. She mentions Graham Greene, Dostoyevsky, Dante, Beethoven, and Michelangelo–apparently Christians–but seems unable to see the tooth-in-claw beauty of Ernest Hemingway’s work. What about William Shakespeare? The list is nearly endless.
The true silliness of this proposition becomes apparent when we imagine the atheist, the agnostic, and the believer standing side-by-side awed at the rising of the sun, or admiring the thousands of stars that can be seen with the naked eye on a clear night. Beauty can never be the sole province of one segment of society, although Christians might be able to contribute more art to the world if they were to simply abandon their child-like conceptions of good and evil. Of course, if they did this, how could they then call themselves Christians?
