Why "Theological-Aesthetical"?

on staying right-side-up

[Image: “Adoration of the Shepherds,” Bartolo di Fredi, 1374, Siena, Italy. Courtesy of Met’s Open Access Gallery, The Cloisters Collection. Public domain.]

The title’s question is motivated by the (excellent) conversation we had at the first New York Contemplative Realist fiction reading, for which I want once more to thank our generous hosts at Arthouse2b.

After the reading, Thomas Mirus of Catholic Culture was kind enough to moderate a discussion/talkback for me and T.C. Merrill (whose novel Minor Indignities makes perfect reading for this time of year, keen & hilarious as it is in tracing the shape of mimetic desire in campus life). During the talkback, someone in the group¹ raised the question of how to pin down the concrete meaning of the Contemplative Realism manifesto’s admittedly complex, and maybe even kind of abstruse-sounding, subtitle: “aesthetico-theologico….?”

It really does seem like a heavy phrasing, theological-aesthetical, but it matters, and so does the order of the words. I’ll get to the reason why in a minute.

Last Thursday night, it came up as a side point to the main burning question for just about everyone there: How do we create art and literature of high quality while also living a life of, to be scandalously particular, Catholic devotion?² Is such a thing even possible? (Spoiler alert: I think it is, and the evidence is overwhelmingly on this claim’s side, despite that it’s demonstrably also quite possible to live a life of devotion while creating art of low quality. The prevalence of the latter phenomenon is no proof of the phenomenon’s necessity.)

But if we’re at all interested in the simultaneous pursuit of art and holiness, then what it means to talk about the “theological-aesthetical” is anything but a side point, for us. It’s closer to being the heart of the matter. In the interest of good order, I’m going to talk about why that is by addressing myself to theory first. The practical, hands-on, virtue-of-art answer to the question opens up other conversations entirely.

So I think I know why Joshua Hren put this phrase, “theological-aesthetical,” in the title of the manifesto. But even if I’m off by a few degrees, I can still make a good case for its connection to Hans Urs von Balthasar’s idea of “theological aesthetics.” Close to the beginning of his long work The Glory of the Lord, von Balthasar speaks about the state of human culture that comes about when we abandon the idea of the beautiful. In this state, he implies, we cease to see things first of all as they are—to measure all things, even humanity, by that which stands outside of and beyond them. Instead we come to see things solely as we are, without tempering that vision by any external reference.

It’s a passage that parallels Pieper’s familiar claims about vision, but von Balthasar goes into greater depth and breadth. He thinks not simply that we have forgotten how to look, seek, and find, but that we have forgotten both what we are and what we can become.

For von Balthasar, “beauty is the word that shall be our first.” This is his choice because, if we want to understand our own historical moment and cultural situation at all—and therefore understand how to speak into it—we have to understand its relation to beauty and the paths by which that word “has bid farewell to our new world … leaving it to its own avarice and sadness.”

It’s easy to speak too simplistically about beauty, to invoke its name without knowing or thinking or even examining too closely what we mean. But to be simplistic here will cause us to get lost.

By talking about beauty, von Balthasar does not want to evoke mere prettiness, nor decoration. Therefore he is not necessarily talking about all the fruits of the arts and crafts of the past, which sometimes express but sometimes also obscure the form at the heart of things which is von Balthasar’s deeper concern. He is not talking about “mere appearance,” nor simply about the physical—this “impossible marriage with matter…” which “spoils all man’s taste for love”—but about all the multifarious ways in which intangible goodness and truth get themselves expressed in and through the visible. He is trying to get at “the very language of light.”

Does he succeed? It’s not for me to judge—I am a working writer, not a theologian—but listen to this:

In a world without beauty—even if people cannot dispense with the word and constantly have it on the tip of their tongues in order to abuse it—in a world which is perhaps not wholly without beauty, but which can no longer see it or reckon with it: in such a world the good also loses its attractiveness, the self-evidence of why it must be carried out. … In a world that no longer has enough confidence in itself to affirm the beautiful, the proofs of the truth have lost their cogency. … The witness borne by Being becomes untrustworthy for the person who can no longer read the language of beauty. (The Glory of the Lord, 19)

The situation has somewhat devolved, to put it mildly, since von Balthasar first published these words in 1961. Now not only the name of truth itself, but also the whole project of offering and accepting proofs and evidence even for empirical facts, has become an endangered pursuit. This is the same situation toward which Pieper is pointing us, and which Joshua Hren wants us to notice when he writes:

Human beings have come to see reality itself as a construct—a cacophony of constantly changing conventions. … Human nature is alternately pressured and stretched, shaped and malformed by various social conventions. … By contrast, the contemplative realist adheres to the stability of both nature and human nature, seeing both as created by God and the latter as particularly defined by the interplay between the tripartite human faculties of intellect, will, and appetites (or passions)… (Contemplative Realism, 4-5)

In a similar move, von Balthasar wants us to begin by looking at “the subjective evidence:” to wit, ourselves—perhaps since we’re so often doing this anyway, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It’s a habit, maybe an imperfect one, but one that can still be turned to good purpose.

What do we see, then, in ourselves, when we take patient and honest inventory?:

Through his body, man is in the world. … As body, man is a being whose condition it is always to be communicated; indeed, he regains himself only on account of having been communicated. For this reason, man as a whole is not an archetype of Being and of Spirit, rather their image; he is not the primal word, but a response; he is not a speaker, but an expression governed by the laws of beauty, laws which man cannot impose on himself. As a totality of spirit and body, man must make himself into God’s mirror… (Glory of the Lord, 21-22, “The Subjective Evidence”

Let’s unpack this. First, von Balthasar is using the classical sense of man, anthropos, human being or person (which, let’s not have any misunderstandings that this expression would somehow exclude women, because it doesn’t, full stop). Having noted that, he then makes the somewhat flatfooted observation that the human being, as well as being spirit, is always also body. Yes, right, okay, we know. But we kind of wish we could forget it (don’t we? really? if not in times of relative ability or health, then as soon as the body seems to become the slightest apparent obstacle to our working out of our will in the world?).

But then he says something surprising. Because the human person is body, the human person is always communicated. What? This is by no means obvious to the person sitting in front of a screen in a room alone, thumbing a scroll of text ever upward and upward.

What this person most likely and overwhelmingly feels is, precisely: uncommunicated, closed off. Invisible. Erased. Ghosting and ghosted. This helps to explain why she, or he, so often taps Like and Share and Love and Haha and Grr, and also thumb-types out such an overwhelming volume of commentary (so much of which, however, still goes unread).

But even this example goes to serve von Balthasar’s point: Find us at our most isolated; you will still find that we speak. We even speak by our silences (though what we say by them can by no means be simplistically interpreted).

Our whole being speaks, not only through our spoken or written words, but through our body at all times—and this whether we consciously will it or not. If von Balthasar is right, then, we possess ourselves and receive ourselves only to the extent that we have first communicated ourselves. Which makes us radically (perhaps uncomfortably) interdependent on one another: and not only on one another, but also, for von Balthasar, on something greater than ourselves which is also outside ourselves. And not just something, but Someone, of a particular character and by a particular name, which is easy to think we know through and through but which possibly has not ever fully been communicated to, or understood by, us at all.³

It’s the emphasis on this something greater which the order of the words in “theological-aesthetical” seeks to bring home. Even when it seems that we are starting and ending with the simple observation and aesthetic rendering of phenomena, it’s easy to lose one’s tether to the idea that the objects of observation and rendering, and the instruments of the observing eye and rendering hand, are always already predetermined from the outside, always already both given and received. From whom, to whom, by whom?: Theology offers some answers, for which we rightly turn to theologians rather than to novelists.

But novelists, like other artists, have the privilege of turning over the answers and their answerers, looking at and through and inside them from every possible angle and in every conceivable situation. In the process of performing all these reversals, inversions, and revolutions, we can easily lose our balance, even fall on our faces. When we do, it’s often as not the theologians who, though they cannot do our proper work for us nor we theirs for them, can communicate us back to ourselves—can help us to stand on our feet again.

1. I am sorry I can’t remember who; I was working on two hours of sleep; so many of you lovely folks, when (hopefully soon!) we meet again, I am going to need you to reintroduce yourselves; such is life.

2. No exclusion of you much-loved non-Catholic readers is hereby meant: this was just the context of Thursday’s conversation, which was happening in an intentionally Catholic space.

3. Q.v. von Balthasar again, this time in his discussion of Bernanos (“The Writer’s Mission”): “God becomes concrete for us in Christ, and it is to Christ as Redeemer that the whole authority to judge is entrusted… [T]here is no access to the attitude that makes the creation of Christian literature possible other than the attitude of Christ himself.” Which gets across to us that for von Balthasar, it’s never a question of a vague “universe” or a pagan deity or a manmade idol, but only of the Myth become Fact. Which also means, for those of us writers who would like this access, that we had better make carefully sure we are seeking His attitude in fact, and not something else which we may have mistaken for it.)