that the experience of the sacred evokes in homo religiosus.
Can we state conceptually what it is that makes things appear to us as beautiful and some things as more beautiful than others? Alfred North Whitehead, whose philosophy is permeated by aesthetic considerations, tells us that beauty is the “harmony of contrasts.”43 What makes us appreciate the beauty of things is that they bring together nuance, richness, complexity, and novelty on the one side, and harmony, pattern, or order on the other. The more “intense” the synthesis of harmony and contrast, the more we appreciate their union. Nuance without harmony is chaos and harmony without nuance is monotony. Beauty involves the transformation of potentially clashing elements into pleasing contrasts, harmonized by the overarching aesthetic pattern of the beautiful object or experience.
An example of such harmony of contrasts may be seen in any great novel. What makes such a novel beautiful is its weaving together into a unified whole the many subplots and characterizations that might have easily led to confusion. A poor novel would be one that was so concerned with overall order that it failed to establish sufficient tension and conflict to bring about the nuanced complexity required by beauty. At the opposite extreme, an inferior novel would degenerate into chaos, failing to bring its details into the unity of a single story. Either lack of harmony or absence of complexity would impoverish the artistic masterpiece. Our appreciation of the work of art, or of anything beautiful, is the result of our implicit sense that the beautiful precariously balances the order and novelty brought together in the aesthetic object.
If we reflect on the elements of the beautiful, however, we are led to the conclusion, also emphasized by Whitehead, that every actuality is, to some degree at least, an aesthetic phenomenon. Every “actual entity” is a patterned synthesis of contrasting elements. In the simplest objects the contrasts are not intense, but they are there at least to some small degree. Nothing would be actual at all unless its ingredients were patterned in some way or other. Whether we are talking about an electron, an artistic creation, a person, a civilization, or the universe as such, these entities would not have any identity whatsoever unless their constituent elements were patterned in a definite way. Their “actuality” corresponds by degrees to the mode and intensity of their synthesizing harmony and contrast. This means that all things are actual to the extent that they are beautiful and all things are beautiful to the extent that they order novelty and complexity into aesthetic contrasts.44
Beauty, therefore, has what philosophers call a “transcendental” nature. This means that “the beautiful” is not any particular thing, but instead a metaphysical aspect of all things (being, truth, unity, goodness, and beauty are the “transcendentals” usually mentioned by metaphysicians). For this reason alone, we may suspect that we cannot casually disassociate any possible encounter with beauty from the experience of the divine, which is said to be the supreme exemplification of the “transcendentals.”
We experience beauty in nature, in the physical appearances or personalities of others, in great architecture, art, music, poetry, and other types of literature. But one of the most intense instances of aesthetic experience lies in the spectacle of an heroic story. Since such stories involve the narrative patterning of struggle, suffering, conflicts, and contradictions into a complex unity, they stand out as one of the most obvious examples of beauty. In fact, it is often our being conditioned by the stories of great heroes that determines our whole sense of reality, personal identity, and purpose, as well as the quality of our aesthetic experience in general. From the beginning of human history, it appears that the consciousness of people—their sense of reality, identity, and destiny—has been shaped primarily by their sense of the heroic as it is deposited in the paradigmatic stories of their traditions. In myth, legend, ballad, history, epic, and any other type of story, people have woven around themselves a narrative womb with all the ingredients of ordered contrast that I am here attributing to beauty.
In this light, the seemingly nihilistic dismantling of tradition, history, religion, and story in the “deconstructionist” element of modern criticism may be interpreted as itself a moment of contrast that adds nuance to the wider pattern of beauty for which we remain forever nostalgic. The way in which human consciousness has, at times, been frozen in particular narrative patterns deserves the kind of negative criticism one finds in a deconstructionist philosophy. In spite of its inevitable protests to the contrary, I would suggest that, like Nietzsche, its criticism is directed less at narrative as such than at narrative fixation. Deconstructionists are by no means the most significant threat to the integrity of story. For the demise of story is first of all the result of our childish obsession with particular versions of a dynamic narrative tradition. The attempt to freeze a particular tradition in an absolutely conservative way is already the end of story, the true “nihilism” that prevents the story from remaining alive. Story-fixations bring about the end of story and, with it, the impression of the death of God, long before modern deconstructionists begin their work. Nietzsche himself was well aware of the implicit nihilism buried in the superficial narrative fixation of much Christian theology and spirituality. By bringing the “ending” into narrative view prematurely, by failing to wait in the midst of struggle, and by narrowing the ending down to dimensions too suffocating to satisfy the human desire for the infinite, story-fixation is itself already the death of narrative. To be properly narrative, the cosmic and human story must remain in process. To freeze the story artificially is to kill it. Hence, the deconstruction of story(-fixation) of which we have been speaking is an essential nullifying operation undertaken for the sake of the survival of narrative itself. The stories, histories, and cosmologies taken apart by deconstructionists are, in my view, highly caricatured versions with which some (but by no means all) believers are uncomfortable anyway. Although its proponents would undoubtedly deny it, deconstructionism announces not the end of story as such but rather the end of naive story-fixations. And thus it may be seen as contributing, in the final analysis, to a wider aesthetic vision.
However, the narrative sense which our critics have rightly tied to the idea of God is incapable of being absolutely eradicated. Their own writings display a narrative undercurrent of which they are not always aware. They themselves tell a story about story. Their tale has a beginning, a period of struggle, and an end. Deconstructionists envisage themselves as living in the “final days,” when history and narrative have come to an end, when an eternal “play” of language eschatologically appears.45 Ironically they usually invoke and transform ancient myths (stories)—like those of Sisyphus, Eros, Thoth, Prometheus, Zarathustra, and others—to instruct us about the futility of myth. In the very performance of the deconstruction of narrative, they give evidence of the ineradicably narrative quality of all human experience and consciousness.
In its announcing the “closure” (which does not necessarily mean chronological end) of history, self, and narrative, and in its endorsement of a formless and insignificant play of language, deconstructionism also falls short of giving us the ultimate aesthetic fulfillment we all long for. In the final analysis, this philosophy is not a space within which one can live. If it has any value at all in terms of our aesthetic needs, it is only as a “moment” in the process of moving toward a wider narrative vision of beauty than is allowed by our story-fixations. Unfortunately, in its repudiation of the tension intrinsic to narrative, and in its artificial efforts to force the eschaton of play into the temporal narrowness of the present, it is reduced to one more version of the gnostic escapes from history to which religious people are always tempted whenever they grow tired of waiting and struggle. Once again, it is worth recalling Tillich’s words: “We are stronger when we wait than when we possess.”46 This applies not only to our search for depth but also to our quest for an ultimate beauty.
The Absence of God
The quest for a completely satisfying aesthetic experience always leaves us with some element of discontent. In the first place, an intense experience of beauty never lasts indefinitely. The most
