has argued that aesthetic delight is part of the shalom, or peaceable flourishing, that faith looks for in seeking the kingdom of God. In the same spirit liberation theologians such as Dorothee Soelle maintain that a desirable social order necessarily includes the freedom of aesthetic creation and the joy of aesthetic response, which are part of knowing and loving God.
The idea that beauty has a kind of divine right to exist has in point of fact been held by Christian thinkers as diverse as Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Jonathan Edwards, and Étienne Gilson. In this regard what is innovative about postmodern theologies is the degree to which the beauty they celebrate is of a kind that is perceptible to the senses. Whereas the whole neo-Platonic tradition within Christian thought has viewed our delight in sensory beauty as but an inferior though necessary step toward appreciating the higher realm of intellectual and spiritual beauty, the tendency in postmodern theology is to interpret the doctrines of creation and Incarnation as affirming the holy communion of the spiritual and the material.
In view of the relative autonomy and freedom of aesthetic creation, modern and postmodern theologians often look on aesthetic creativity as an important feature of humanity’s having been made in the image of God. Jacques Maritain, for example, holds that creative intuition and production in some sense continue the work of divine creation. And Nicolas Berdyaev stresses how the artist exercises freedom in such a way as to go beyond all mere imitation to strive after beauty that is as yet unseen, and unforeseen even by God.
Related to theologies of beauty and creativity are theologies of artistic expression and revelation. For instance, the influential theology of culture developed by Paul Tillich finds implicit religious significance even in art that is overtly secular. According to Tillich, works such as Picasso’s Guernica can express, through tensions that shatter complacency, a radical concern for what is ultimate—for the inexhaustible ground of being and meaningful existence, which traditionally is called God. Theologians influenced by Heidegger and Gadamer likewise look to art and poetry as a special unveiling (and mysterious concealing) of otherwise inarticulate truth. Alternatively, they may view art as potentially sacramental in its sensuous embodiment of what transcends intellectual sense.
More recently, theologians of art have come to see that some art is much more ironic or genuinely playful than is suggested by talk of ultimate concern, revelation, and truth. Moreover, even in the creation and experience of art at its most serious level, it seems possible that selves and communities are typically rather fragmented and unstable, characterized as much by penultimate concerns as by a concern for what is ultimate. Particularly when theologians are attentive to deconstructionist ideas, they may suspect that art can be errant and incoherent in ways far more subtle and pervasive than thinkers since the time of Plato have recognized (or feared). Do beauty and unity really encompass the goals and effects of art? Is the self really capable of integrity? Is religion? In raising such questions, theological aesthetics has begun to take more extensive account of formal fragmentation and expressive negation in both art and religion. For some theologians this also means taking seriously the possibility of a tragic or at least tragicomic theology for which redemption is literally incomprehensible (though perhaps still affirmable).
There is, in any event, a growing theological recognition that aesthetic experience and insight—whether positive or negative—cannot fully be absorbed or contained in the medium of theological concepts. That is to say, the meaning and insight embodied in (or evoked by) artistic expressions and representations are never entirely separable from the style and medium of expression. Art does not merely mirror. It reconfigures and reconstructs in ways not strictly replicated by other modes of making and meaning.
Yet as theologians have realized more and more, the language of art (in the broadest sense) is native to religion and so requires theological attention. Christian ideas and practices are unavoidably rooted in aesthetically rich forms: myth, metaphor, parable, song, ritual, image, edifice. With regard to scriptures, moreover, it is now clearer than ever that literary strategies are intrinsic to the biblical texts and their religious import.
Biblical scholars today thus join forces with scholars of religion and literature, who for some decades have argued that religious reflection depends on the artistic cultivation of language and imagination, just as literary art in turn taps religious experience and thought. Meanwhile, scholars in related areas have taken pains to demonstrate the religious involvements of such arts as drama, dance, music, painting, architecture, and film.
Because many such inquiries have dealt with modern culture, they have been able to show that in our own time religious questions and affirmations continue to be interwoven in, and reinterpreted by, the work of artists: from Stravinsky and Messiaen to Philip Glass and Arvo Pärt; from Kandinsky and Mondrian to Barnett Newman and Anselm Kiefer; from T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden to Walker Percy and Alice Walker. Furthermore, several interpreters of art and religion have analyzed popular film and television, detecting a resurgence and reshaping of religious themes, whether in horror movies, science fiction, or more realistic genres. Thus on many levels one observes the continuing interanimation of art and religion, or aesthetics and theology.
What all of this suggests is not, of course, that everything aesthetic is especially religious or that everything religious is especially aesthetic. It suggests, rather, that religion lives and thrives partly by means of aesthetic forms and that any reflection on Christian belief and practice in particular must therefore take aesthetic media into consideration. Such is the testimony, certainly, of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s multivolume work The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, and it is a basic assumption of most theologians now engaged in aesthetics.
It may be that aesthetics as a theological enterprise has just begun to come into its own. It seems probable that theologians will increasingly care about the constructive and subversive powers of artistry, about popular arts as well as elite, about styles of life and thought as well as styles of art, about the role of “tastes” in the formation and evaluation of religious identities and differences, and about the aesthetic values of the natural world as well as those of human culture. Finally, with the renewal of studies in spirituality, theology is likely to ponder anew the ways in which aesthetic disciplines and sensitivities contribute to spiritual life and an awareness of God.
FRANK BURCH BROWN
Bibliography
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics.
Jeremy Begbie, Voicing Creation’s Praise: Towards a Theology of the Arts.
Frank Burch Brown, Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life.
John de Gruchy, Christianity, Art, and Transformation: Theological Aesthetics in the Struggle for Justice.
Richard Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics: God in Imagination, Beauty, and Art.
Cross-Reference: Comedy, Culture, Deconstructionism, Hermeneutics, Imagination, Religious Language, Ritual, Spirituality, Tragedy, Transcendence.
AFTERLIFE (See ETERNAL LIFE.)
AGNOSTICISM
Agnosticism is the intellectual disinclination to assert or deny truth claims without compelling evidence. More narrowly defined, it is the disinclination to assert or deny statements regarding the existence and nature of God. The adoption of agnosticism as a general intellectual orientation is motivated by the conviction that there is insufficient evidence for steadfast cognitive commitments. Like philosophical skepticism, agnosticism is less a doctrine than a refusal to be doctrinaire. As regards the existence of God, agnosticism is the position that shuns
