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The Community of the Beautiful: A Theological Aesthetics
2000 Catholic Press Association Award Winner! The claim has been made that we are gripped today in an aesthetic crisis" with considerable theological ramifications. Aesthetics, which has existed since the first human heart was moved by the influence of the beautiful, has played a major role, both implicit and explicit, in theological reflection. In The Community of the Beautiful Alejandro Garcia-Rivera draws from the North American philosophical tradition and Hispanic theological thought to propose a new aesthetic a redemptive building of the community of the beautiful. The Community of the Beautiful focuses on the premise that religion and beauty go together. Yet today hundreds of theological treatises continue to speak solely of the "truth" of their claims. The Community of the Beautiful addresses this silence with a proposal about the relationship between God and the beautiful. It asks the How can the finite human creature name the nameless, perceive the imperceptible, make visible the invisible? The answer is what Hans Urs von Balthasar called a theological aesthetics. The Community of the Beautiful is not simply an analysis of Balthasar's theology; there exists a more personal and concrete reason for a reconsideration of the connection between God and the beautiful. The experience of a particular living ecclesial tradition, the Latin Church of the Americas, may be a guide to a world that lost its confidence in the religious dimensions of the beautiful. Garcia-Rivera recasts the question of theological aesthetics posed above in light of the religious experience of the Latin Church of the Americas so that the question What moves the human heart? To answer that question, Garcia-Rivera draws on along-ignored philosophical tradition. The philosophical semiotics of Charles Peirce and Josiah Royce enter into dialogue with the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar to describe the traditional transcendentals, the True and the Good, as communities. The final transcendental, the beautiful, enters into conversation with the semiotic aesthetics of Jan Mukarovsky and the religious experience of the Latin American Church to become the dazzling Vision of the community of the beautiful, God's community. Chapters are "Pied Beauty," "A Different Beauty," "Seeing the Form," "The Community of the True," "The Community of the Good," "The Community of the Beautiful," and "Lifting up the Lowly." Alejandro R. Garcia-Rivera, a Roman Catholic lay theologian, received his doctorate in theology from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago and holds degrees in physics from Ohio State University and Miami University. The author of numerous articles and winner of a Catholic Press Association award, he is assistant professor of systematic theology at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley. "
- GenresTheology
224 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 1999
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January 12, 2018
Thinking the World Beautiful
Aesthetics is something most people associate with art appreciation, the study of what changing tastes find fashionable and when. But aesthetics is only peripherally about art; and it is not at all about fashion. Aesthetics is the study of how we perceive, or more accurately, choose to construct, wholes out of diverse parts. Aesthetics is therefore a discipline that addresses most of what we do in the world to make sense of it from Systems Theory to Medical Science to Theology.
Aesthetics does not dictate taste or approval or rules for how to determine what is a correct or beautiful construction of a whole. It does attempt to bring us to conscious awareness of what our tastes, preferences, and habits are. Only when these are made visible do we have the possibility to consider them, and even improve them. Aesthetics in a sense therefore is therapeutic. Its inevitable self-referentiality leads to voluntary psychological and behavioural change.
But aesthetics is never a solitary, or even a binary psychoanalytical, activity. Aesthetics is always undertaken in the context of some group, a community in which tastes, preferences and habits are so thoroughly shared that their very existence often has been hidden. Aesthetics therefore is an activity of cultural excavation of an entire community. It takes place in company or it doesn’t take place at all. Whoever undertakes aesthetics must have friends either within his community or elsewhere in order to be effective.
The purpose of Garcia-Rivera’s Community of the Beautiful is to approach aesthetics from the point of view of the largest system, the biggest whole that he can conceive. Traditionally this has been called God, and we have attributed to it all of the characteristics which we, as human beings, believe are essential to the coherence to such an immense system. Such an undertaking is not a matter of religious faith but of aesthetic commitment. What is at issue is not the existence of the figure called God, but the aesthetic coherence of the image we have about this figure. Is it an ideal worthy of discussion and adoption, not necessarily worship, is the aesthetic question.
For Garcia-Rivera an“aesthetic is a mode of apprehending reality, or a mode of articulating or comprehending the real.” That is, an aesthetic is a way in which we choose to organize the world of our experience. The fact that the aesthetic is a choice is obvious once stated but often overlooked. For example when I open the bonnet of my automobile I may perceive some very different systems - the fuel pump; the engine; the entire automobile; the national network of vehicles, roads, petrol stations and traffic enforcement; the international economic system of internal combustion engines; and so on. Each of these systems is an aesthetic.
In general terms, what we are seeing, what we are choosing to see, through an aesthetic is what Garcia Rivera calls a ‘Form:’ “a totality of parts and elements, grasped as such, existing and defined as such, ...[which] transcends its parts as members, and controls them in their own confined territories.”
When he takes God as his aesthetic starting point, Garcia-Rivera does two important things. First he names the biggest Form he can conceive, so therefore the ultimate or maximal aesthetic. This is the aesthetic equivalent of the ethical ‘What would Jesus do?’ The second, perhaps more important thing is that he creates a completely abstract object as the focus of consideration. There is nothing ‘there’ but the aesthetic itself. God is a projection of human thought, but this is not inherently perjorative. It simply makes clear what we already ‘are’.
There is no question but that whatever he then discusses is ‘final’, intrinsic, infinitely worthwhile in itself. This would be the case for any aesthetic but by raising his to the level of the divine, he makes this explicit and incontrovertible. The aesthetic “is the value of that which is self-evident. One cannot ask what they are for.” In other words, the aesthetic is its own measure of value. There is nothing beyond it, or even other than it, to which it can be compared.
“Theological aesthetics,” Garcia-Rivera says, “seeks to recover a belief in the reality of the beautiful, and thus of all the transcendentals.” He means of course the realty of truth and goodness as well as beauty, and he believes, correctly I think, that the way to re-establish their meaning and import philosophically is through their aesthetic aspect. In other words, the true, the good, and the beautiful ‘fit together’ with each other and in our experience in a coherent way. This fitting together is not logical or empirically derived. Rather it requires intuition and insight, an aesthetic sense. Which is precisely what he wants to promote.
This intuition and insight is not incidental to aesthetics therefore. They are faculties which are very real but typically underdeveloped. The ability to detect a whole doesn’t necessarily appear as a talent even to the one who exercises it. Intuition and insight seem to come from somewhere else, as something given from outside. Just as important, the Form which is perceived is perceived as distinct from the self which perceives; it is ‘other’, that is, different, alien. This occurs, according to Garcia-Rivera, in all aesthetic perceptions, but is more clearly evident in divine aesthetics. The point is certainly debatable; but perhaps that is because it itself is an aesthetic insight which can’t be proven.
Garcia-Rivera, based on his observations to this point, then makes an interesting turn - to semiotics, the study of signs, and to an argument about the importance and existence of universals, which classically refers to all nouns - table, justice, airplane, person - except proper names. His purpose is to establish them along with the transcendentals, as real. His intention is to overcome the difficulties that had arisen in late medieval Aristotelian philosophy, commonly referred to as nominalism. Nominalism has had a persistent pernicious influence on philosophy, particularly on aesthetics since it rejects the reality of any aesthetic, and with it the reality of intuition, insight and the human construction of the cosmos.
The American philosophers, Charles Sanders Peirce and Josiah Royce, are arguably the most important historical voices raised against nominalism. Peirce established what has been called a ‘metaphysics of relations rather than substance’, clearly inspired by the Christian theology of the Trinity in which each Person is defined solely in terms of its relation to the other two. Peirce also gave a name and described a very precise logic for aesthetic intuition and insight: abduction.
Royce, working on Peirce’s foundation, then introduced the idea of value into the metaphysics of relations. In Aristotelian philosophy, relations (and consequently things like systems) are barely recognised as existing. So Garcia-Rivera properly marks the work of Peirce and Royce as a major breakthrough in aesthetics.
An important implication of the above is that it is relations that are the universals, something dramatically opposed to Aristotelian thinking. A table is a table because of its aesthetic characteristics not because there is some abstract Platonic form existing in some spiritual universe. As Garcia-Rivera recognises therefore, “Aesthetics by its very nature appears to present a rare intersection between philosophy and theology.” Royce expressed in a remarkably concise way: “We can appreciate more than we can understand.” Our organ of appreciation is activated by signs - words, arguments, conversations, simple human encounters. Royce constructs an entire philosophy around the redemptive quality of signs, that is, of communication.
It is through Royce that this idea of ‘appreciation’ finds its way through thinkers like Geoffrey Vickers* and Russell Ackoff** even into areas as far removed from art as business and government. In almost everything human beings do as human beings, we must interpret what is going on. Interpreting what is going on, particularly in the mind of another human being, requires a particular act of will, a decision about how to interpret, that is, about an aesthetic.
Every interpretation is an opportunity to create a community, to share an aesthetic. The will to interpret, as Royce states it is the desire to attain a “luminous vision of your ideas, of my own, and of the one to whom I interpret you.” Effectively this implies a very specific kind of what can be called ‘submission’ to the encounter. Community can only be created by such submission. But note that this involves no loss of personal autonomy or demand for compromise, only an openness sufficient to appreciate the, frequently unstated often unconscious, aesthetic of the other. To the extent that art is an aesthetic effort, its function is precisely to reveal this other.***
It must be said at minimum that Garcia-Rivera has walked the talk of aesthetic theory. He has indeed given an interpretation which is coherent and which invites yet further interpretation. It would seem ungrateful, churlish even, to ask for anything more. Nevertheless, a complete index would be more than helpful.****
*See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
** See: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
*** See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
**** See a very interesting further interpretation here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Aesthetics is something most people associate with art appreciation, the study of what changing tastes find fashionable and when. But aesthetics is only peripherally about art; and it is not at all about fashion. Aesthetics is the study of how we perceive, or more accurately, choose to construct, wholes out of diverse parts. Aesthetics is therefore a discipline that addresses most of what we do in the world to make sense of it from Systems Theory to Medical Science to Theology.
Aesthetics does not dictate taste or approval or rules for how to determine what is a correct or beautiful construction of a whole. It does attempt to bring us to conscious awareness of what our tastes, preferences, and habits are. Only when these are made visible do we have the possibility to consider them, and even improve them. Aesthetics in a sense therefore is therapeutic. Its inevitable self-referentiality leads to voluntary psychological and behavioural change.
But aesthetics is never a solitary, or even a binary psychoanalytical, activity. Aesthetics is always undertaken in the context of some group, a community in which tastes, preferences and habits are so thoroughly shared that their very existence often has been hidden. Aesthetics therefore is an activity of cultural excavation of an entire community. It takes place in company or it doesn’t take place at all. Whoever undertakes aesthetics must have friends either within his community or elsewhere in order to be effective.
The purpose of Garcia-Rivera’s Community of the Beautiful is to approach aesthetics from the point of view of the largest system, the biggest whole that he can conceive. Traditionally this has been called God, and we have attributed to it all of the characteristics which we, as human beings, believe are essential to the coherence to such an immense system. Such an undertaking is not a matter of religious faith but of aesthetic commitment. What is at issue is not the existence of the figure called God, but the aesthetic coherence of the image we have about this figure. Is it an ideal worthy of discussion and adoption, not necessarily worship, is the aesthetic question.
For Garcia-Rivera an“aesthetic is a mode of apprehending reality, or a mode of articulating or comprehending the real.” That is, an aesthetic is a way in which we choose to organize the world of our experience. The fact that the aesthetic is a choice is obvious once stated but often overlooked. For example when I open the bonnet of my automobile I may perceive some very different systems - the fuel pump; the engine; the entire automobile; the national network of vehicles, roads, petrol stations and traffic enforcement; the international economic system of internal combustion engines; and so on. Each of these systems is an aesthetic.
In general terms, what we are seeing, what we are choosing to see, through an aesthetic is what Garcia Rivera calls a ‘Form:’ “a totality of parts and elements, grasped as such, existing and defined as such, ...[which] transcends its parts as members, and controls them in their own confined territories.”
When he takes God as his aesthetic starting point, Garcia-Rivera does two important things. First he names the biggest Form he can conceive, so therefore the ultimate or maximal aesthetic. This is the aesthetic equivalent of the ethical ‘What would Jesus do?’ The second, perhaps more important thing is that he creates a completely abstract object as the focus of consideration. There is nothing ‘there’ but the aesthetic itself. God is a projection of human thought, but this is not inherently perjorative. It simply makes clear what we already ‘are’.
There is no question but that whatever he then discusses is ‘final’, intrinsic, infinitely worthwhile in itself. This would be the case for any aesthetic but by raising his to the level of the divine, he makes this explicit and incontrovertible. The aesthetic “is the value of that which is self-evident. One cannot ask what they are for.” In other words, the aesthetic is its own measure of value. There is nothing beyond it, or even other than it, to which it can be compared.
“Theological aesthetics,” Garcia-Rivera says, “seeks to recover a belief in the reality of the beautiful, and thus of all the transcendentals.” He means of course the realty of truth and goodness as well as beauty, and he believes, correctly I think, that the way to re-establish their meaning and import philosophically is through their aesthetic aspect. In other words, the true, the good, and the beautiful ‘fit together’ with each other and in our experience in a coherent way. This fitting together is not logical or empirically derived. Rather it requires intuition and insight, an aesthetic sense. Which is precisely what he wants to promote.
This intuition and insight is not incidental to aesthetics therefore. They are faculties which are very real but typically underdeveloped. The ability to detect a whole doesn’t necessarily appear as a talent even to the one who exercises it. Intuition and insight seem to come from somewhere else, as something given from outside. Just as important, the Form which is perceived is perceived as distinct from the self which perceives; it is ‘other’, that is, different, alien. This occurs, according to Garcia-Rivera, in all aesthetic perceptions, but is more clearly evident in divine aesthetics. The point is certainly debatable; but perhaps that is because it itself is an aesthetic insight which can’t be proven.
Garcia-Rivera, based on his observations to this point, then makes an interesting turn - to semiotics, the study of signs, and to an argument about the importance and existence of universals, which classically refers to all nouns - table, justice, airplane, person - except proper names. His purpose is to establish them along with the transcendentals, as real. His intention is to overcome the difficulties that had arisen in late medieval Aristotelian philosophy, commonly referred to as nominalism. Nominalism has had a persistent pernicious influence on philosophy, particularly on aesthetics since it rejects the reality of any aesthetic, and with it the reality of intuition, insight and the human construction of the cosmos.
The American philosophers, Charles Sanders Peirce and Josiah Royce, are arguably the most important historical voices raised against nominalism. Peirce established what has been called a ‘metaphysics of relations rather than substance’, clearly inspired by the Christian theology of the Trinity in which each Person is defined solely in terms of its relation to the other two. Peirce also gave a name and described a very precise logic for aesthetic intuition and insight: abduction.
Royce, working on Peirce’s foundation, then introduced the idea of value into the metaphysics of relations. In Aristotelian philosophy, relations (and consequently things like systems) are barely recognised as existing. So Garcia-Rivera properly marks the work of Peirce and Royce as a major breakthrough in aesthetics.
An important implication of the above is that it is relations that are the universals, something dramatically opposed to Aristotelian thinking. A table is a table because of its aesthetic characteristics not because there is some abstract Platonic form existing in some spiritual universe. As Garcia-Rivera recognises therefore, “Aesthetics by its very nature appears to present a rare intersection between philosophy and theology.” Royce expressed in a remarkably concise way: “We can appreciate more than we can understand.” Our organ of appreciation is activated by signs - words, arguments, conversations, simple human encounters. Royce constructs an entire philosophy around the redemptive quality of signs, that is, of communication.
It is through Royce that this idea of ‘appreciation’ finds its way through thinkers like Geoffrey Vickers* and Russell Ackoff** even into areas as far removed from art as business and government. In almost everything human beings do as human beings, we must interpret what is going on. Interpreting what is going on, particularly in the mind of another human being, requires a particular act of will, a decision about how to interpret, that is, about an aesthetic.
Every interpretation is an opportunity to create a community, to share an aesthetic. The will to interpret, as Royce states it is the desire to attain a “luminous vision of your ideas, of my own, and of the one to whom I interpret you.” Effectively this implies a very specific kind of what can be called ‘submission’ to the encounter. Community can only be created by such submission. But note that this involves no loss of personal autonomy or demand for compromise, only an openness sufficient to appreciate the, frequently unstated often unconscious, aesthetic of the other. To the extent that art is an aesthetic effort, its function is precisely to reveal this other.***
It must be said at minimum that Garcia-Rivera has walked the talk of aesthetic theory. He has indeed given an interpretation which is coherent and which invites yet further interpretation. It would seem ungrateful, churlish even, to ask for anything more. Nevertheless, a complete index would be more than helpful.****
*See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
** See: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
*** See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
**** See a very interesting further interpretation here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
December 11, 2011
I'd put this book on my "to read" list a couple of years ago based mostly on a review I read in Christian Century (I think). It certainly seemed right up my alley -- "Theological Aesthetics," I'm all over that. The book started promisingly, too, with the author proposing to develop a theological aesthetic for the community of the beautiful based on his own experience as a Latino-American, finding the difference between his culture and that of the Norte Americanos who were his neighbors and colleagues, and referring to the Jesuit theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, some of whose work I have read, struggled with and ultimately enjoyed.
But, alas, the late Dr. Garcia-Rivera took a tack that left me cold. Rather than basing his work on a biblical theology, he bases it on some pretty arid 19th century philosophy and semiotics. Try as I might, I just never could get interested in his line of thought. I tried skimming the book to find his major points of argument and failed. It's probably my own lack of time for concentration and grounding in this type of philosophy but the book simply never spoke to me.
But, alas, the late Dr. Garcia-Rivera took a tack that left me cold. Rather than basing his work on a biblical theology, he bases it on some pretty arid 19th century philosophy and semiotics. Try as I might, I just never could get interested in his line of thought. I tried skimming the book to find his major points of argument and failed. It's probably my own lack of time for concentration and grounding in this type of philosophy but the book simply never spoke to me.
October 30, 2024
Difficult.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews