“Aesthetics” and “theological aesthetics” usually imply a focus on questions about the arts and how faith or religion relates to the arts: only the final pages of this work take up that problem. The central theme of the book is beauty. The author employs a new typology of western texts on beauty and a theological analysis of the image of God and redemption to counter the centuries-long tendency to ignore or marginalize beauty and the aesthetic as part of the life of faith. Studying the interpretation of beauty in ancient Greece, 18th-century England, the work of Jonathan Edwards, and 19th- and 20th-century philosophies of human self-transcendence, the author explores whether Christian existence, the life of faith, and the ethical exlude or require an aesthetic dimension in the sense of beauty.

Table of Contents

• • Preface vii
• 1 Beauty as the Beast: Traditional and Postmodern Expressions 1
  • Beauty and the Postmodern 2
  • Beauty as the Beast in Christian Traditions 6
  • Hebraic and Christian Iconoclasms 8
• 2 Beauty as Being: The Irrepressible Character of Beauty 15
  • The ‘Great Theory of Beauty’ 17
  • The Olympian Cosmogonies 17
  • The Platonic Tradition 19
  • The Great Theory in the Middle Ages 20
  • The Process Transmutation of the Great Theory of Beauty 23
  • Beauty as Being 26
• 3 Beauty as Sensibility 31
  • Precursors of the Eighteenth-century Turn 32
  • The New Problematic of Beauty in the Eighteenth Century 33
  • The Psychological Relocation of Beauty 34
  • The Problem of Taste 35
  • The Sublime 36
  • Legacies and Ambiguities 38
• 4 Beauty as Benevolence 43
  • Primary and Secondary Beauty 44
  • Beauty as Community 45
  • Beauty and God 46
  • The Problem of Objectivity 47
  • Beauty and Self-transcendence 48
• 5 Beauty in Human Self-transcendence 51
  • Human Self-transcendence without Beauty 52
  • Self-transcendence as Passionate Subjectivity 52
  • Self-transcendence as Intentional Meaning 54
  • Self-transcendence as Radical Responsibility 55
  • The Aesthetic Aspect of Self-transcendence 57
  • Beauty as a Transcendental Condition of Experience 57
  • Beyond Self-preoccupation through Beauty 59
  • The Beauty of the Graceful Body 62
  • Summary 64
• 6 Paths to Beauty in Twentieth-century Theology 67
  • Anti-Aesthetic Protestant Approaches to Beauty 68
  • Twentieth-century Catholic Theologies of Beauty 74
• 7 The Beauty of Human Redemption 83
  • The Image of God as Self-transcendence 85
  • Formal and Ethical Self-transcendence 86
  • The Image of God as Potentiality and Actuality 87
  • The Imago Dei as Beautiful 88
  • The Despoiled Image 89
  • The Beauty of Redemptive Remaking 93
  • Redemptive Self-transcendence 93
  • Surmounting the Dichotomy of the Ethical and the Aesthetic 94
• 8 Faith’s Aesthetic Sensibilities 96
  • Beauty, Pathos and Joy 101
  • Beauty and Pathos 101
  • Joy: Beyond the Dichotomy of Rigorism and Satisfaction 103
  • Faith without Beauty 107
  • Arts in the Life of Faith 110
  • Synopsis 117
  • Aesthetics 117
  • Beauty 117
  • The Western Story of Beauty 118
  • Theological Aesthetics and Redemptive Transformation 119
  • Index 121