Art and Theology

Beauty, Art and Theology

Beauty is undoubtedly a poignant feature of the human experience of the world. Augustine, in the Confessions, says that he ''questioned'' the world implicitly through the attention he gave it; and notably, the ''response'' that he says he received from the world was its beauty. Like Augustine, we all implicitly ''question'' the world through the attention we give it. We pose our ''how?'' questions through our practical, causal, or scienti?c investigations and our ''why?'' questions de profundis of unexpected joy or su?ering. What if Augustine's implication is correct that the ultimate answers to our questions are somehow bound up in the response of the world's beauty? Beauty might be a sort of guiding principle or vademecum to God. Despite biblical texts discussing the beauty and revelatory function of the natural world, and despite a contemporary culture that values the natural world so highly, contemporary Protestant theology has not emphasized a natural revelation through beauty. But a more ''creational'' theology is surely in order—a theology engaging the natural world as a potential theological ''source'' akin to Scripture, tradition, reason, and religious experience (Viladesau, pp. 212). Toward this end, I present a preliminary and formative account of how human beings might gain a better understanding of God through an examination of the world's beauty—that is, an account of how God is revealed in, and understood through, creation, especially through natural beauty.

Such an account is appropriate, because our knowledge of God is creationally mediated. That is, God makes himself known to his creatures through the medium of his creation—a created transmission of knowledge that has for its pinnacle the incarnate body of Christ. Creation's mediation of all knowledge becomes apparent when creation is understood in the broadest sense. In this broad sense, creation encompasses not only what we think of as ''nature''—that is, the non-human—but also the part of ''nature'' that is human: the mind-body, with its various capacities. As the conduit for our knowledge, this aesthetically rich creation mediates any understanding we have of God. And we might expect, given the arresting, even ''saturated,'' character of many experiences of beauty, that such experience could point to God in some intelligible way. The beauty of the world is, after all, an aspect of God's creation—an ontology that is (at least partly) addressed to his ends, and in which he is intimately involved.

A few words of Simone Weil can place ourselves in the proper perspective to relate art to theology: "In all that awakens within us the pure and authentic sense of beauty is really the presence of God. There is almost an incarnation of God in the world, whose sign is the beauty. Beauty is the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible. Thus all art is by its essence, religious" (Watts, pp. 78).

The emphasis is on the incarnation of God in the world, as a distinctive feature and as a sign of beauty points, draw a bridge between art and theology. The iconography, especially in the East, is ...