1. Hans Urs Von Balthasar, the Glory of the Lord: a Theological Aesthetics, 7 Vols, Various Translators; Vol
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Notes PREFACE 1. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, 7 vols, various translators; vol. 1 (San Francisco: Ignatius; and New York: Crossroad, 1982); vols 2-3 (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1984-86); vols 4-7, trans. in progress. The range and depth of von Balthasar's treatment of various theological issues and figures relevant to matters of theological aesthetics makes his work a major resource for study in the field, and especially for historical understanding of a kind impossible to pursue here. His treatment of issues normally dealt with in aesthetics is nonetheless spotty and erratic; many of the theological and philosophical topics central to the present study are ones on which he barely touches. That is to say, von Balthasar's work is sui generis, standing outside the main arenas of both contemporary aesthetics and modem theology. For the most part I have had to be content to let him speak for himself. 2. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1980). 3. Gerardus van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art, trans. David E. Green (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963). 4. John Dillenberger, A Theology of Artistic Sensibilities: The Visual Arts and the Church (New York: Crossroad, 1986). 5. Thomas R. Martland, Religion as Art (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981). 6. F. David Martin, Art and the Religious Experience: The 'Language' of the Sacred (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1972). 7. Frank Burch Brown, Transfiguration: Poetic Metaphor and the Languages of Religious Belief (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1. Hal Foster, 'Postmodernism: A Preface', in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983). 2. David Carroll, Paraesthetics (London: Methuen, 1987) pp. xiv, xv. See also Christopher Norris, Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology (London: Routledge, 1988). 3. Janet Wolff, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983) p. 107. 4. See Jacques Derrida, 'Parergon', in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 5. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 1960; trans. G. Barden and J. Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1975). Aesthetics naturally 195 196 Notes to Chapter 2 merges with hermeneutics at the point of inquiring specifically into meaning and meaningfulness, or into truth and significance. Our divergence from Gadamer is partly a matter of emphasis. 6. See Martin Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art', in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). 7. See Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1986) pp. 76-7; Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: HilI & Wang, 1977) pp. 179-89; and Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980) p. 133. 8. Both of these kinds of concern are expressed, for example, by Sallie McFague in Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987). 9. Cf. Giles Gunn, The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). CHAPTER 2: CAN AESTHETICS BE CHRISTIAN? 1. See Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983) pp. 50-4. 2. James M. Gustafson, Can Ethics Be Christian? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). 3. See Oliver O'Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for an Evangelical Ethics (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1987). 4. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, 7 vols; vol. 1 (San Francisco: Ignatius; and New York: Crossroad, 1982); vols 2-3 (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1984-6) vols 4-7, trans. in progress. 5. For documentation on the theological study of the arts and aesthe tics in North America, see Wilson Yates, The Arts in Theological Education (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987). 6. Dorothy L. Sayers, 'Towards a Christian Aesthetic', 1944; reprinted in Nathan A. Scott, Jr, ed., The New Orpheus: Essays Toward a Christian Poetic (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1964) pp. 3-20; quotation from p. 4. 7. von Balthasar, Glory I, 117. 8. For a discussion of writings sharply critical of aesthetics, see Mary Mothersill, Beauty Restored (London: Oxford University Press Clarendon, 1984) pp. 1-73. 9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations: On Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) p. 1. 10. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica, 2 vols, 1750-8; reprint edn (Hildesheim: G.Olms, 1961). See also Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer, eds, Essays in Kant's Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chica go Press, 1982) p. In. Notes to Chapter 2 197 11. William Blake, 'Aphorisms on the Laocoon Group', in Selected Poetry and Prose of Blake, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Random House Modern Library, 1953) pp. 330, 328. 12. See R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (New York: Oxford University Press-Galaxy, 1958); and Benedetto Croce, 'Aesthetics', in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th edn; reprinted in Philosophies of Art and Beauty, ed. Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns (Chicago: Univerity of Chicago Press-Phoenix, 1976) pp. 556-76. Collingwood, in particular, is inconsistent, finally deciding that there is no good writing that is not art. See ibid., pp. 298-9. 13. See, for example, Monroe C. Beardsley, 'The Aesthetic Point of View', in Philosophy Looks at the Arts, rev. edn, Joseph Margolis, ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978) pp. 6-24. 14. Harold Osborne, 'Aesthetic Relevance', British Journal of Aesthetics 17 (1977): 294. 15. Jerome Stolnitz, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Criticism (Boston, Houghton Mifflin 1960) p. 36. 16. Virgil Aldrich, Philosophy of Art (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963) p. 20. Stolnitz and Aldrich are criticized by George Dickie in his Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974) pp. 113-46. 17. See Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim, 3 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953); and Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). 18. See Martin Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art' and 'What Are Poets For?', in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). 19. See Etienne Gilson, The Arts of the Beautiful, 1965; reprint edn (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1976); Painting and Reality, 1957; reprint edn (Cleveland: World-Meridian, 1959); and Jacques Mari tain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, 1953; reprint edn (New York: Meridian, 1955). Of the two thinkers Maritain is less purist in inclination, writing that 'poetry [in the very broadest sense] is the fruit neither of the intellect alone, nor of imagination alone. Nay more, it proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together' (p. 80). Yet even Maritain is hemmed in by Aristotelian categories. In restricting art to the productive intellect, he cannot reckon adequately with the ways in which theoretical reason and moral deliberation may interact with poiesis and aesthesis, or vice versa. 20. See Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Scribner's, 1953); and Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey et al (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Universi ty Press, 1973), esp. p. 551. 21. See John Dewey, Art as Experience, 1934; reprint edn (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons-Capricorn, 1958). Dewey would be the last person to want to separate art from the everyday interests and experiences of life, having fought vigorously against what he terms 198 Notes to Chapter 2 the 'compartmental conception of fine art' (p. 8). Yet he is better at describing formal 'rhythms' of art and everyday aesthetic experi ence than in seeing how they actually qualify thoughts, moral judgments, intellectual systems, and religious valuations. 22. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, in Selected Writings, ed. Sir Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), p. 80. 23. Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl, 1942; reprint edn (New York: Random House-Vintage, 1947) p.l46. 24. Karl Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, trans. Clarence K. Pott (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1986) pp. 16,20,33-40,55-7. 25. Clive Bell, Art, 1913; reprint edn (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons Capricorn, 1958) p. 54. 26. Lynn Poland well documents this feature of the New Criticism in her book Literary Criticism and Biblical Hermeneutics: A Critique of Formalist Approaches (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, American Academy of Religion Academy Series, no. 48, 1985). 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer explicitly constructs an analogy between, on the one hand, a Lutheran or Catholic conception of the sacramental bread and wine as the flesh and blood of Christ and, on the other hand, the way in which the work of art, rather than referring to something outside itself, constitutes and signifies in itself 'an increase in being'. See Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Nicholas Walker, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) p. 35. Cf. Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought, 1952; reprint edn (Cleveland: World-Meridian, 1959) pp. 261-4. 28. Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) pp. 146-69. 29. von Balthasar, I, 117, 118. 30. John Henry Newman, 'Poetry, with Reference to Aristotle's Poetics', in Essays and Sketches, ed. Charles Frederick Harrold. 3 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1948) vol. I, p. 76. 31. S0ren Kierkegaard, On Authority and Revelation: The Book on Adler, or a Cycle of Ethico-Religious Essays, trans.