Glory Over Sublimity: Karl Barth'S Theological Aesthetics

HeyJ •• (2016), pp. ••–••

GLORY OVER SUBLIMITY: KARL BARTH’S THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS

SCOTT A. KIRKLAND Trinity College, Melbourne, Australia

INTRODUCTION: DISPLACING THE SUBJECT OF SUBLIME INTUITION

My contention is that Barth deliberately reframes theologically the Kantian conditions for perception of the beautiful and the sublime by dispossessing the subject of the normative universality she maintains in Kant’s system of knowing. Barth frames beauty and sublimity instead in terms of the givenness of divine being for us in the form of the Son of God incarnate. Beauty no longer is a subjective apriori; it is rather a product of divine self-giving. Barth therefore finds ways to speak of creaturely participation in this beauty through the playful language of ‘joy’ and ‘happiness’ in the Spirit. We shall focus on Church Dogmatics [hereafter CD] paragraph 31.3, on divine glory; it is here that Barth enters into one of the few explicit discussions of theological aesthetics in the CD. Barth seeks to heal the disjunction created between the beautiful and the good in the second and third critiques by re-thinking the relationship between divine action and divine beauty, seeing God’s beauty as his action. Beauty [Schon€ ], derived from divine glory [Herrlichkeit], is the crowning moment of CD II.1, the final perfection to be explicated. This is significant, as glory is seen as the exposition of the form of God’s coming in its superfluousness. Glory is God’s hiddenness as it is the revelation of his fullness in a dizzying light. Throughout CD II.1, each of the perfections serves to illuminate another; with none seen in isolation, each is continually destabilised by the excess of God’s revelatory activity. Divine beauty becomes then for Barth a way of speaking about the positive plentitude of the divine life manifest in the coming of Jesus Christ. Beauty has a determinate ‘form’; it is not a stepping off point into a sublime formless- ness, as Kant would have it. To use an aesthetic metaphor Barth was fond of, it is as if the discussion of divine eternity and glory recapitulates the earlier movements of the volume, bringing everything to a glorious crescendo in praise of the overflowing abundance of divine self- revelation. And, yet, as we shall see, this is necessarily a movement into divine hiddenness: just as the light of God’s glory is dizzyingly bright, so each single conceptual movement is continually displaced by the next in a perpetual movement of interrogation—each perfection spills over into the other as we seek to explicate the simple act of God.

SUBLIMITY, MODERNITY, AND THE UNIVERSALISATION OF SUBJECTIVITY

For Kant taste [Geschmach], the faculty by which we make aesthetic judgements, is not predi- cated upon the beautiful object, for beauty [Schon€ ] resides not in the object but in the activation of the faculty of taste, and what Kant names a non-cognitive ‘free play’ [Freispiel]between imagination and understanding. The judgement of taste is ‘not a cognitive judgement, hence not

VC 2016 Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 2 SCOTT A. KIRKLAND a logical one, but is rather aesthetic, by which is understood one whose determining ground cannot be other than subjective.’1 This object-less construction of beauty is only interested in the object, therefore, insofar as it excites ‘free play’—which is to say, insofar as the object conforms to the subject. Consequently, the beautiful is to be distinguished from the agreeable [angene- hem], something we are interested in for the sake of the gratification of some desire. Taste is distinguished from this more appetitive pleasure by a lack of interest in the object, for the object is of no significance insofar as it can fleetingly arouse desire in me, but rather is beautiful insofar as it arouses my disinterested aesthetic faculties to the free play of the imagination and understanding.2 The ‘non-cognitive’ subjective location of aesthetic judgements means that they bypass any empirical or moral judgement of the object. Kant can then distinguish between the good and the beautiful in important ways, and yet find a way to unite them again in the subject. The judgement of taste is understood as contemplative, that is, ‘a judgement that is indifferent with regard to the existence of an object’3 and so it simply finds pleasure without being, so to speak, diverted to a concept. The disinterestedness of the faculty of taste allows us to disentangle the beautiful from the merely agreeable. If taste is disinterested, the object in which it finds pleasure is not arrived at by satisfaction in the agreeable form in the object as such.4 Hence, the judgement of beauty is ‘free’, for ‘no interest, neither that of the senses, nor that of reason, extorts approval’.5 Here there is a similarity to moral judgement in that, just as aesthetic judgement is free and able to locate the beautiful in its freedom from interest, moral judgement too must be freed from interest in submission to moral law: ‘For where moral law speaks, there is, objectively, no longer any free choice with regard to what is to be done’.6 The two modes of judgement, therefore, are bound together in the way they are able to universalise subjectivity, and so move the subject toward subjectively universal ends—the end in itself of free play in beauty, and the end of moral action. Yet, the judgement of the beautiful and the judgement of the good remain entirely different, united only in the subject herself, not in the object. The beautiful, like the moral in the second critique, becomes a further way of instantiating a ‘subjective universality’.7 For Kant, if we are able to establish that all rational human agents share the same faculties of judgement, we can establish that, when we apprehend the beautiful disinterestedly, others who approach the same object will attain to a similar pleasure. This is, importantly, the way back to the object. For, we must speak ‘as if beauty were a property of the object’,8 even though beauty is subjectively grounded. The universal remains subjectivity, for it is only in the assumption of subjective universality that I can overcome what could so easily become a solipsistic relativity. Kant, then, argues that there is nothing that is beautiful, the beautiful is only a state of disinterested contemplative consciousness. Yet, precisely because of this disinterestedness, we are able to assume that others, similarly disinterested, would have the same experience of pleasure in their apprehension of the given object. To conclude with this brief survey of Kant, we come to the sublime [Erhanben]. Sublimity assumes the same bypass of the subject’s cognitive faculties that judgements of beauty assume. The difference being the sublime brings something to bear in the subject other than the free play of (the rather more tame) beauty. The sublime is divided into two categories, the mathematical and the dynamic. The sublime in general is concerned with that which is ‘absolutely great’ [schlechthin gross]; the mathematical sublime is concerned with ‘greatness’ [Grose-sein€ ]as ‘magnitude’ [eine Grose sein]. This is not mathematical in the sense that it is intuitive of con- cepts (i.e., numbers or mathematical symbols—which may be beautiful for thinkers like Leibnitz or Spinoza), but in that magnitude is ‘intuited by the eye’ and becomes aesthetically overwhelming. Kant employs the example of St Peter’s Basilica, where ‘there is a feeling of the inadequacy of his [the subject’s] imagination for presenting the ideas of a whole, in which the GLORY OVER SUBLIMITY: KARL BARTH’S THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS 3 imagination reaches its maximum and, in the effort to extend it, sinks back into itself, but is thereby transported into an emotionally moving satisfaction.’9 The dynamic sublime is concerned with lack of control natural power has over the perceiving subject. This is bound up with the kind of fear we feel before natural disasters, or nature’s displays of power (the kind of things the Romantics loved: volcanoes, cyclones, bush fires, etc.). Yet, we consider the ‘object fearful without being afraid of it’ when we realise resistance would be futility. We fear the power of the object in a manner akin to reverent awe. If we are afraid, we will take flight before the object, whereas sublime fear perceives the object in the knowledge that no actual harm can come. So, in the case of the fear of God, we might find ourselves afraid of the absolute power of God because of some wrongdoing that has caused offence to God. This is not the sublime, for it is a fear of harm. ‘Only when he is conscious of his upright, God-pleasing disposition do these effects of [divine] power serve to awaken in him the idea of the sublimity of this being, insofar as he recognises in himself a sublimity of disposition suitable to God’s will, and is thereby raised above fear of such effects of nature, which he does not regard as outbursts of God’s wrath.’10 The sublime, both mathematical and dynamic, therefore, is not concerned with the object as such, but with our feeling before the object. It is a state of consciousness that opens onto that which is absolutely great.

GLORY AS THE TELOS OF THE STRUCTURE OF CD II.1

The doctrine of divine simplicity, simply stated, is the doctrine that God is not a composite substance. This lies at the heart of Barth’s exposition of the perfections. For Barth, however, it also serves as a point of theological distinctiveness on the part of Christian trinitarian dogma, for it is not philosophically derived. Rather simplicity is a predicate of God’s glorious triune activity. God is not non-composite in a nominalist sense. Simplicity consists in God’s simple act, the act in which the Father begets the Son, the Son is begotten by the Father, and together they breathe forth the Spirit. It is within this simple self-differentiating unity of multiplicity that the relation between the divine perfections is positively established. So Barth can say that God is the one who loves in freedom and is free in his love, or, indeed, in our section, God is the one who is eternal in his glory and glorious in his eternity. Each of the perfections elucidates the other insofar as each elucidates the simple triune activity, and thereby the simple substance of the divine being. This means Barth must reject certain ‘philosophical’ or ‘mystical’ doctrines of divine simplicity. For example, this is his problem with the Areopagite, whom he considers to have derived simplicity philosophically, and subsequently accommodated theological language (this will be echoed in his construction of beauty—as we shall see). Barth was writing in the middle of some very poor readings of the mystical traditions, so we can forgive him on this front. How- ever, it is significant that Barth wants to construct simplicity positively through the very structure of trinitarian unity in differentiation. As he is laying the groundwork for his exposition of the perfections Barth speaks of the possibility of the mutual co-inherence of the perfections in simplicity against ‘the nominalistic and the semi-nominalistic weakening of them and in answer to them both’.11 Curiously, he prefaces his discussion of the one and the many by stating that in this question we turn ‘our attention to the question of the possibility, legitimacy and necessity of speaking here of perfections (in the plural), of the glory [Herrlichkeit] of God as a multiplicity of perfections, and therefore of the latter in their individuality and diversity.’12 The glory of God is explicitly identified with the multiplicity of the perfections. Consequently it is not reducible to any particular perfection. The glory of God will form the focus of Barth’s exposition of divine beauty, as we shall see. It 4 SCOTT A. KIRKLAND important to note at this point, however, that Barth is paving the way for a construction of divine glory (and therefore beauty) through the very shape of his exposition of the perfections them- selves: the divine glory forms the focus of the very last perfection in CD II.1. Glory is the climax of the whole volume because God’s unity in multiplicity is the display of his glory, his beauty. CD II.1, therefore, can be read as a deliberately and carefully constructed theological aesthetic. Divine objectivity, for Barth, is a guard against idolatry. If we were to seek God without form, without particularity, we would be seeking a forbidden direct and thereby unmediated access to God. There is no non-objective access to knowledge of God, for God is hidden in his revelation. God is never non-objectively accessible to us, that is, accessible without the particu- larities of formal coherence, and yet he overwhelms us with his superabundance, his glory. Another reason, therefore, Barth locates his discussion of glory at the conclusion of CD II.1 is to maintain that divine glory is a hidden glory. God’s glory is his multiplicity, and his unity precisely in this multiplicity. It is a multiplicity in which we are overwhelmed; indeed, this begins to sound the notes of the sublime. Yet, it is decidedly not the sublime of post-Kantian Romanti- cism, for it is the sublimity of God’s revelation of himself, through himself, in himself. Hence, Barth is very careful, as we shall see, to avoid the language of the sublime, which is the unte- thering of subjectivity from the object. The sublime and the ‘free play’ Kant was so fond of were precisely what Barth endeavoured to avoid. It is important to notice the way Barth lays the groundwork for his explication of glory through his explication of divine hiddenness. Barth wants to think hiddenness through a positive plenitude—excess—of revelatory action, rather than with the aid of any philosophical limit concept. So, he states, ‘the lines we can draw to describe formally and conceptually what we mean when we say “God” cannot be extended so that what is meant is really described and defined; but they continually break apart so that it is not actually described and therefore not defined.’13 Descriptions of the divine perfections are positive descriptions of God’s revelatory action, and, indeed, only possible by virtue of participation in this action. Yet our description is always exceeded by the multiplicity of God’s self-giving being. Hiddenness is not, therefore, a predicate of divine absence or the epistemic limits of the subject—God is not a sublime Other in the Kantian sense—but is a function integral to revelation itself. Barth is particularly careful to avoid any kind of nominalism at this point, whereby being qua being might function as the locus of divine hiddenness. Hence, as he discusses the perfections, each is seen as interpreting and being displaced by the other in the simplicity of ever-greater multiplicity. Returning to explicitly aesthetic questions, when Barth locates the divine glory at the climax of the volume he is not locating the sublime beyond multiplicity, or a sublime beyond the magnitude of the given. There is no Kantian/Romantic sublime in his aesthetic precisely because it is the history of Jesus of Nazareth that is of material significance for the construction of any theological aesthetic. The disinterested aesthetic judgement of the Kantian subject is displaced as we are drawn into the form of God’s self-disclosure in this history.

GLORY AS GOD’S SELF-DIFFERENTIATING, CRUCIFORM UNITY

Barth begins his discussion of glory by offering us four brief definitions: God is glorious, first, in his fullness and self sufficiency; second, he is glorious in that he ‘seeks and at once finds those to whom he declares himself’, that is, his glory is his self-communication; third, he is glorious as the one who permeates the otherness he seeks and finds, offering it a share in his being; finally, he is glorious for his work is not in vain, in that he brings all things to completion in GLORY OVER SUBLIMITY: KARL BARTH’S THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS 5 himself.14 Immediately, however, Barth asks us whether a finer point may be put on the concept of glory via the concept of beauty. Beauty frees us from the connotations of a cold glorious omnipotence, an irresistible factum brutum of divine self-disclosure. Divine beauty allows us to further qualify omnipotence, in that to speak of omnipotence as beauty is ‘to describe not merely the naked fact of his revelation or its power, but the shape and form [Form und Gestalt]in which it is a fact and power. It is to say that God has this superior force, this power of attraction, which speaks for itself’.15 The problem of a naked, brute omnipotence is that the knowledge of God’s power becomes ‘knowledge or revelation which in the last resort is a mere object— without shape or form [Form und Gestalt]’.16 What is critical is that Barth applies the language of determinate shape and form to divine glory, and, thereby, beauty, as it is the evasion of form that will eventually prove fatal for any theological aesthetic as it finds itself paying homage to the naked fact of power, powerfully echoing the Romantic sublime. Barth’s earlier structural concerns are then echoed again as he points to what he considers Pseudo-Denys’ ‘thinly veiled platonism’ whereby beauty is brought under the spectre of beauty as such.17 Barth’s move is the more radical proposition that divine glory is the ‘sum of the divine perfections’, and as such beauty is given content as it is takes determinate shape in the ‘self-sufficiency that is a self-sufficiency which overflows and declares itself.’18 The concern that the introduction of beauty might introduce an aestheticism into the doctrine of God, in that beauty might serve to order our knowledge independently of God’s self-disclosure, is cut short by Barth’s constant refrain that beauty is not to be considered in abstracto, but is an explication of the Form und Gestalt of God’s persuasive action. So it is that no concept of beauty as such is provided, for God is both the explication, and the possibility, of our apprehension of beauty. At this point the subject has been disarmed of any noetic priority, for divine gift will function as the ground of the possibility of the apprehension and enjoyment of divine beauty. God is not only, according to Barth’s trinitarian logic, the object of beauty, but is the beautiful subject. Barth’s logic for this formal objective concept of divine beauty is found in the tradition. Beauty produces pleasure, yet it does so ‘because it is beautiful, not because it produces pleasure’ (a quite explicit disavowal of the logic of Kantian aesthetics).19 He turns to Thomas at this point. In ST 1.5.4.1 Thomas suggests that the beautiful and the good are wed by virtue of sharing the same form, and so ‘good is praised as beautiful.’ The difference between the good and the beautiful is a logical difference, for the good relates to appetite, and so to teleology, and beauty relates to noetic powers for, as Barth quotes, ‘beautiful things are those which please when seen.’20 They please, however, not because they relate to an idea of beauty, but because God is the ‘basis and standard of everything that is beautiful’, they please insofar as they are given to participate in him.21 Barth offers conceptual ground for this objective concept of beauty in his doctrine of God. Both Thomas and Augustine, to whom Barth turns to give beauty an explicit trinitarian logic, are, in the texts Barth cites, working with a definition from Hilary’s De Trin II: ‘Eternity is in the Father, form [species] in the Image, use in the Gift’.22 Thomas expounds the first part of this statement: ‘eternity, insofar as it means a being without a principal, has a likeness to the property of the Father, who is principle without a principle.’23 Augustine elucidates this similarly, stating, ‘the Father has not a father from whom he is’.24 Speaking of the image, however, Thomas explicitly employs aesthetic language, stating ‘Species or beauty has a likeness to the property of the Son.’ This is the due proportion of the Son, his bearing the image of the Father, for ‘those things which are impaired are by the very fact ugly’.25 That is, as Augustine states, the Son is the location of, ‘wondrous proportion and primal equality’.26 The Son is the perfect image of the eternal Father, for ‘an image is said to be beautiful if it perfectly represents even 6 SCOTT A. KIRKLAND an ugly thing.’27 Beauty, then, is located in the relation between the Father and the Son, in which the Son is the express image of the Father. Where Barth takes this classical trinitarian logic (explicitly) further is in that ‘it is the work of the Son and therefore His incarnation which causes us to speak in this way of his eternal being.’28 That is to say, our knowledge that God is beautiful ad intra is contingent upon the actuality in which God discloses himself in the history of Jesus of Nazareth ad extra.‘Hisdivin- ity overflows in its glory in the fact that the true God became true man in Jesus Christ.’29 Fur- ther, the inner trinitarian logic of the Son as the beautiful representation of the Father is the very condition for the history of Jesus Christ, and so for our aesthetics. For it is in the conditions of identity and non-identity, of identity in self-differentiation (or, in Thomas’ language, of subsis- tent relations)30 that God is other to Godself, and so is represented as beautiful in himself in the humiliating difference from himself he sustains in the cross. God spans the difference between Himself and the ultimate distance from himself, and so includes all things in himself.31 So, Barth can state, ‘God allowed this humiliation to come upon Himself and this exaltation to be the lot of the other, man. It is in this way that he exercises and confirms His unity with Himself, His divinity.’32 Because God is other to Godself, God can be God in the other. So, the motion of the descent of God and the simultaneous exultation of humanity is grounded in an aesthetic logic at the point at which the Son is God—he is the perfect image of the Father in his act of humiliation. ‘God could not be more glorious as God than in this inconceivable humiliation of Himself to man and the no less inconceivable exaltation of man to Himself.’33 God’s glory, and, thereby, his beauty, is a cruciform glory and beauty. Here Luther’s theologia crucis is being drawn upon and reworked in significant ways. The Father is represented as glorious in his renunciation of himself in his Son, and this is the work in which the Son is the objective representation of the Father—and, therefore, the express reflection of his Gestalt und Form. So, echoing Chalcedon, Barth states, ‘He is One and yet another, but One again even as this other, without confusion or alteration, yet also without separation or division. What is reflected in this determination of the relationship between the divine and human nature in Jesus Christ is the form [Form], the beautiful form of the divine being [die schone€ Form des gottlichen€ Wesens].’34 It is in the cruciform shape of Christ’s self-renunciation that the beauty of God is finally disclosed as an overflow of divine joy. Thomas and Augustine, following Hilary, identify the Spirit as the ‘use’ of God, in the sense of, as Thomas states, quoting Augustine, ‘“to enjoy,” according as “to use is to employ some-thing at the back of the will, and to enjoy means to use joy- fully. ... So “use”, whereby the Father and the Son enjoy each other, agrees with the property of the Holy Ghost as Love.’35 Christ is the express image of the Father, and so the distinction between form and content here melts away as God’s self-differentiating unity spans the distance between the Father as Arche and the Son as Logos. God is objective to Godself, and it is in this space in-between that we are given a share in divine being, in the joy that arises between Father and Son, the enjoyment of beauty–or, as Thomas states, Love. In a very real sense, then, the cross and resurrection are events that are internal to the life of God. Yet, they are not so as if they were constitutive of God’s unity—far from it. Rather, they are a repetition of the divine being in act, and the final overflow of joy (resurrection) in the non- identical repetition of divine being (the Son) that is the very simple logic of the divine act itself. This light is too bright for us. This act dazzles us with it’s complexity and magnitude in such a way that we are continually coming up against limit. Yet, not in such a way that we find a jump- ing off point into a sublime beyond, but in such a way that are led again and again to the glory and beauty of God in the face of Jesus Christ. GLORY OVER SUBLIMITY: KARL BARTH’S THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS 7

THE EXCESSIVENESS OF GOD: POSITIVE PLENITUDE OF GIFT OVER SUBLIME MAGNITUDE

In the previous two sections we have examined, first, Barth’s logic of the perfections of the divine being as they are given shape in a unity of multiplicity in God’s glorious being, and, second, the way the divine glory is then explicated explicitly in terms of beauty. Glory is, as I have noted, the final of the perfections to be explicated. My proposal is that this is quite deliberate for two reasons: first, glory is the sum of God’s action in that it has no content other than in concrete reference to the divine act; second, the association of glory with beauty explicitly moves us away from the subjective universality of Kantian aesthetics, and so away from an abstract sublime. This is, ultimately, a move away from the nominalist and voluntarist deities of modernity, following a line through Scotus, Ockham, and Kant in particular. Barth is quite deliberate in his use of the language of the sublime [Erhanben] throughout CD II.1. The English translation, however, is problematic in this regard. Early in the volume (29.3 - ‘The Being of God in Freedom’), as he is explicitly undermining any nominalist notion of divine simplicity beyond multiplicity, Barth states that,

We must reject out of hand the nominalistic and semi-nominalistic reservation that in the last resort we can speak of the proprietates Dei [properties of God] only improproprie [improp- erly], that the most characteristic inner being of God is a simplicitas [simplicity] which is to be understood undialectically If we reuse to do this and to recognise that God’s being tran- scends the contrast of simplicitas and multiplicitas [simplicity and multiplicity], including and reconciling both, it is hard to see how we can escape the view of a God who is extremely lofty [Erhanben] in his pure simplicity but also quite empty and unreal.36

It is quite clear that Barth is employing the conceptuality of the sublime quite deliberately in order to defy the idea of a simplicity beyond dialectical multiplicity, which is grounded, for post-Kantian Romantic Idealism, in the sublime aesthetic intuition beyond the object. Later in the volume, in the discussion of divine beauty, the language of the sublime does emerge in the English translation, yet without the technical philosophical term in the German text: ‘The beauty of Jesus Christ is not just any beauty. It is the beauty of God. We must not fail to see at this point the substance or model of the unity of God’s majesty and condescdence; His utter sublimity [Hoheit - better ET: greatness] and holiness’.37 Clearly Barth intends the technical language to perform a specific function in the first example. In the later, however, given the structure of divine beauty explicated above, I would suggest that Barth is quite deliberately avoiding the language for theological gain. The sublime embroils perception of God in the magnification and absolutisation of the subject’s power (subjective universality). Barth has quite deliberately undone the relationship between power as abstract magnitude and the sublime, as we have seen in his wedding of power to divine beauty: the persuasiveness of the Father in Christ’s action through the Spirit. If we are to construct a theological aesthetic with Barth, then, we shall have to do so on the ground of Christological particularity, and the joy we take in that particularity by participation in the relation between Father and Son in the Spirit. This theo-logic is ‘hyperbolic’—to borrow a term from William Desmond—to the extent that God’s life is never a static simplicity, but a fully actualised simple multiplicity. The Logos is not a terminus, or exhaustion of meaning, but continually overflows in the joy between Father and Son, the Spirit. The Spirit, as John Milbank states, perpetually “re-opens the Paternal Arche” keeping the movement going.38 In this sense, the aesthetic moment, the excess of God, is the Spirit’s creativity. As we move toward the Father by the Son in the Spirit, we do so in our particularity, in our difference. Yet it is a 8 SCOTT A. KIRKLAND difference borne by God, a difference grounded in the overflow of gift, a difference that is predi- cated upon difference already in God. As Desmond states,

Great art has a singularity which resists an exhaustive univocal analysis or dialectical encap- sulation. In it shines forth a freshness and inexhaustibility. Mostly we think of singulars in terms of their classiﬁcation by generals: human beings, not this singular, for instance. To look at the world with this love of the singular, we would have to be the embodiment of agapeic mind: loving the singular for the sake of the singular. In its love of the singular, our art can show something of the agapeic mindfulness and its hyperbolic import. Looked at this way, the aesthetics of singular happenings puts us in mind of a source of agapeic origination.39

CONCLUSION: THE BEAUTIFUL, HAPPY SCIENCE

At one point in his argument Barth states that, in order to give an adequate answer to the question of divine beauty, ‘we should also have to survey all the sections of dogmatics which we have yet to consider, and indeed all theology as such.’40 Indeed Hans Urs von Balthasar took his cue from Barth at this point.41 What is important for Barth, however, is not the construction of a beautiful theology—that is always secondary. What is important is the theological attentive- ness we give the beautiful object of theology, God. In this sense, ‘theology is the most beautiful of the sciences’42 because it is the ‘happy science.’

Notes

1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 5: 203. [Hereafter CPJ]. 2 ‘Any relation of representations, however, even that of sensations, can be objective (in which case it sig- niﬁes what is real in an empirical representation); but not the relation to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, by means of which nothing at all in the object is designated, but in which the subject feels itself as it is affected by the representation.’ CPJ, 5: 203–4. 3 CPJ, 5: 203. 4 CPJ, §17. Kant is quite explicit in his disavowal of any form in the object as such that might provide objective measure of beauty. 5 CPJ, 5: 210. 6 CPJ, 5: 210. 7 CPJ, 5: 212. 8 CPJ, 5: 211. emphasis added. 9 CPJ, 5: 252. 10 CPJ 5: 263. 11 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol 2. part 1. trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1980), 330. [Hereafter CD]. Signiﬁcantly, this serves as a preface to ‘The Being of God in Freedom’, (CD II.1, 330–335) where the divine glory is located in ‘The Perfections of the Divine Free- dom’. Barth’s explication of freedom is then bound up with a reassertion of a proper multiplicity in unity of divine simplicity, rather than the nominalistic assertion of being as such behind multiplicity. 12 CD II.1, 327. 13 CD II.1, 187. 14 CD II.1, 646–649. 15 CD II.1, 650. 16 CD II.1, 650. 17 While this may be a poor reading of the Areopagite, Barth was indeed a poor reader of the mystical theological traditions, it is illustrative of the kind of nominalism Barth wants to avoid. GLORY OVER SUBLIMITY: KARL BARTH’S THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS 9

18 CD II.1, 652. 19 CD II.1, 656. 20 ST 1.5.4.1; CD II.1, 656. 21 CD II.1, 656. 22 Hilary of Poitiers, De Trinitatae, II. 23 ST, 1.39.8c 24 Augustine, De Trinitatae, VI.10.11. 25 ST, 1.39.8c 26 Augustine De Trin VI.10.11. 27 ST, 1.39.8c 28 CD II.1, 662. 29 CD II.1, 662. 30 ST 1.40. It is key that Thomas’ discussion of relations as persons follows upon his discussion of Hilary and Augustine’s trinitarian logics, for he has prepared the ground for this more explicit language in the estab- lishment of mutually constitutive relations between eternity, image, and gift. 31 Later in CD IV.1.59.3, Barth will speak of God ‘sublating’ [Aufhebung] the difference between himself and himself in the cross and resurrection. Which is not to say that somehow God must embrace alienation from Godself in order to be beautiful (as in some kind of idealist logic of the inclusion of the negative), but to say that the cross and resurrection are the explication of divine beauty in created being. 32 CD II.1, 663. 33 CD II.1, 663. 34 CD II.1, 664. 35 ST 1.5.4.1 citing Augustine, De Trin, VI.10.12 36 CD II.1, 333. 37 CD II.1, 665. 38 John Milbank, ‘The Second Difference: For a Trinitarianism without Reserve’ in The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 187. 39 William Desmond, God and the Between (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008),137. 40 CD II.1, 656. 41 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Volume 1: Seeing the Form, trans., Erasmo Leiva- Merikakis ed., Joseph Fessio S.J. and John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 56–59. 42 CD II.1, 656.