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Glory Over Sublimity: Karl Barth'S Theological Aesthetics

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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 per- ception of the beautiful and the sublime by dispossessing the subject of the normative universal- ity 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, see- ing 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 dis- cussion 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 continu- ally 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 can- not 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 dis- tinguished 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 judge- ment 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 judge- ment 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, objec- tively, no longer any free choice with regard to what is to be done’.6 The two modes of judge- ment, 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 beau- tiful 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 con- cerned 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 sub- stance.
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