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Senses of Beauty by Natalie Michelle Carnes Graduate Program in Religion Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Stanley Hauerwas, Supervisor ___________________________ Jeremy Begbie ___________________________ Elizabeth Clark ___________________________ Paul Griffiths ___________________________ J. Warren Smith Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Program in Religion in the Graduate School of Duke University 2011 i v ABSTRACT Senses of Beauty by Natalie Michelle Carnes Graduate Program in Religion Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Stanley Hauerwas, Supervisor ___________________________ Jeremy Begbie ___________________________ Elizabeth Clark ___________________________ Paul Griffiths ___________________________ J. Warren Smith An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Program in Religion in the Graduate School of Duke University 2011 Copyright by Natalie Carnes 2011 Abstract Against the dominant contemporary options of usefulness and disinterestedness, this dissertation attempts to display that beauty is better—more fully, richly, generatively—described with the categories of fittingness and gratuity. By working through texts by Gregory of Nyssa, this dissertation fills out what fittingness and gratuity entail—what, that is, they do for beauty-seekers and beauty-talkers. After the historical set-up of the first chapter, chapter 2 considers fittingness and gratuity through Gregory’s doctrine of God because Beauty, for Gregory, is a name for God. That God is radically transcendent transforms (radicalizes) fittingness and gratuity away from a strictly Platonic vision of how they might function. Chapter 3 extends such radicalization by considering beauty in light of Christology and particularly in light of the Christological claims to invisibility, poverty, and suffering. In a time when beauty is wending its way back from an academic exile enforced by its associations with the ‘bourgeois,’ such considerations re-present beauty as deeply intertwined with ugliness and horror. Chapter 4 asks how it is a person might perceive such beauty, which calls for pneumatological and anthropological reflections on Gregory’s doctrine of the spiritual senses. The person who sees beauty rightly, for Gregory, is the person who is wounded by love. iv For Matthew v Contents Abstract..............................................................................................................iv Acknowledgements.............................................................................................. viii Introduction. Assembling Truths’ Shadow .......................................................................1 Chapter One. On ‘Gregory of Nyssa’ and ‘Beauty’: Genealogical Threads.................................8 1.1. Set One: Gregory of Annisa, Caesarea, and Nyssa...............................................10 1.2. Set Two: Beauty of Antiquity, Modernity, and the Present ....................................30 1.3. Recent Theological Performances of Beauty ......................................................53 1.4. Conclusion ..............................................................................................58 Chapter Two: Beautiful Bodies, Beautiful Words: Signs of a Radically Transcendent God ............59 2.1. Fittingness and Gratuity as an Alternative to Functionality or Disinterestedness...........63 2.2. Initiation: The Work of Rhetoric ...................................................................77 2.3. Inspiration: The Work of Making Rhetoric ..................................................... 117 2.5. Conclusion ............................................................................................ 160 Chapter Three. Rotting Bodies, Bleeding Words: The Beauty of the Word Made Flesh ............. 162 3.1. Strains on the Ladder................................................................................ 170 3.2. On Things Unseen and Unseemly................................................................. 175 3.3. Seeing the Savior as Seeing the Saved............................................................. 215 3.4. Difficulties: Bodies Exposed, Words Deflecting ............................................... 218 3.5. Conclusion ............................................................................................ 235 Chapter Four. Bodies Luminous and Wounded: The Spirit Manifests the Beauty of the Word..... 236 4.1. The Substance of Things Unseen: Two Boxes, Two Crosses................................. 241 vi 4.2. Non-identical Identity............................................................................... 245 4.3. The Wounded Self................................................................................... 256 4.4. Spiritual Senses for Spiritual Bodies .............................................................. 284 4.5. The Other Bridegroom ............................................................................. 292 4.6. Macrina’s Wound.................................................................................... 311 4.7. From Theory to Theoria............................................................................. 317 4.8. Conclusion ............................................................................................ 321 Epilogue. When Everything is Before our Eyes............................................................. 324 Works Cited ..................................................................................................... 327 Biography......................................................................................................... 340 vii Acknowledgements I would like to thank Stanley Hauerwas, who has the twin gifts, invaluable in an advisor, of asking difficult questions and trusting his students to answer them. From my first year in graduate school, he has helped me find my theological voice. Paul Griffiths read every chapter more than once (more than twice), and his critiques, suggestions, and encouragement continually opened new ways forward for me. Warren Smith has been my excellent guide through Gregory of Nyssa and Plato, and Elizabeth Clark has pressed me into what historical responsibility I have managed. My thanks also to Jeremy Begbie for serving on my dissertation committee. Early in the process, David Aers pressed me on why beauty. His question has rung in my ears ever since, and my dissertation attempts to address the concerns I hear in it. Others have held me accountable to that question: In 2009-10 I participated in a dissertation working group at the Franklin Humanities Institute. I am grateful for the feedback I received there, particularly from Ignacio Adriasola, Erica Fretwell, and Brian Goldstone. At least twice Brian introduced me to resources that became central to my arguments. Without him, this dissertation would look quite different. My future colleague Jonathan Tran likewise introduced me to material that continued returning to me as I wrote this dissertation. Sean Larsen and Ben Dillon read and responded to two of my chapters, and I appreciate the questions, insights, and support of these colleagues. But the roots of this dissertation go back much farther than the last couple years. Sarah Coakley introduced me to Gregory of Nyssa, and Nicholas Constas deepened the acquaintance. Elaine Scarry helped me learn how to think about beauty, and Kimerer LaMothe helped me learn viii how to think. I learned the difficulty and wonder of trying to say something about ancient Christian sources from Margaret Mitchell and the importance of doing so from Kathryn Tanner. My greatest human debt belongs to the first reader of all my texts, my husband Matthew. In addition to careful readerly attention, Matthew gives me the life—both the pattern of living and the vitality—that funds my work. It is to him this dissertation is dedicated. As I began to write, Matthew and I received our daughter Chora, who—how can we help it?—gives beauty a new poignancy for us. May she continue to grow beautiful—star-like, Macrina- like—into ripe old age. ix Introduction Assembling Truths’ Shadow Meditating on divine transcendence, Gregory of Nazianzus describes what it means to do theology by offering a picture of ho aristos theologos, the most excellent theologian. Such a theologian is not one who has discovered the whole of God’s being, he tells us, but one who has assembled more of truth’s shadow.1 As elsewhere, Nazianzen here chastens would-be theologians, cautioning them about the treacheries of theologizing and directing them to epistemological modesty. Gregory of Nyssa also uses the imagery of light to name the fullness and poverty of theological knowing. Theology, for these friends, is done in the shadows. I take their image of the theologian as a shadow-dweller to display the scope of my own work. It is especially important to remember the shadowy character of theology in a project that purports to explore a name for God—for that is what I, like Gregory of Nyssa, take Beauty to be. In conversation with Nyssen, I elaborate a vision of beauty in which it is characterized by fittingness and gratuity. I argue that we can articulate the beauty of an object by naming an aspect under which it is fitting, and in describing its fittingness with that aspect,