Universal Beauty

chapter 4 Universal Beauty

Margaret Wolfe Hungerford penned the well-known phrase, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” in the late nineteenth century novel Molly Bawn.1 This phrase, which allegedly derives from an ancient Greek proverb in the third century bce, means beauty is subjective to the perceiver. Although this is an ancient notion, artists and theorists, for the majority of Western art history, have supposed beauty to be an objective reality. This predominant view of objective beauty caused the great Neo-Classical painter Ingres to say, “There are not two arts, there is only one: it is the one which has as its foundation the beautiful, which is eter- nal and natural. Those who seek elsewhere deceive themselves, and in the most fatal manner.”2 It is this notion of objectivity that caused artists and theorists not only to refer to a thing’s beauty, but also to “the beautiful” as a thing in itself. This issue is not merely one of semantics, however. The problem of beauty has regularly been polarized in aesthetics either as a definitive characteristic to the definition of art, or as an archaic issue that does not deserve consideration. Moreover, beauty was condemned by many scholars and artists in modernity, but has since made a resurgence in contemporary art. As one adopts a cultur- ally and historically relativistic theory of art and aesthetics as an ontological foundation for Pentecostal aesthetics, it is important to understand how asser- tions about beauty’s objectivity can be made in a relativistic system. For this reason, this chapter will evaluate the nature of beauty in art and what the Pentecostal response to beauty ought to be. First, this chapter will consider the historical understandings of the objective and subjective conceptions of beauty and will look at various contemporary responses to beauty. The next section will attempt to answer the question if beauty can be known to be objective by drawing from the theological method of George Lindbeck. Lindbeck’s Cultural-Linguistic Method allows for one to believe in the objective reality of beauty after admitting to the subjective nature of the cultural-linguistic system in which the assertion was made.3

1 Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, Molly Bawn (London: George Newnes, 1902), 83. As will be dis- cussed later, this quotation is very much linked with Kant’s idea of beauty. 2 Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres, in Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves, Eds. Artists on Art: From the XIV to the XX Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1945), 216. 3 George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1984), 41.

The final section will evaluate the Pentecostal’s response to beauty by consid- ering its particular cultural-linguistic system, which I will call the Pentecostal artworld.

The Problem of Beauty

The concept of beauty has harbored varied philosophical understandings and responses in the field of aesthetics. It is the question of beauty’s nature that has ignited the discipline’s greatest amount of debate over the past two millen- nia. The many iterations of the issue can be fundamentally reduced to the question: Is beauty an objective reality or a subjective feeling? Is there any value in a metaphysics of beauty, or must one look at it only phenomenologi- cally. Although some contemporary theorists hold to some sense of objectivity in beauty, the general dichotomy can be appropriated as the classical concept of objective beauty over against the modern concept of subjective beauty. Analyzing these two historical approaches to beauty will put the problem of beauty’s nature squarely to the fore.

The Classical Account of Objective Beauty As mentioned in chapter one, the premoderns held that beauty carries some sort of objective transcendent feature. This idea began with the ancient Greek philosophers, particularly Plato, who claimed that beauty is pure and touches upon transcendent truth.4 Later in the patristic era, Augustine asserted that beauty is transcendent and comes from God.5 But it is the medieval philoso- pher and theologian Thomas Aquinas who articulated what would become the general idea behind the classical account of objective beauty. Aquinas goes beyond the Augustinian idea that beauty comes from God by insisting beauty is itself an attribute of God. Beauty, like essence, existence and truth, is an essential attribute of being.6 Aquinas calls these attributes “transcen- dentals.”7 All finite things in the created order are beings and have being.8 God, however, is infinite. God is not a being, but is rather an absolute transcendent

4 Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen, Ed., Theological Aesthetics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 9. 5 Thiessen, Theological Aesthetics, 12. 6 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Vol. 2, Existence and Nature of God (Ia. 2–11). Trans. and Ed. By Timothy McDermott (London: Blackfriars, 1964), 73. 7 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Vol. 4, Knowledge in God (Ia. 14–18), Trans. and Ed. by Thomas Gornall (London: Blackfriars, 1964), 113. 8 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Vol. 4, 113.