Faith and Beauty

'Aesthetics' and 'theological aesthetics' usually imply a focus on questions about the arts and how faith or religion relates to the arts; only the final pages of this work take up that problem. The central theme of this book is that of beauty. Farley employs a new typology of western texts on beauty and a theological analysis of the image of God and redemption to counter the centuries-long tendency to ignore or marginalize beauty and the aesthetic as part of the life of faith. Studying the interpretation of beauty in ancient Greece, eighteenth-century England, the work of Jonathan Edwards, and nineteenth and twentieth-century philosophies of human self-transcendence, the author explores whether Christian existence, the life of faith, and the ethical exclude or require an aesthetic dimension in the sense of beauty. The work will be of particular interest to those interested in Christian theology, ethics, and religion and the arts.

Edward Farley,

Contents: Preface. Beauty as the Beast: traditional and postmodern expressions: Beauty and the postmodern; Beauty as the beast in Christian traditions; Hebrew and Christian iconoclasms. Beauty as Being: The Irrepressible Character of Beauty: The 'great theory of beauty'; The Olympian cosmogonies; The Platonic tradition; The 'great theory' in the Middle Ages; The process transmutation of the great theory of beauty; beauty as being. Beauty as Sensibility: Precursors of the 18th-century turn; The new problematic of beauty in the 18th century; The psychological relocation of beauty; The problem of taste; The sublime; Legacies and ambiguities. Beauty as Benevolence: Primary and secondary beauty; Beauty as community; Beauty and God; The problem of objectivity; Beauty and self-transcendence. Beauty in Human Self-Transcendence: Human self-transcendence without beauty; Self-transcendence as passionate subjectivity; Self-transcendence as intentional meaning; Self-transcendence as radical responsibility; The aesthetic aspect of self-transcendence; Beauty as a transcendental condition of experience; Beyond self-preoccupation through beauty; The beauty of the graceful body; Summary. Paths to Beauty in 20th-Century Theology: Anti-aesthetic Protestant approaches to beauty; 20th-century Catholic theologies of beauty. The Beauty of Human Redemption: The image of God as self-transcendence; Formal and ethical self-transcendence; The image of God as potentiality and actuality; The imago dei as beautiful; The despoiled image; The beauty of redemptive remaking; Redemptive self-transcendence; Surmounting the dichotomy of the ethical and the aesthetic; Faith's aesthetic sensibilities. Beauty, Pathos and Joy: Beauty and pathos; Joy: beyond the dichotomy of rigorism and satisfaction; Faith without beauty; The arts in the life of faith. Synopsis: Aesthetics; Beauty; The western story of beauty; Theological aesthetics and redemptive transformation; Index.