Friday, December 31, 2010

David Bentley Hart on Beauty

Some more in support of a bubble
From The "Beauty of the Infinite", by David Bentley Hart, paperback published by Eerdman's, 2003, pp. 20-21 

'Beauty crosses boundaries.  Among the transcendentals, beauty has always been the most restless upon its exalted perch; the idea of the beautiful -- which somehow requires the sensual to fulfill its "ideal" nature -- can never really be separated from the beauty that lies near at hand.  Beauty traverses being oblivious of the boundaries that divide ideal from real, transcendent from immanent, supernatural from natural, pleasing from profound -- even, perhaps, nature from grace....  Beauty defies our distinctions, calls them into question, and manifests which shows itself despite them: God's glory.  For Christian thought, beauty's indifference to the due order of far and near, great and small, absent and present, spiritual and material should indicate the continuity of divine and created glory, the way the glory of heaven and earth truly declares and belongs to the glory of the infinite God.....  There is, moreover, a marvelous naïveté in the response most immediately provoked by the beautiful....  Theology should ponder how beauty can compel morally by its eccess: it is in the delighted vision of what is other than oneself -- difference, created by the God who differentiates, pleasing in the eyes of the God who takes pleasure -- that one is moved to affirm that otherness, to cherish and respond to it...  Theology... should be not only untroubled by beauty's prodigality, its defiance of so many orderly demarcations, but heartened by it: the beautiful uniquely displays the dynamic involvement of the infinite and the finite, the unmasterable excess contained in the object of beauty, the infinite' s hospitality to the finite....  Beauty crosses every boundary, traverses every series, and so manifests that God who transcends every division -- including, again, that between the transcendent and the immanent.'

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