Religious Aesthetics: A Theological Study of Making and Meaning
by
by
Escaping the Tyranny of the Beautiful
The title of this book is not a synonym for a sort of specialized theology. Religious aesthetics is not the same thing as theological aesthetics according to Brown’s analysis. Rather a religious aesthetic is distinctive, I interpret Brown as saying, in the precise sense that it is revelatory. Theology, on the other hand, may be explanatory or descriptive, or even directive, but it is not in itself an aspect of divine revelation.
This is a highly sophisticated point of view, and also a deeply radical one. It appears to me that it is the view of perhaps the most well-known and important of 20th century theologians, Karl Barth, who convincingly denied that even scripture, much less theological writing, constitutes the Word of God. Scripture may indeed have been conceived, written, and edited by people who had a definite religious aesthetic. But in a sense it is only the remnant and echo of that aesthetic in scripture which can properly be called the Word of God.
So for Brown, the aesthetical has nothing to do with the artistic, the iconic, the tasteful, or even the beautiful or the philosophical. It cannot be derived rationally or ethically. Nor is it the product of a ‘hermeneutic’ search pattern undertaken by the human mind. The religious aesthetic ‘arrives’, one might say, suddenly and with some emotional force from somewhere entirely outside of the recipient. And in a manner perhaps like that described by Barth, it takes up residence in the human mind and demands a response, to itself as well as to what it reveals about the world.
It strikes me that Brown’s is the polar opposite thought to that presented by existential philosophers, especially those of the school of Martin Heidegger, who insist on the self-creation of one’s own aesthetic as an essential symbol of the ‘authentic’ self.* The religious aesthetic is certainly no less demanding than its existential sibling, but its demands are for recognition not for compliance. It invites but has no compulsive force.
There are several important implications of the idea of the religious aesthetic. First, it frees the human mind from what Brown calls “the tyranny of the beautiful”, that is, precisely the kind of myopic obsession which befalls people like Heidegger who dig their own spiritual graves because they insistently believe in their own press. Second, human notions of aesthetic harmony are always limited by culture, personal experience and individual talents. So there is little reliability to be expected from the process of human “aesthesis” or thought about aesthetics.
One might make a counter-objection to the religious aesthetic: What is there to ensure that the revelatory aesthetic which grips the individual is neither delusional nor merely the influence of the demonic? Certainly the existence of a large number of religious fundamentalists around the world, justifiably provokes such a question.
Brown’s idea is that there is in fact a necessary conflict or dialectic between the religious and other aesthetics, including the theological. He considers the two to be mutually informative and transformative. Both (or presumably many) are to be applied in order to interpret the world. ‘Aesthetica’, that is, objects of aesthetical perception, in fact have multiple identities. Some objects may only be perceived in one or other aesthetic - a bit like the existence of two separate worlds in the same space in China Mieville’s The City & The City.
In Mieville’s story the city in question is divided, sometimes on a house by house basis, into two parallel worlds. Although the worlds are intertwined physically with each other, the city’s inhabitants are taught to, quite literally, not see, hear, smell, or feel what happens to those in the companion world. Residents are permitted to commute, as it were, between one world and the other through a tunnel in the city centre. Once through the tunnel they are able to engage with the alternative world but are unable to perceive the world they have just left.
In my initial reading of The City & The City, my interpretation was that the book was a commentary on ghettoization - economic, social, and racial. I saw Mieville as presenting a problem to be solved. However I have since realized that Mieville, in a manner typical of most his writing, is playing with a much broader set of issues. Implicitly my response to his ideas was epistemological: I wonder what it would take to get the residents to accept knowledge about the alternative world? I now see that Mieville has raised exactly the same issue of aesthetics that Brown articulates.
Immanuel Kant asked: What are the qualities that capture our attention to cause delight or at least the need for interpretation? Neither he nor anyone else has come up with a satisfactory answer to this question. Brown suggests a response which indicates the futility of Kant’s question. If meaning of any kind depends on relationships among things - people, ideas, events, words - then something has meaning only for someone in particular and only in relation to something else.
‘Nothing’ is not something else. Only someTHING else is something else. We need not perceive this something else in order for it to act as the existential foil for our interpretation of the world, but it is nevertheless necessary as a sort of potential, a place to go in order to get our bearings on the aesthetic which defines our usual world.
I think there’s a good chance that Mieville and Brown converge productively on this very point. Brown’s religious aesthetic seems to me the universal alternative to whatever ‘secular’ aesthetic one happens to be using. The religious and the secular cannot, must not, be consolidated into some sort of composite. It is possible to move back and forth from one to the other but only by taking one’s mind and its perceptive categories through a somewhat dark transitional tunnel. Is it fanciful to suggest the toll for the passage is in a currency called by a traditional name: Grace?
*See for example https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Postscript: Both Mieville and Brown present a situation that also prevails historically in the Christian Church. Almost since the time of its establishment, perhaps even at its establishment, the Church has been composed of two opposing factions: the episcopal church of hierarchy, dogma, and power vs. the monastic church of fraternity, spiritual sensitivity, and self-denial. When the tension between these two factions exists, the church as a whole seems most healthy. When either faction dominates, the church becomes merely a component of the world or a vague New Age tendency without any substance. I think this can be seen most clearly in the history of Christianity in England in which the dominant poles of York (founded by Irish monks) and Canterbury (founded by emissaries from Rome) have struggled against each other for a millennium. Episcopal Canterbury, led by Henry VIII, was motivated to overcome monastic York in the Reformation largely because of the overwhelming success of monasticism during the previous 500 years. The principle difference between the English and Continental Reformations is that the former was episcopal, the latter monastic. The idea of the religious vs. the theological aesthetic would fit the situation equally well.
The title of this book is not a synonym for a sort of specialized theology. Religious aesthetics is not the same thing as theological aesthetics according to Brown’s analysis. Rather a religious aesthetic is distinctive, I interpret Brown as saying, in the precise sense that it is revelatory. Theology, on the other hand, may be explanatory or descriptive, or even directive, but it is not in itself an aspect of divine revelation.
This is a highly sophisticated point of view, and also a deeply radical one. It appears to me that it is the view of perhaps the most well-known and important of 20th century theologians, Karl Barth, who convincingly denied that even scripture, much less theological writing, constitutes the Word of God. Scripture may indeed have been conceived, written, and edited by people who had a definite religious aesthetic. But in a sense it is only the remnant and echo of that aesthetic in scripture which can properly be called the Word of God.
So for Brown, the aesthetical has nothing to do with the artistic, the iconic, the tasteful, or even the beautiful or the philosophical. It cannot be derived rationally or ethically. Nor is it the product of a ‘hermeneutic’ search pattern undertaken by the human mind. The religious aesthetic ‘arrives’, one might say, suddenly and with some emotional force from somewhere entirely outside of the recipient. And in a manner perhaps like that described by Barth, it takes up residence in the human mind and demands a response, to itself as well as to what it reveals about the world.
It strikes me that Brown’s is the polar opposite thought to that presented by existential philosophers, especially those of the school of Martin Heidegger, who insist on the self-creation of one’s own aesthetic as an essential symbol of the ‘authentic’ self.* The religious aesthetic is certainly no less demanding than its existential sibling, but its demands are for recognition not for compliance. It invites but has no compulsive force.
There are several important implications of the idea of the religious aesthetic. First, it frees the human mind from what Brown calls “the tyranny of the beautiful”, that is, precisely the kind of myopic obsession which befalls people like Heidegger who dig their own spiritual graves because they insistently believe in their own press. Second, human notions of aesthetic harmony are always limited by culture, personal experience and individual talents. So there is little reliability to be expected from the process of human “aesthesis” or thought about aesthetics.
One might make a counter-objection to the religious aesthetic: What is there to ensure that the revelatory aesthetic which grips the individual is neither delusional nor merely the influence of the demonic? Certainly the existence of a large number of religious fundamentalists around the world, justifiably provokes such a question.
Brown’s idea is that there is in fact a necessary conflict or dialectic between the religious and other aesthetics, including the theological. He considers the two to be mutually informative and transformative. Both (or presumably many) are to be applied in order to interpret the world. ‘Aesthetica’, that is, objects of aesthetical perception, in fact have multiple identities. Some objects may only be perceived in one or other aesthetic - a bit like the existence of two separate worlds in the same space in China Mieville’s The City & The City.
In Mieville’s story the city in question is divided, sometimes on a house by house basis, into two parallel worlds. Although the worlds are intertwined physically with each other, the city’s inhabitants are taught to, quite literally, not see, hear, smell, or feel what happens to those in the companion world. Residents are permitted to commute, as it were, between one world and the other through a tunnel in the city centre. Once through the tunnel they are able to engage with the alternative world but are unable to perceive the world they have just left.
In my initial reading of The City & The City, my interpretation was that the book was a commentary on ghettoization - economic, social, and racial. I saw Mieville as presenting a problem to be solved. However I have since realized that Mieville, in a manner typical of most his writing, is playing with a much broader set of issues. Implicitly my response to his ideas was epistemological: I wonder what it would take to get the residents to accept knowledge about the alternative world? I now see that Mieville has raised exactly the same issue of aesthetics that Brown articulates.
Immanuel Kant asked: What are the qualities that capture our attention to cause delight or at least the need for interpretation? Neither he nor anyone else has come up with a satisfactory answer to this question. Brown suggests a response which indicates the futility of Kant’s question. If meaning of any kind depends on relationships among things - people, ideas, events, words - then something has meaning only for someone in particular and only in relation to something else.
‘Nothing’ is not something else. Only someTHING else is something else. We need not perceive this something else in order for it to act as the existential foil for our interpretation of the world, but it is nevertheless necessary as a sort of potential, a place to go in order to get our bearings on the aesthetic which defines our usual world.
I think there’s a good chance that Mieville and Brown converge productively on this very point. Brown’s religious aesthetic seems to me the universal alternative to whatever ‘secular’ aesthetic one happens to be using. The religious and the secular cannot, must not, be consolidated into some sort of composite. It is possible to move back and forth from one to the other but only by taking one’s mind and its perceptive categories through a somewhat dark transitional tunnel. Is it fanciful to suggest the toll for the passage is in a currency called by a traditional name: Grace?
*See for example https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Postscript: Both Mieville and Brown present a situation that also prevails historically in the Christian Church. Almost since the time of its establishment, perhaps even at its establishment, the Church has been composed of two opposing factions: the episcopal church of hierarchy, dogma, and power vs. the monastic church of fraternity, spiritual sensitivity, and self-denial. When the tension between these two factions exists, the church as a whole seems most healthy. When either faction dominates, the church becomes merely a component of the world or a vague New Age tendency without any substance. I think this can be seen most clearly in the history of Christianity in England in which the dominant poles of York (founded by Irish monks) and Canterbury (founded by emissaries from Rome) have struggled against each other for a millennium. Episcopal Canterbury, led by Henry VIII, was motivated to overcome monastic York in the Reformation largely because of the overwhelming success of monasticism during the previous 500 years. The principle difference between the English and Continental Reformations is that the former was episcopal, the latter monastic. The idea of the religious vs. the theological aesthetic would fit the situation equally well.
posted by The Mind of BlackOxford @ January 27, 2018
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