In keeping with what has been a pretty clear theme this week, here is an old post on aesthetics and theology:
Martha Nussbaum, in her must-read book UPHEAVALS OF THOUGHT, says that
awe and wonder are non-Eudaimonistic emotions, spontaneous recognitions
of inherent value in the thing experienced. Beauty, too, is much like
this. Beauty, for all the Buddhist protestations against it, is a kind
of universal invitation to attachment. Buddhists create sand art that
they destroy with one stroke, to represent the impermanence of life. But
in point of fact, there is a tension between the beauty of the art and
its destruction. The gesture of the sand art is, interestingly enough, a
recognition of the tension, for the significance in destroying the
beauty is a kind of pronouncement against the message of beauty in
general.
The world can be so wonderful, experienced as so incredible, that it
almost automatically brings one to an attitude of worship. Awe and
wonder are almost spontaneous worshipful responses, and they rise up in
us all the time. Great beauty inspires worship. That is simply what it
means to really give oneself over to the experience of the aesthetic.
Beauty comes to us as information-bearing, any and all instantiations of
beauty seem to be very much like a message. That message is one of
sublimity and goodness. The world SEEMS TO BE saying to us: 'yes, to
this you can fully give yourself.'
But in a godless universe, this is nothing more than a trick, and a
trap. For all beauty is, in point of fact, passing in this world, as the
Buddhist gesture attests to. Death is the final word on all that is
wonderful and awe-inspiring. The horror, then, is that in the shadow of
death beauty becomes something not wonderful, but terrible. For what
purpose can it serve, but to remind us of all that we cannot have? What
can it do but reinforce the fact that our life is inevitably incomplete?
Beauty becomes the ultimate lie, an invitation to play acting and
nothing more. It just makes the horror of the darkness that surrounds
human life that much starker.
The very fact that the Buddhist sand art is destroyed attests to the
'danger' Buddhists see in beauty, for they recognize the message it
sends. The destruction of the beautiful is a kind of saying 'no' to that
message. But what if we take the message as it stands? What if we
choose, in spite of the counter-evidence, to trust our experience of the
beautiful? Then awe and wonder become intimations of the very eternity
we seek. We say 'no, this is what it means to be human and I will not
run from it', and then we let our actions and attitudes guide our
beliefs. What is wrong with this? Isn't this just being honest about who
we are as limited beings? You see the truth is that the passing of
beauty becomes, to the person who is fully open to the wonder of the
world, the death of God in the world. For if awe and wonder are
autonomic responses of worshipfulness, then the fact of the passing of
the object of awe can be nothing less than the destruction of that which
is worthy of worship. Life becomes the story of crucifixion without
resurrection.
But what if what appears to be divine is? What if eternity is calling us
through those experiences to trust and choose in opposition to the
counter-evidence? I think that they are, especially when taken in
context of a whole range of other human experiences. Beauty is not the
passing of the divine into nothingness. It is a momentary in-breaking of
Eternal Divinity, into the ever-changing theatre of the mortal coil.
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