On the Shelf
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by Mark McInroy
Mark McInroy is an assistant professor of systematic theology at the University of St. Thomas, and is the book review editor for ARTS. He has published academic examinations of Origen of Alexandria, Martin Luther, Karl Barth, Karl Rahner, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. He is the author of Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses: Perceiving Splendour (Oxford University Press, 2014). James Romaine and Linda Stratford, eds. ReVisioning: Critical Methods of Seeing Christianity in the History of Art(Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013). In ReVisioning: Critical Methods of Seeing Christianity in the History of Art, editors James Romaine and Linda Stratford aim to expand a certain narrowness in academic treatments of Christian art. The problem, |
as Romaine explains in his introductory chapter, is that “images and objects reflective of Christian content and contexts have too often been met by a field that lacks the methodological framework by which to meaningfully inform their engagement” (6). The corrective, as Stratford describes it in the next chapter, involves the complex task of “developing an eye for theological relevance; moving into consideration of ‘affective space’ without sacrificing scholarly rigor; and maintaining religious perspective without overly inflating that perspective” (41).
The volume is organized such that, after two introductory chapters by each of the editors, the fifteen remaining chapters are divided into three sections, which treat methodological issues in early and medieval art (Part I), Renaissance and Baroque art (Part II), and nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century art (Part III). In the first part, chapters treat such topics as the Vatican Jonah sarcophagus, which may be the earliest artistic depiction of the resurrected Christ; the “Princeton Madonna,” which functions as a paradigmatic example of visual art executing theological work; the richly foliated motifs in Orvieto Cathedral, Italy, which should not be viewed as mere ornamentation, but instead as giving “visible form to God’s provision in all things” (113); a fifteenth-century German print of the Mass of St. Gregory, in which intricate claims are made about the connections between seeing and believing; and the Miraculous Mass of St. Gregory Featherwork from the Colegio de San José de los Naturales in Mexico City, which displays meanings that are relevant to both the pre- and post-Christian indigenous cultures in central America.
In the second part, chapters treat Renaissance and Baroque art, and authors claim that their use of pictorial space absorbs the viewer into the compositions they create transforming liturgical space; that Patinir’s 1515 painting stands at a crossroads in that it “depicts an interesting unity of older medieval concerns for the devotional life with more particularly contemporary concerns for individual agency and virtue” (204); that Marian Florence was an important context in which Michelangelo’s artistic sensibilities were formed; that early Protestant art was efficacious in persuading many to join the movement begun by Luther in the early sixteenth century; and that the “recumbent Christ” was a type of devotional sculpture and was viewed as a metaphor for the Eucharist and as a concrete manifestation of the promise of resurrection.
The third part offers a treatment of artistic works from recent centuries, treating such themes as the tension between religious and secular worldviews; spiritual and materialist categories that defy neat separation into distinct spheres; the possibility of an artist being deeply religious and thoroughly modernist; doubt; and sacrifice. The collection of essays is complemented by twenty-four color plates and a number of black-and-white images.
As a whole, the volume offers a refreshing take on religiously themed artistic works, and it successfully delivers methodological sophistication to the many important theological and artistic issues it raises.
Kathryn B. Alexander, Saving Beauty: A Theological Aesthetics of Nature (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014).
Kathryn B. Alexander holds that “a necessary ingredient of ecological redemption is the role that natural beauty can play” (4). Saving Beauty: A Theological Aesthetics of Nature describes this role at a time of urgency, anxiety, and cautious hope for the natural world in which we live. Chapter 1, “Natural Beauty: Theological History,” guides the reader through reflections on beauty offered by figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Bonaventure, Aquinas, and others. Alexander then describes a two-stage decline of beauty, first at the hands of iconoclastic reformers in the sixteenth century, then through Kant’s philosophical critique of objective beauty. In spite of this apparent diminishment, in Chapter 2, “Nature-Beauty and Salvation,” Alexander insists that the experience of natural beauty can be redemptive. She turns to Josiah Royce’s “hidden aesthetics” and his process of negation to claim, “when we posit a life without beauty we consider the prospect of a radically diminished life” (91). Alexander then suggests that Royce’s notion of the “Beloved Community” be applied to the environmental crisis such that the earth itself is viewed as an inextricable component of the community we all share. Chapter 3, “Nature Revealed: Religious Insight in the Art of Andy Goldsworthy,” views Goldsworthy’s art as a catalyst for the sense of community described in Chapter 2. To Alexander, “[N]ot only is Goldsworthy helping his audiences to see the beauty that is already contained in the natural world: his ‘touch’ looks into the heart of nature and opens the door for the aesthetic” (100). Chapter 4, “A Theological Aesthetics of Nature,” extends the points raised in the first three chapters in order to make the summary statement, “[W]e are moved by beauty, and the experience of beauty … brings us closer to the divine and closer to a right relationship with a created order designed to delight” (144). Readers conversant with theological aesthetics will observe a number of familiar themes in the volume; it is especially thought-provoking in the idea that appreciating beauty is a key component in addressing our current ecological crisis.
Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
Based on Roger Scruton’s Stanton Lectures, given to the Divinity Faculty of the University of Cambridge in 2011, The Soul of the World takes on various critiques of religion that have been launched from a number of different quarters in recent years. Most consistently in Scruton’s sights are those views that insist evolutionary and neuroscientific accounts of human beings to be the exclusive arbiters of truth and meaning in our world today. Against such pretensions, Scruton summons his considerable command of art, architecture, music, and literature to claim that our aesthetic and moral sensibilities suggest a transcendent realm not adequately explained by a scientific worldview. He also draws from personalist thought in order to claim that I-Thou relations between persons demonstrate “that the overreaching intentionality of interpersonal responses presents us with meanings that transcend the domain of any natural science” (175). Scruton’s volume culminates in many ways in his claim that our relationship with God is one such personal relation, and that it not something derived from philosophical argument. To Scruton, writers such as John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, and others “affirm that God is a subject, who can and must be loved. And this means that, if he exists, he is a person, marked by those features that are essential to personhood, such as self-knowledge, freedom, and the sense of right and wrong” (190). Ultimately, much hinges in this volume on the claim that persons are irreducible entities; they cannot be exhaustively explained by any series of preceding causes. As such, they will always escape any attempt (scientific or otherwise) to fully account for them.
Brendan Thomas Sammon, The God Who is Beauty: Beauty as a Divine Name in Thomas Aquinas and Dionysius the Areopagite (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013).
At the outset of The God Who is Beauty: Beauty as a Divine Name in Thomas Aquinas and Dionysius the Areopagite, Brendan Thomas Sammon observes that, despite the recent proliferation of studies of beauty in philosophical and theological circles, there has been a neglect of beauty as a divine name. Sammon holds that such an investigation will contribute to two distinct subfields within theological aesthetics. First, to those who, like Hans Urs von Balthasar and David Bentley Hart, are inclined to examine the metaphysical aspects of beauty, Sammon offers a view of the divine name as “a communication of God’s very self into the created order” (7). Second, to those who, like Richard Viladesau and Jeremy Begbie, explore the connection between theology and the arts, Sammon insists that his treatment of beauty as a divine name “enables a more complete portrait of the foundations upon which all arts situate themselves, and the ends to which all arts, consciously or unconsciously are striving” (7). The volume falls into three parts, the first of which treats of Greek philosophical views of beauty. The second part examines Pseudo-Dionysius, and the third his reception in the Latin West, most particularly in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Chapter 1 discusses beauty in Plato and Aristotle, and there Sammon makes the important observation that these figures reveal a key ambiguity in beauty: it is a “spiritual” phenomenon that is paradoxically intertwined with the material world. Chapter 2 insists that Neoplatonic figures such as Plotinus and Proclus only exaggerate the problem in their investigations into beauty, and Sammon concludes this section of the book with the claim that Greek philosophy as a whole is unable to surmount the challenge of uniting the spiritual and material. Turning to the second section, Chapter 3 offers the book’s first treatment of the divine names; here Sammon points to the importance of Dionysius’ use of biblical material, rather than philosophical discussions of the divine names provided by Proclus. Chapters 4 and 5 together examine Dionysius’ text The Divine Names, and Sammon argues that two dimensions of God’s beauty are conveyed in this text. First, beauty refers to God in God’s self, which Sammon reads as God’s “transcendental plenitude;” second, beauty refers to God in God’s self-disclosure, which Sammon reads as a “principle of determination.” These aspects of God’s beauty are then used in Chapter 6 to argue for the inadequacy of viewing the Dionysian God as a thinly disguised version of the Neoplatonic One. Instead, Dionysius’ God is thoroughly Christian. The third section begins with Chapter 7, which treats the journey of Dionysius’ writings from the late-patristic Greek East to the medieval Latin West. Along similar lines, Chapter 8 looks at the development of beauty as a divine name from the sixth to thirteenth centuries. In Chapter 9, Sammon describes the reading of Dionysius by Albert the Great, which leads into his treatment of Aquinas in Chapters 10, 11 and 12. These three chapters collectively claim that “beauty for Thomas is primarily a theological phenomenon deriving as it does from the Dionysian tradition of the divine names” (10). Readers will appreciate Sammon’s historically attuned and theologically astute treatment of a surprisingly neglected topic within theological aesthetics.
In the second part, chapters treat Renaissance and Baroque art, and authors claim that their use of pictorial space absorbs the viewer into the compositions they create transforming liturgical space; that Patinir’s 1515 painting stands at a crossroads in that it “depicts an interesting unity of older medieval concerns for the devotional life with more particularly contemporary concerns for individual agency and virtue” (204); that Marian Florence was an important context in which Michelangelo’s artistic sensibilities were formed; that early Protestant art was efficacious in persuading many to join the movement begun by Luther in the early sixteenth century; and that the “recumbent Christ” was a type of devotional sculpture and was viewed as a metaphor for the Eucharist and as a concrete manifestation of the promise of resurrection.
The third part offers a treatment of artistic works from recent centuries, treating such themes as the tension between religious and secular worldviews; spiritual and materialist categories that defy neat separation into distinct spheres; the possibility of an artist being deeply religious and thoroughly modernist; doubt; and sacrifice. The collection of essays is complemented by twenty-four color plates and a number of black-and-white images.
As a whole, the volume offers a refreshing take on religiously themed artistic works, and it successfully delivers methodological sophistication to the many important theological and artistic issues it raises.
Kathryn B. Alexander, Saving Beauty: A Theological Aesthetics of Nature (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014).
Kathryn B. Alexander holds that “a necessary ingredient of ecological redemption is the role that natural beauty can play” (4). Saving Beauty: A Theological Aesthetics of Nature describes this role at a time of urgency, anxiety, and cautious hope for the natural world in which we live. Chapter 1, “Natural Beauty: Theological History,” guides the reader through reflections on beauty offered by figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Bonaventure, Aquinas, and others. Alexander then describes a two-stage decline of beauty, first at the hands of iconoclastic reformers in the sixteenth century, then through Kant’s philosophical critique of objective beauty. In spite of this apparent diminishment, in Chapter 2, “Nature-Beauty and Salvation,” Alexander insists that the experience of natural beauty can be redemptive. She turns to Josiah Royce’s “hidden aesthetics” and his process of negation to claim, “when we posit a life without beauty we consider the prospect of a radically diminished life” (91). Alexander then suggests that Royce’s notion of the “Beloved Community” be applied to the environmental crisis such that the earth itself is viewed as an inextricable component of the community we all share. Chapter 3, “Nature Revealed: Religious Insight in the Art of Andy Goldsworthy,” views Goldsworthy’s art as a catalyst for the sense of community described in Chapter 2. To Alexander, “[N]ot only is Goldsworthy helping his audiences to see the beauty that is already contained in the natural world: his ‘touch’ looks into the heart of nature and opens the door for the aesthetic” (100). Chapter 4, “A Theological Aesthetics of Nature,” extends the points raised in the first three chapters in order to make the summary statement, “[W]e are moved by beauty, and the experience of beauty … brings us closer to the divine and closer to a right relationship with a created order designed to delight” (144). Readers conversant with theological aesthetics will observe a number of familiar themes in the volume; it is especially thought-provoking in the idea that appreciating beauty is a key component in addressing our current ecological crisis.
Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
Based on Roger Scruton’s Stanton Lectures, given to the Divinity Faculty of the University of Cambridge in 2011, The Soul of the World takes on various critiques of religion that have been launched from a number of different quarters in recent years. Most consistently in Scruton’s sights are those views that insist evolutionary and neuroscientific accounts of human beings to be the exclusive arbiters of truth and meaning in our world today. Against such pretensions, Scruton summons his considerable command of art, architecture, music, and literature to claim that our aesthetic and moral sensibilities suggest a transcendent realm not adequately explained by a scientific worldview. He also draws from personalist thought in order to claim that I-Thou relations between persons demonstrate “that the overreaching intentionality of interpersonal responses presents us with meanings that transcend the domain of any natural science” (175). Scruton’s volume culminates in many ways in his claim that our relationship with God is one such personal relation, and that it not something derived from philosophical argument. To Scruton, writers such as John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, and others “affirm that God is a subject, who can and must be loved. And this means that, if he exists, he is a person, marked by those features that are essential to personhood, such as self-knowledge, freedom, and the sense of right and wrong” (190). Ultimately, much hinges in this volume on the claim that persons are irreducible entities; they cannot be exhaustively explained by any series of preceding causes. As such, they will always escape any attempt (scientific or otherwise) to fully account for them.
Brendan Thomas Sammon, The God Who is Beauty: Beauty as a Divine Name in Thomas Aquinas and Dionysius the Areopagite (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013).
At the outset of The God Who is Beauty: Beauty as a Divine Name in Thomas Aquinas and Dionysius the Areopagite, Brendan Thomas Sammon observes that, despite the recent proliferation of studies of beauty in philosophical and theological circles, there has been a neglect of beauty as a divine name. Sammon holds that such an investigation will contribute to two distinct subfields within theological aesthetics. First, to those who, like Hans Urs von Balthasar and David Bentley Hart, are inclined to examine the metaphysical aspects of beauty, Sammon offers a view of the divine name as “a communication of God’s very self into the created order” (7). Second, to those who, like Richard Viladesau and Jeremy Begbie, explore the connection between theology and the arts, Sammon insists that his treatment of beauty as a divine name “enables a more complete portrait of the foundations upon which all arts situate themselves, and the ends to which all arts, consciously or unconsciously are striving” (7). The volume falls into three parts, the first of which treats of Greek philosophical views of beauty. The second part examines Pseudo-Dionysius, and the third his reception in the Latin West, most particularly in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Chapter 1 discusses beauty in Plato and Aristotle, and there Sammon makes the important observation that these figures reveal a key ambiguity in beauty: it is a “spiritual” phenomenon that is paradoxically intertwined with the material world. Chapter 2 insists that Neoplatonic figures such as Plotinus and Proclus only exaggerate the problem in their investigations into beauty, and Sammon concludes this section of the book with the claim that Greek philosophy as a whole is unable to surmount the challenge of uniting the spiritual and material. Turning to the second section, Chapter 3 offers the book’s first treatment of the divine names; here Sammon points to the importance of Dionysius’ use of biblical material, rather than philosophical discussions of the divine names provided by Proclus. Chapters 4 and 5 together examine Dionysius’ text The Divine Names, and Sammon argues that two dimensions of God’s beauty are conveyed in this text. First, beauty refers to God in God’s self, which Sammon reads as God’s “transcendental plenitude;” second, beauty refers to God in God’s self-disclosure, which Sammon reads as a “principle of determination.” These aspects of God’s beauty are then used in Chapter 6 to argue for the inadequacy of viewing the Dionysian God as a thinly disguised version of the Neoplatonic One. Instead, Dionysius’ God is thoroughly Christian. The third section begins with Chapter 7, which treats the journey of Dionysius’ writings from the late-patristic Greek East to the medieval Latin West. Along similar lines, Chapter 8 looks at the development of beauty as a divine name from the sixth to thirteenth centuries. In Chapter 9, Sammon describes the reading of Dionysius by Albert the Great, which leads into his treatment of Aquinas in Chapters 10, 11 and 12. These three chapters collectively claim that “beauty for Thomas is primarily a theological phenomenon deriving as it does from the Dionysian tradition of the divine names” (10). Readers will appreciate Sammon’s historically attuned and theologically astute treatment of a surprisingly neglected topic within theological aesthetics.