Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

How should one speak of the beautiful? Although the beautiful appears obvious when experienced, trying to describe the experience reveals the task to be one of the most difficult ever attempted. Why is it so difficult? Theologians have a ready answer. There is an intrinsic relationship between beauty and the divine. Early in the history of the Christian church, theologians proposed that Beauty is another name for God. In doing so, theologians made an implicit distinction between beauty and the beautiful. While Beauty is another name for God, the beautiful is the human experience of divine beauty. To speak of the beautiful, then, means not only to speak of the divine, but also to speak of the spiritual nature of our humanity. This spiritual nature has two related dimensions. If beauty is divine, then its human experience has a spiritual basis not only in the human ability to experience God, but also in the human ability to create works that are themselves beautiful. In other words, the spiritual dimension in an aesthetics lies in the intrinsic human ability to experience divine beauty as well as the unmistakable human activity of making beautiful works. The history of the theology and spirituality of beauty could begin with the first cave paintings of the first men and women, but it is more instructive to begin with the Greeks. The Greeks were one of the first to detect an intrinsic ... log in or subscribe to read full text