quare id faciam?

An excerpt

From David Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite, mid-way into the introduction:

[B]eauty is a category indispensable to Christian thought; all that theology says of the triune life of God, the gratuity of creation, the incarnation of the Word, and the salvation of the world makes room for – indeed depends upon – a thought, and a narrative, of the beautiful. Hans Urs von Balthasar claims there is a "Christian principle" made manifest in Christ – inseparable from the divine "content" of his identity – which, uniquely, does not oppose form to the infinite; "This," he writes, "makes the Christian principle the superabundant and unsurpassable principle of every aesthetics; Christianity becomes the aesthetic religion par excellence." One might add that to grasp the aesthetic character of Christian thought is also to understand the irreducible historicality of the content of Christian faith: the kerygma that Christ enjoins his disciples to preach is not some timeless wisdom, an ethical or spiritual creed fortified by the edifying example of its propagator, a Wesen des Christentums, but a particular story, a particular Jew, a particular form.

(I've had Beauty of the Infinite in the active pile since sometime late last year; but only managing to get to it very slowly, here & there. It calls for some removal from distraction, which isn't come by as often as I'd wish these days.)

posted by paul bowman @ 1:11 PM