Theological Aesthetics

...That desire to conjoin the visible and invisible, shared by artists and believers, provides a foundation for their renewed and vitalizing alliance...

...This is a crude outline of Viladesau's subtle though sometimes abstruse arguments...

...This is false populism...

...In an effort to bridge the impoverishing divide between contemporary artists and the church, the pope's letter provides a compressed though comprehensible overview of the church's historical collaboration with artists, and her theological understanding of beauty...

...Similarly unpersuasive is Viladesau's presentation of the Crucifixion as a counter to the seductions of beauty...

...Nevertheless, I found Viladesau's assertion of the theological importance of the aesthetic bracingly intelligent, though I disagreed with his diagnosis of the dangers posed by the imagination and his advocacy for a "hermeneutic of suspicion" toward art...

...3) The analogical imagination is a genuine form of rationality, and an essential means of understanding God...

...2) Anthropologically speaking, human beings are hardwired to know—to receive God's revelation—through the senses...

...Its principal audience is fellow theologians who are familiar with terms which interested lay readers will have to discover with the aid of a good philosophical dictionary...

...Please God, may his churches become such places for those who, even though they may not be aware of doing so, still come to church to find what the bitter world never gives them in its houses, its factories, and its barracks...

...But a peek inside your local anorexic church reveals that even asceticism can be vulgarized...

...the arts) plays in our understanding of God...

...Theological Aesthetics is a work of fundamental theology, which is to say that Viladesau is primarily interested in the sources and warrants for the church's understanding of beauty...

...Commonweal 24 September 24,1999...

...An extensive exposition of that theology can be found in Fordham professor Richard Viladesau's Theological Aesthetics: God in Imagination, Beauty, and Art...

...What the French Dominican priest M. A. Couturier wrote in 1951 obtains more than ever in today's image- and commodity-saturated culture...

...Viladesau studies what role aesthetics (knowledge that comes from sensation, imagination, and feeling...

...She needs art not so much to illustrate her teachings, but because great art draws us closer to God "by making perceptible...the world of the spirit, of the invisible, of God...

...In his view, the dangers are twofold: idolatry (which occurs when "the analogical becomes mythological," or when "the human imagination substitutes for God's self-revelation"), and distraction ("when the aesthetic function of pleasing takes precedence over the theological function of mediating higher realities or values...

...First, the term "beauty" is too slippery at the book's end, suddenly signifying a scandalous surfeit and materiality which affronts the social mission of the church...

...His work demonstrates that the role is extensive, rich, and, in part, problematic...

...the idea of the beautiful...

...The implied duality between poverty and beauty rings false, and has historically damaged the modern church both in its expression and in its service to the poor...

...Viladesau argues that because kitsch is religiously helpful for large numbers of the faithful, we should consider it merely as an instance of the "highly subjective component in both aesthetic and religious reactions...

...In the words of William Lynch, Jesuit theorist of the Christian imagination: "The Christian faith should never think of itself as a conceptual bundle of ideas which must beg imaginative support from literature and art...

...Darla Donnelly__________ Hope John Paul II's recent "Letter to Artists" (April 1999) proffers an urgent invitation: "The church needs art...

...Through art, be it sacred or secular, we can make a Platonic ascent to God, who is the "condition of possibility" for our appreciation of beauty...

...There will, hopefully, never be an end to collaboration between theology and literature, but it must be a collaboration of (theological) imagination with (literary) imagination...

...1) Beauty, like goodness and truth, is a transcendental, a property that necessarily accompanies being and is found with every being...

...Daria Donnelly, Commonweal's children's book critic, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts...

...the current musical triumphs of "the holy minimalists" Arvo Part, John Tavener, and Henryk Gorecki...

...Less necessarily, Viladesau undervalues syntax as the means of modulating thought, so that he is hard to follow despite abundant section headings and argument summaries...

...Commonweal 22 September 24, 2999 Despite an appreciation for the truth located within these anxieties, I found myself resisting them on several grounds...

...This faith is also a life of the imagination—historical, concrete, and ironic...

...Viladesau gives only three paragraphs to the great problem of contemporary sacred art: the comfortable mediocrity which is abetted by the aesthetic timidity and ignorance of those making decisions about church decoration and liturgy...

...Thus, beauty is an avenue for the desire and longing which passes back and forth between us and God...

...His advocacy for the latter is understandable, especially given the excesses of our culture and the successes of minimalist sacred art: for example, the Mark Rothko Chapel...

...Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross...

...Add to this: nor its televisions, its superstores, its information superhighway...

...Drawing on Catholic theologians from the fathers of the church to Karl Rahner and David Tracy, and also Protestant theologians Karl Barth and Gerardus Van der Leeuw, Viladesau makes a series of interrelated arguments and affirmations...

...The cross from which Christ lifts the world to himself might lead an artist as much to extravagance as to asceticism...

...Accused of temerity for his role in what are now understood as among the most significant collaborations between (largely nonbelieving) artists and the church in the twentieth century (Matisse's chapel at Vence, the church decoration of Assy by Leger, Rouault, Matisse, Picasso, and Braque), Commonweal 23 September 24,1999 Couturier responded: "In an age when everyone can read, the primary role of sacred art can no longer be (if indeed it ever was) to instruct...

...The church today urgently needs bold artists, artists (whether believers or not) who are reckless in their pursuit of artistic purity and perfection...

...On the contrary, if the same age is precisely the time when the most confining, most crushing servitude weighs upon working people, would not the primary role of art be to create places of enchantment, poetry, deliverance...

...Readers are forewarned that Theological Aesthetics is difficult...