As I mentioned in my previous post, I am currently taking a class on aesthetics, which, for those of you not familiar, is the philosophy of beauty (more or less). As I also mentioned, I've never taken a course in this area before and it's raising some very interesting questions. For example:
The Bible says in Colossians 1:15 that Christ is the "image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature." Is an image necessarily inferior to the thing being represented? Or should we reject the ancient Greek notion of mimesis altogether and hold that images do not have to have implied referents? What does that mean for this verse?
Why does beauty transcend language? Dr. Kyle Grady says that at the same time that beauty compels us to speak it robs us of our words. Can we find a justification for this in Christian thought?
Is there such a thing as objective beauty? From whence would it be derived, and how could we know it? What does Christianity have to say about this?
I'll be responding to each of these questions in upcoming posts, but I want to begin with the last one, which in a way rather shows my hand in regards to my personal philosophy of beauty.
I believe that beauty is indeed objective, though it comes to us subjectively. Beauty is an attribute of God, and as all Divine attributes is eternal, absolute, and universal. God's other attributes (truth, goodness, justice, power, etc.) are all the source from which we draw our conceptions of these things in the world, and I think it is the same with beauty. Just as all of these other attributes have an absolute (and thus objective) reality or fulfillment in God, so absolute (and thus objective) beauty can also be found there.
We see reflections of this perfect beauty in the world, in varied and diverse places, all of which give us a glimpse of that true, perfect beauty beyond this world (forgive me for sounding Platonic), in God. So the different reflections of this attribute, each impacting us in different ways and to different degrees, are all facets of ultimate and objective beauty. So while it may seem that beauty is subjective on one level, of we "zoom out" and consider God, we can see that objective beauty exists because it finds its absolute in Him.
There's a reason this sounds Platonic--it's a page straight out of Plato. Christian thought developed, in large part, in Greek-speaking areas heavily (if not wholly) dependent on the works of Plato and Aristotle.
ReplyDeleteWhat you're describing is the particular (terrestrial/human) instantiation of a universal (divine/absolute). It's Greek philosophy couched in Christian language.
Pretty much, yes. Paul of course drew heavily on Greek thought, and read the Phaedrus specifically, even stealing the phrase "through a glass darkly." But the fact that the thought was originally Greek does not mean it cannot also be Christian. All truth is God's truth, as they say.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that the thought was originally Greek does, in a stict chronological sense, mean that it can't be Christian. The idea existing for more than 500 years before Christ was even born would seem to suggest that it is not distinctly or innately Christian.
ReplyDeleteWhat I meant to get at is that you aren't defending a conception of God. You are defending a conception of the absolute universal (what Plato called the Good). Since early Christian thinkers found it easier to adopt Greek though wholesale instead of creating their own thought, we can understand the confusion.
The way you've gotten around the whole problem is by equating the God of the Bible with this universal absolutely, in the sense of establishing an identity relationship between the two.
That's the path taken by most Christian apologists. It doesn't work particularly well, though. We end up with a dual role God (on top of the three Godheads that Christians invented to make up for some of their other logical inconsistancies). There's the one god of flowery rhetoric and abstract conversation that IS truth, beauty, power, machismo, or whatever other abstract concepts we'd like Him/Her/AlmightIt to personify, and the personal God of human interaction. This is the God that exists in place and time, interacting with out historical narrative.
You've placed me on much more familiar ground with this last post, so thank you.
ReplyDeleteYou say that because it was Greek it cannot be Christian, because you believe Christianity to be false. I say that it can be both, because I believe the truths of Christianity to be transcendent and the reality espoused within it to find resonance throughout history.
As to your second point, I don't know how familiar you are with Moreland and Craig, but they put forward a definition of God as a maximally excellent being, expanding on Anselm. This being embodies all great-making properties. That is similar to the conception of God presented here.
God, being the greatest possible Being, and also being a Person, has certain characteristics: justice, mercy, power, beauty, love, etc. As God exists eternally, and has always possessed these characteristics, they are just as eternal and absolute (since God is both their fountainhead and their embodiment) as He is. So your claim that I have equated the Biblical God with the universal absolute is not far from the truth, but not quite. God remains a Person, but also embodies and absolutizes (is that a word?) certain concepts.
What we mean when we say God is love, or any other "flowery rhetoric," as you call it, is that God is the source of that thing and that the thing cannot exist without Him, that He perfectly embodies the concept and that He is where the complete notion comes from. So God is at the same time a Person and the source of certain fundamental truths about concepts.
It is certainly not true that Christian thinkers adopted all of Greek thought. They assuredly rejected certain concepts of deity and philosophy (such as the purpose of life) as well as drawing on other sources such as the Jewish system. Not to mention the ideas they developed themselves.
I don't see where you get the fact that the Church developed the idea of the Trinity to hide logical inconsistencies--could you please say more about that? It's new to me.
I'm sorry that I left you with the impression that I reject Christ. I don't. The reason I said that a thought could not be distinctly Christian by virtue of being originally Greek was not a rejection of Christian thought--it was a simple recognition of chronology and the role of social interaction on the development of thought.
ReplyDeleteHere's the rub, as I see it: This isn't a case in which there are minor similarities between two philosophies developed in roughly the same area at roughly the same time. This is a case in which one group (early Christians) adopted a well-established conceptualization of God from another group (the Greeks).
Here I'd like to pause and note that I never said this kind of borrowing is unique to Christians or that it's a bad thing. Simply pointing out a case in which a specific idea was borrowed, quite obviously, from another way of thinking. This kind of borrowing, though, can lead to a schizophrenic view of God and lead to statements like:
"God remains a Person, but also embodies and absolutizes (is that a word?) certain concepts."
Do you see what I see? I see a seam right down the middle of the view of God expressed above. There's the personal God, and then there's the conceptual God. There's the God that you can speak to and there's the God you can never quite find the words to express. You have the Hebrew God and you have the Platonic universal.
The absolute of absolutes argument works just as well with or without God. The Greeks had the Form of the Good. The Christians made that form personal and called it God. There is nothing about the argument that depends on, or necessarily leads to, the existence of God.
Cue the, "A ha! That's the difference. Christians believe in a version of this belief that does depend on God."
Well, yes, but only by the addition of one simple step: The form of the Good is God.
Thanks for explaining. But I think something you may be missing is the self-revelation of God through Christ. God is indeed something that we can never fully understand or find words to express, something infinitely higher than we. But He has also stooped down to reveal parts of Himself to us through His Son, Jesus.
ReplyDeleteYou are completely right that we can never understand God--on our own. But if He Himself tells us about Him, we can begin to understand. This is especially true because God and humans are not completely alien to one another, but God made us in His image and gave us the capacity to have a relationship with Him.
Another point, this time in the form of an example, which may or may not apply: I am at the same time a person and a concept. I can have relationships and also represent certain ideas, such as "college student," "Christian," "son," etc.
The step we take past this is simply to say that because God is God, the concepts He represents are not simply done in part, as ours are, but are the source of the other concepts, because He exists eternally.