LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

is ultimate—for the inexhaustible ground of being and meaningful existence, which traditionally is called God. Theologians influenced by Heidegger and Gadamer likewise look to art and poetry as a special unveiling (and mysterious concealing) of otherwise inarticulate truth. Alternatively, they may view art as potentially sacramental in its sensuous embodiment of what transcends intellectual sense.

      More recently, theologians of art have come to see that some art is much more ironic or genuinely playful than is suggested by talk of ultimate concern, revelation, and truth. Moreover, even in the creation and experience of art at its most serious level, it seems possible that selves and communities are typically rather fragmented and unstable, characterized as much by penultimate concerns as by a concern for what is ultimate. Particularly when theologians are attentive to deconstructionist ideas, they may suspect that art can be errant and incoherent in ways far more subtle and pervasive than thinkers since the time of Plato have recognized (or feared). Do beauty and unity really encompass the goals and effects of art? Is the self really capable of integrity? Is religion? In raising such questions, theological aesthetics has begun to take more extensive account of formal fragmentation and expressive negation in both art and religion. For some theologians this also means taking seriously the possibility of a tragic or at least tragicomic theology for which redemption is literally incomprehensible (though perhaps still affirmable).

      There is, in any event, a growing theological recognition that aesthetic experience and insight—whether positive or negative—cannot fully be absorbed or contained in the medium of theological concepts. That is to say, the meaning and insight embodied in (or evoked by) artistic expressions and representations are never entirely separable from the style and medium of expression. Art does not merely mirror. It reconfigures and reconstructs in ways not strictly replicated by other modes of making and meaning.

      Yet as theologians have realized more and more, the language of art (in the broadest sense) is native to religion and so requires theological attention. Christian ideas and practices are unavoidably rooted in aesthetically rich forms: myth, metaphor, parable, song, ritual, image, edifice. With regard to scriptures, moreover, it is now clearer than ever that literary strategies are intrinsic to the biblical texts and their religious import.

      Biblical scholars today thus join forces with scholars of religion and literature, who for some decades have argued that religious reflection depends on the artistic cultivation of language and imagination, just as literary art in turn taps religious experience and thought. Meanwhile, scholars in related areas have taken pains to demonstrate the religious involvements of such arts as drama, dance, music, painting, architecture, and film.

      Because many such inquiries have dealt with modern culture, they have been able to show that in our own time religious questions and affirmations continue to be interwoven in, and reinterpreted by, the work of artists: from Stravinsky and Messiaen to Philip Glass and Arvo Pärt; from Kandinsky and Mondrian to Barnett Newman and Anselm Kiefer; from T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden to Walker Percy and Alice Walker. Furthermore, several interpreters of art and religion have analyzed popular film and television, detecting a resurgence and reshaping of religious themes, whether in horror movies, science fiction, or more realistic genres. Thus on many levels one observes the continuing interanimation of art and religion, or aesthetics and theology.

      What all of this suggests is not, of course, that everything aesthetic is especially religious or that everything religious is especially aesthetic. It suggests, rather, that religion lives and thrives partly by means of aesthetic forms and that any reflection on Christian belief and practice in particular must therefore take aesthetic media into consideration. Such is the testimony, certainly, of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s multivolume work The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, and it is a basic assumption of most theologians now engaged in aesthetics.

      It may be that aesthetics as a theological enterprise has just begun to come into its own. It seems probable that theologians will increasingly care about the constructive and subversive powers of artistry, about popular arts as well as elite, about styles of life and thought as well as styles of art, about the role of “tastes” in the formation and evaluation of religious identities and differences, and about the aesthetic values of the natural world as well as those of human culture. Finally, with the renewal of studies in spirituality, theology is likely to ponder anew the ways in which aesthetic disciplines and sensitivities contribute to spiritual life and an awareness of God.

       FRANK BURCH BROWN

      Bibliography

      Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics.

      Jeremy Begbie, Voicing Creation’s Praise: Towards a Theology of the Arts.

      Frank Burch Brown, Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life.

      John de Gruchy, Christianity, Art, and Transformation: Theological Aesthetics in the Struggle for Justice.

      Richard Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics: God in Imagination, Beauty, and Art.

      Cross-Reference: Comedy, Culture, Deconstructionism, Hermeneutics, Imagination, Religious Language, Ritual, Spirituality, Tragedy, Transcendence.

      AFTERLIFE (See ETERNAL LIFE.)

      AGNOSTICISM

      Agnosticism is the intellectual disinclination to assert or deny truth claims without compelling evidence. More narrowly defined, it is the disinclination to assert or deny statements regarding the existence and nature of God. The adoption of agnosticism as a general intellectual orientation is motivated by the conviction that there is insufficient evidence for steadfast cognitive commitments. Like philosophical skepticism, agnosticism is less a doctrine than a refusal to be doctrinaire. As regards the existence of God, agnosticism is the position that shuns both the theistic claim that God exists and the atheistic claim that there is no God.

      The word “agnosticism” was coined in 1869 by the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley. A staunch defender of Darwinism, Huxley made agnosticism central to his conception of scientific rationality. In an 1889 essay, “Agnosticism and Christianity,” he wrote: “It is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what agnosticism asserts and, in my opinion, is all that is essential to agnosticism.” Clearly Huxley’s conception of agnosticism was of the broader sort, because he identified it closely with a general prescription governing rational beliefs; this maxim is now commonly called “the evidentialist principle” and is associated especially with the empiricist philosophy of John Locke. Huxley inferred from his prescription that belief in God’s existence is not rationally assertible. Another Darwinian, Herbert Spencer, expressly associated agnosticism with the unknowability of basic facts about God.

      The Greek root of “agnosticism” may mean either “unknown” or “unknowable.” Similarly, an agnostic may admit to lacking knowledge about God because he or she has, in fact, failed to secure such knowledge or because he or she is convinced that, in principle, this sort of knowledge is not attainable by even the most persistent and proficient human inquirer. Protagoras and David Hume were philosophers who exemplified a sort of ironic humility toward theological matters, while Plato and Immanuel Kant confessed to a principled science about God’s nature and existence. Kant argued that belief in God arises as a postulate of practical reason rather than from a proof of theoretical reason. The wide influence of his view made agnosticism an ironic and polite form of atheism that led some philosophers to accentuate the immanent character of God and prompted some theologians to acknowledge the confessional character of faith.

      Broader social forces also have effected the diminished prominence of agnosticism as a category for describing basic beliefs about the world. Secularism, as the social legitimation of nonreligious values and behaviors, makes unqualified atheism less shocking, while at the same time making systematic indifference to religion more feasible. Also, historicism, as the acknowledgment that one’s beliefs are historically conditioned—often in unconscious

Скачать книгу