As I am reading von Balthasar's The Glory of the Lord, I thought it appropriate to discuss, in general terms, my own views on beauty. As von Balthasar begins his introduction, he discusses the issue of "aesthetics in theology" and "the beautiful" that should be familiar to anyone who understands classical (Thomistic) metaphysics - the vocabulary of form, or perfection, of the interrelationships among the transcendentals (the one, the true, the good and the beautiful). While I think there is some merit to what von Balthasar is doing, especially as regards the loss of an aesthetic sense in the Protestant Reformation and after, what I personally find frustrating is the persistence of an abstract discussion of "the beautiful" as a metaphysical category without reference to anything actually beautiful.
The image above, Michaelangelo's Pieta, is of my own personal favorite sculpture. There is something transcendent about it - something that surpasses the combination of form, emotive quality, and technical excellence that are evident in this piece.
This painting, by Jackson Pollock, is also among my favorite pieces of art. There is, just as in the Pieta, a transcendent quality to all of Pollock's work, surpassing all the individual qualities that make this work a masterpiece of technical brilliance. I do believe that von Balthasar would be troubled by my inclusion of Pollock as an example of beauty, for in the abstract expressionism here we have the attempt to represent not form, but if we are to continue our use of Thomistic categories, but rather "matter". By raising a quality to the level of something to be represented, we have, in classical parlance, made a category error. There is nothing of beauty about the accidental qualities that come and go; only in form as it pertains to that which does not change is worthy of being called beautiful.Of course, I am fairly early in a dense work, the center of which isn't a discussion of "worldly aesthetics" at all, but rather a theological aesthetics in which the entire issue is the contemplation of the beautiful as we apprehend it in the Divine. In other words, the work is an examination of Christian interiority - prayer, the mystical and contemplative life, the eschatological promise of a New Heaven and New Earth - with "the beautiful" elevated from any reference to actual beauty to a hermeneutical principle. This is all well and good. Without any anchor in what an individual, or individuals, or even societies, view as "beautiful" we are bereft of any reference that might make such an abstract discussion meaningful.
