David Hart

Here are some more excerpts from David Bentley Hart’s remarkable Beauty of the Infinite .

“The Bible . . . depicts creation at once as a kind of deliberative invention (‘Let us make . . . ’) and, consequently, as a kind of play, a kind of artistry for the sake of artistry. This is expressed with exquisite delicacy by the figure of Wisdom in the book of Proverbs, at play like a small child before the eyes of God, as his delight in all his works; and expressed equally gracefully by the image of the stars singing and the angels rejoicing at creation in the book of Job.”

The “beauty of the Trinity, this orderliness of God’s perichoresis, is the very movement of delight, of the divine persons within one another, and so the analogy that lies between worldly and divine beauty is a kind of analogia delectationis.”

God’s pronouncement of creation as “good” was an aesthetic judgment, and “it is only with sin that the goodness of creation must be conceptually separated into solitary transcedental categories, and only with sin that creation is seen to posses a distinct ethical axis. One might almost say that the separate category of the moral is an intrusion upon the aesthetic joy that is the upwelling source of creaturely existence, as is a separate category of truth once the paradisal experience of divine love in the blameless beauty of creation is lost.”

Hamann, he says, “to a degree perhaps unparalleled in Christian thought” saw “the true knowledge of God in creation – the true analogy ?Elay in a childlike rapture before the concrete and poetic creativity of God, in the task of translating the language of that creativity, and in the rearticulation of that language in poetic invention.”