Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others

Chapter 21: Between Swooners and Cynics

21 Between Swooners and Cynics The Art of Envisioning God The semiotic possibilities of the Hebrew of Genesis 1:31, ‘‘Viyar Elohim et kol asher asa vehinei tov meod [God saw everything that he had made and indeed it was very good],’’ include cognitive, moral, and aesthetic dimensions. Some traditional interpretations see the text as asserting that the world is well-wrought, that nature’s means, cunningly adapted to its ends, are indications of divine purposiveness , and that obedience to divine ordinances is a manifestation of human goodness. Other accounts focus upon the created order as a vast spectacle that attests nature’s power to arouse awe and rapture, a perspective reflected in the Romantic coupling of art and nature. Thus F. W. J. Schelling, in a lecture of 1804, declares: ‘‘The universe is formed in God as an absolute work of art and in eternal beauty . . . beauty in which infinite intention interpenetrates infinite necessity.’’1 Does the Romantic rapture of this Schellingian pronouncement not wend its way into postmodernity in the gaze of the tourist who inwardly cordons off the admiring hordes to proclaim the beauty of that primordial beginning as rendered by Michelangelo or Giovanni di Paolo? Is there a connection between God envisaged as creator and the ascription of beauty? Is the link understood as one of direct agency? These questions presuppose a way of seeing hidden in our manner of questioning, in our comportments toward what is viewed as beautiful. Thus the wide-eyed ecstatic, whom I shall hereafter refer to as the ‘‘swooner,’’ asks, ‘‘Ah, what is beauty really,’’ while the 331 doubting protester, whom, in conformity with an ancient philosophical tradition, I shall call the ‘‘cynic,’’ inquires disparagingly, ‘‘What is beauty anyway?’’ I shall not try to determine why some things rather than others may be called beautiful or to weigh received accounts of beauty. Instead , I shall focus on the world orientations or dispositions of the questioner, the ‘‘Ah’’ of the swooner and the ‘‘anyway’’ of the cynic, as each encounters the referent of the term beauty. By tracking the philosophical matrices from which these perspectives derive, I hope to show that swooners and cynics cannot do without one another if the extremes of naı̈veté and nihilism are to be avoided and that each must be taken into account in speaking about God. I shall consider how the disruption of the cynic erupts into the beautiful, disfigures it, but in so doing helps to transfigure it, and I shall conclude by describing some ways in which theological thinking is bound up with both. Swooning and the Sublime It might be thought that swooning before the artwork or the phenomena of nature can be traced to thaūmazein, the Greek term for wonder or amazement referred to in the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. But the view that swooning is allied to wonder is, in part, the result of an often-unacknowledged redescription of the Greek thaūmazein in a nineteenth-century Romantic aesthetic. Considered to be a devaluing of the world and a plunging into an inner world, the Romantic aesthetic, as depicted by its adversaries, is the very opposite of the serenity of the ancients. Thus, Schelling discerns in the aesthetics of his contemporaries characteristics the ancients had censured : ‘‘audacious fire, and violent, shrieking, fleeting antitheses.’’ Or, as Johann Joachim Winckelmann declares: ‘‘One finds oneself as if at a party where everyone wants to talk at once.’’2 It goes without saying that accounts of beauty abound in Plato, Aristotle, and their immediate successors. But, as Schelling had already noticed, the claim that for classical thought the beholder dissolves into ecstasy before that which is beautiful must be dismantled. Accordingly, the notion that swooning began in Athens requires revision . To be sure, Plato describes an eager young man, Theatetus in the dialogue of that name, as ‘‘astonished.’’ It is not, however, beauty but ‘‘the ridiculous and wonderful contradictions’’ of ordinary speech that became grist for the mill of the Sophists that are the sources of 332 The Art in Ethics his astonishment. Theatetus exclaims, ‘‘I am amazed . . . my head quite swims with the contemplation’’ of their questions. For Socrates, the young man’s amazement proves that he is a true philosopher and leads Socrates to announce: ‘‘For wonder [thaūmazein] is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.’’3 Lest we...