Divine Beauty: The Aesthetics of Charles Hartshorne

Chapter 1: Historic and Thematic Background

3 CHAPTER ONE Historic and Thematic Background f WHEREAS THE INTRODUCTION LAID OUT in a preliminary way the concept of God that will be assumed throughout the book, the present chapter will sketch the historic and thematic background to Hartshorne ’s aesthetics, concentrating on the background provided by Whitehead’s aesthetics as detailed by Sherburne, as an understanding of Hartshorne’s view is best facilitated via a consideration of where he agrees or disagrees with Whitehead (as well as with John Cobb, David Ray Griffin, Judith Jones, and other process thinkers). But I will also situate Hartshorne’s aesthetics vis-à-vis various scholars who have concentrated on the relationship between aesthetics and thought about God in particular, as well as some of the major twentieth-century aestheticians in general who dominated the field in the mid-decades of the twentieth century, when Hartshorne did most of his work, such as Croce, Collingwood, Santayana, Vivas, and Ducasse; in later chapters I will consider the relationship between Hartshorne’s aesthetics and the theories of Dewey, Langer, and others. Throughout the book I will treat those early-, mid-, and late-twentieth-century authors who most influenced Hartshorne’s aesthetics or who were most influenced by it. By the end of the present chapter’s treatment of the historic and thematic background to Hartshorne’s aesthetics, I will be ready in the following chapter to start a careful examination of Hartshorne’s own texts. The relationship between aesthetics and philosophical/theological thought about God has a rich history in the West. In the ancient world, for example, Plato clearly linked his aesthetics with religious concerns; beauty itself was in some way connected to divinity.1 And medieval thinkers like Saints Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure had DombrowskiFinalPgs. 13 2/2/04 5:34:13 PM 4 Divine Beauty a developed philosophy of beauty that was closely connected to their classical theistic metaphysics of being.2 Two twentieth-century studies of the connection between aesthetics and God are already classics: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics and Gerardus van der Leeuw’s Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art.3 In recent decades the topic has continued to elicit interest among scholars, as evidenced in the works of Jeremy Begbie, Frank Burch Brown, J. Daniel Brown, Garrett Green, Richard Harries, F. David Martin, John Navone, Aidan Nichols, Patrick Sherry, Richard Viladesau, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and others.4 Despite the merits of the work of these talented scholars, there is still something lacking in their treatments of the subject matter in question. Although I will not detail the work of all of these scholars, I will say a few words about Wolterstorff’s and Viladesau’s approaches so as to briefly indicate the need for a careful study of Hartshorne’s approach. Wolterstorff, an analytic philosopher who is also a contemporary Calvinist, defends a classical theistic view of God that yields not only the most troublesome version of the theodicy problem (as Hume noted, an omnipotent God could eliminate evil, a God who is omniscient with respect to the future would know how to eliminate evil, etc.), but it also yields a predestined universe that produces the aesthetic disvalue of monotony, as we will see in the following chapter. That is, there is an aesthetic price to pay when the concept of future contingency refers merely to our ignorance of what is already “in the cards” in the divine mind. Although Viladesau does not, like Wolterstorff, reject (or, for the most part, ignore) the neoclassical view of God, he gives little indication of how we should assess neoclassical theism’s implications for aesthetics. In fairness to Viladesau it should be noted that part of his thorough, scholarly approach to the relationship between aesthetics and thought about God involves the acknowledgment that for Whitehead (especially in Religion in the Making)5 the foundation of the world is in aesthetic rather than cognitive experience, as in Kant. If theology is ultimately aesthetic rather than cognitive, Viladesau notes, the traditional problem of the inconceivability of God becomes less of an issue. (We will see that even if it is true to say, as Viladesau does, that DombrowskiFinalPgs. 14 2/2/04 5:34:14 PM Historic and Thematic Background 5 the foundation of metaphysics/theology lies in aesthetic experience, for Hartshorne it is also true to say...