Sketch for a Christological Aesthetics

AiDAN Nichols, O.P. Sketch for a Christological Aesthetics Philosophy If we SET OUT TO SHOW someone that rationalism and detachment are not the be-all and end-all of the human response to the world—to being, to everything or anything there is—we should have to persuade him or her that there are some kinds of reality where only thefeeling mind—mind, heart—and emotions working in tandem, can offer an adequate cognitive response, can do justice as an act of knowing, to the reality that is there to be known.We would have to add that, in these cases, the more you are in sympathy with the object concerned—the more you place yourself, so to speak, on its side and immerse yourself in it—the better, not worse, you understand it.1 Were we asked to offer concrete examples , two such—another person, and a work ofart—are most likely to spring to mind. Nor are these examples unrelated. Any work of art is an intensely personal communication, even if the artist's name be unknown, as with most primitive, antique, and medieval Logos 1:1 1997 Sketch for a Christological Aesthetics art, and even ifhe makes himselfsimply the voice ofthat inter-personal thing we call a culture. Conversely, a person, like a work of art, is always a figure or a form to us. A person is never a mere shapeless huddle; rather are they, as the Greek for "person" (proso'pon ) implies, a certain face, certain gestures and expressions, a certain style of behavior—all of which convey interiority, the inner man, the soul.The body, asWittgenstein famously remarked, is the soul's best picture. We admire works of art, as we admire men, for their intelligence, wisdom , sincerity, depth of feeling, compassion and realism. It would be odd to acknowledge this, and yet to deny that there is a relation between moral and aesthetic judgment.2 And in each case, the person or the work of art, when we set out to make a genuine mental contact, we find ourselves having to lay aside any exclusive reliance on reason, on the intellectual procedures that normally constitute rationality, just as we must restrain our tendency to put a distance between ourselves and the object we are looking at. In the Rijksmuseum at Amsterdam is Rembrandt's canvas The Return ofthe Prodigal Son, his final statement on the themes of forgiveness and mercy. No quantitative analysis will grant insight into this work: it is no use asking how many grams the canvas weighs or how many centimeters long it is; nor will any other kind of rational procedure such as, for instance, examining how Rembrandt gains his effects ofperspective. It is not enough to enquire how the psychology of perception works in, or the sociology of patronage affects, the case of this painting if you really wish to find its deepest truth. Only by the simultaneous self-engagement ofheart,intellect , and feeling do we find the contours and colors opening to us the painting's world ofsignificance.A theme many times painted or etched by Rembrandt, the version at the Hermitage in St. 41 42 Logos Petersburg was dubbed by Kenneth Clark"the greatest picture ever painted".3 The profoundly evangelical (in the best sense) quality of Rembrandt's work is signalled not only by the perfect amalgam of divine and human whichhis Christ exhibits, but also by the fact that "he looks for those moments when love leads to forgiveness"— something closely relevant to this particular image, ofwhich Clark remarks: Putting aside superlatives, we may agree that the gesture with which the father puts his hands on his son's shoulders while his kneeling son presses his head to his father's heart, has an archetypal grandeur and pathos. And the way in which they are isolated from the spectators who watch them as ifthey were on a railway platform, from which die train has just departed, is one of those strokes of genius which take the words from our lips. This is not an obscure work; it springsfrom very deep sources, but affects us immediately.4 Through the artist's skill as a...