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Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 9.4 (2006) 33-55



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Cruciform Beauty

Revising the Form in Balthasar's Christological Aesthetic

Cruciform Beauty: Posing the Problem

Toward the end of his article titled "Is Truth Ugly? Moralism and the Convertibility of Being and Love," David Schindler arrives at the lapidary conclusion for which he has meticulously prepared: "Thus, in a word, truth and goodness are not ugly, finally, because being is love and love is being, and this is beautiful!"1 To these pithy, chiseled words, however, Schindler appends a rather copious footnote, one that warrants full citation, providing as it does the point of departure for the current enterprise:

There is of course an enormous issue implied here that is nevertheless not formally treated in the present article; that which arises when we note that the love revealed in Jesus Christ includes the crucifixion. The question, in other words, concerns the sense in which being might be said meaningfully—however paradoxically—to "include" a love that is cruciform, and hence the sense, further, in which this cruciform love might be said—however paradoxically—to be beautiful. Can a love that is Christological, finally, be aesthetic? Needless to say, this central issue requires extensive treatment, which [End Page 33] nonetheless must await another occasion. For now it must suffice to say that what must be shown is how the love consisting originally in self-gift ("first kenosis," as it were) is already "open" to the self-gift which, in the face of sin, takes on the "form" (formlessness) of crucifixion ("second kenosis")—a "form" (formlessness) which thereby, and just so far, shares in the beauty proper to the original self-gift.2

The bulk of Schindler's paper is forthrightly devoted to a contemporary reworking of the classical (Thomistic) account of the transcendentals, especially as mapped onto a philosophical-theological articulation of the trinitarian processions. In service of the thesis at hand, Schindler's preferred categories are those of the immanent, rather than of the economic Trinity. The hypostatic union and Christology in general predictably receive less focused attention. It may not be unduly harsh, therefore, to point out that the provisional solution Schindler offers here to his own question is evidently circular, or at least dogmatic: cruciform love, as ultimate kenotic self-gift, must be beautiful, since this sacrificial love is nothing else than the consummate redemptive expression of the total self-giving of God in the Incarnation—the beauty of which "original" divine self-gift Schindler has already established.3 Schindler does not even begin to envision how the Christological—specifically cruciform—aesthetic turns all aesthetic thought and its metaphysical correlates inside out. Yet this question surely constitutes the neuralgic problem at the heart of any genuine, consistent Christian theological aesthetics. How is the Crucifixion beautiful, if indeed it is? To formulate the problem differently, how is the Crucifixion not merely hideous? Is the ugly somehow mysteriously compatible with the beautiful at this one peculiar locus of human and salvation history? Does such a compatibility, if it is discovered to exist here, extend to any other loci—artistic, theological, anthropological, historical? It is the aim of the current article to begin to explore this constellation of questions, drawing particularly on Hans Urs von Balthasar's profound [End Page 34] insights into the vast realm of "theological aesthetics," a realm he himself did so much to define.

As a provocative background to our inquiry, let us imagine a kind of triptych, whose panels display three modern poetic-artistic visions, those of Fyodor Dostoevsky on one side and William Congdon on the other, and between them a key instance of Flannery O'Connor's Southern Catholic grotesque. The specific "moments" proposed here for reflection are each explicitly Christological; each in fact pertains directly to Christ's passion and death. Each, moreover, engages the question of the Christological aesthetic in quite different terms than the other two. Let us briefly examine each panel in turn.

1. Hans Holbein's Deposition in...

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