Alejandro García-Rivera: A Legacy in Theological Aesthetics

In this article I will consider the contributions of the aesthetics of Alejandro García-Rivera in the field of Systematic Theology. It is difficult, if not impossible, as García-Rivera’s former student, to disassociate the personal from the academic. But personal testimony is also a form of speaking the truth. García-Rivera’s theological aesthetics had a profound influence on my intellectual development. If it were not for him, I never would have read Hans Urs von Balthasar, and it was from a seemingly casual suggestion by him that I discovered, and fell in love with, the writings of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Along with Nancy Pineda-Madrid, we worked closely with him as he was writing The Community of the Beautiful (1999), and I can honestly say the many hours we spent with him discussing this text are one of my fondest memories as a student and academic. My essay focuses primarily on García-Rivera’s first two books, St. Martín de Porres and the Semiotics of Culture (1995) and The Community of the Beautiful.¹

In defining theological aesthetics, García-Rivera states, early in The Community of the Beautiful, that a foundational question for this field is, “What moves the human heart?”² This simple question that is so profound, transforms the manner in which we approach theology. Prior to its publication, academic theology, and in particular theology in the Americas that engages racial/ethnic minority communities, had distanced itself from the affective, instead reducing theology to either discourse as a socio-scientific rational model that has little to do with the human experience of, and response to the sacred, or to ethical actions. Theological aesthetics reminds us that this attention to Beauty is the most authentic manner in which to speak of the Mystery of the Sacred in regards to human encounter. In evoking Beauty, García-Rivera introduces the categories of love, awe, and desire into our theological language. Beauty is inherently attractive, meaning that it draws contemplators out of themselves and into a direct encounter with the phenomenon manifesting itself, and this Beauty, the contemplator knows, testifies to itself in a way that the other transcendentals of the True and the Good cannot. Latino theologian Roberto S. Goizueta sees this role of aesthetics as integral and organic to Latina/o theology: “If Tridentine Western theology stressed the fact that God is known in the form of the True (Doctrine), and liberation theology [the fact] that God is known in the form of the Good (Justice), U.S. Hispanic theology stresses the fact that God is known in the form of the Beautiful.”³ For too long revelation has been understood as truth (to be known) or good (to be chosen).

As defined by García-Rivera, “Theological aesthetics recognizes in the experience of the truly beautiful a religious dimension.”⁴ In other words, theological aesthetics contends that Beauty is a result of divine initiative: Beauty not only exists, the human receives it. “Theological aesthetics attempts to make clear once again the connection between Beauty and the beautiful, between Beauty’s divine origins and its appropriation by the human heart.”⁵ Drawing from the work of von Balthasar, García-Rivera notes that in addressing both the objective and subjective dimensions of Beauty and its reception, theological aesthetics attempts to address modern suspicions surrounding the experience of Beauty.⁶ Situated as the first part of von Balthasar’s enormous trilogy, his aesthetics seeks to recover the aesthetic form of theology. The trilogy itself is based on the three transcendentals of being: the Beautiful (Herrlichkeit), the Good (Theodramatik), and the True (Theologik). The order of the trilogy is not arbitrary. The manifestation, or theophany, of the aesthetics leads to the encounter of the dramatics. As von Balthasar writes, “God does not want to be just ‘contemplated’ and ‘perceived’ by us, like a solitary actor by his public; no, from the beginning he has provided for a play in which we all must share.”⁷ The theo-drama, in turn, is followed by...