Sunday 26 February 2006

God is beautiful

“The most elementary statement of theological aesthetics is that God is beautiful: not only that God is beauty or the essence and archetype of beauty, nor even only that God is the highest beauty, but that ... God is beauty and also beautiful, whose radiance shines upon and is reflected in his creatures.... God’s beauty is delight and the object of delight, the shared gaze of love that belongs to the persons of the Trinity.... True beauty is not the idea of the beautiful, a static archetype in the ‘mind’ of God, but is an infinite ‘music,’ drama, art, completed in—but never ‘bounded’ by—the termless dynamism of the Trinity’s life.”

—David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 177.

3 Comments:

Cynthia R. Nielsen said...

Great quote, Ben. I keep hearing great things about Hart's book and now I have to add it to my Amazon wishlist!

Cynthia

Ben Myers said...

Yes, the book is really an astonishing achievement -- one of the best works of theology to have come from North American in the past couple of decades.

Anonymous said...

I can't read Hart without stopping every few minutes to marvel at his writing. He's a bit over the top sometimes, but more often his prose is simply beautiful--appropriate for that book. I haven't gotten to read through the whole thing, but a few of the chapters spawned a piece on beauty and prayer I did for a class a couple months ago.

Have you seen/read his The Doors of the Sea? It's a quick read, but also a marvelous work on theodicy.

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