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Welcome to our feature interview for Insights, the faculty journal of Austin Seminary. I am William Greenway, editor of Insights and Professor of Philosophical Theology here at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. The author of our lead essay for the spring 2021 issue of Insights is Dr. David White,

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the C. Ellis and Nancy Gribble Nelson Professor of Christian Education and Professor of Methodist Studies here at Austin Seminary. Professor White earned his PhD in Religious Education at Claremont School of Theology, where he wrote a dissertation on reclaiming the prophetic voice of youth. He is an internationally respected authority on youth spiritual education and is author of

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Practicing Discernment with Youth and Dream Care: A Theology of Youth Spirit and Vocation, and co-author of Awakening Youth Discipleship in a Consumer Culture. Most recently, he is the editor of Joy: A Guide for Youth Ministry. Professor White has received significant grants in support of his work, including a $1.2 million grant from the Lilly Endowment to create a project on youth discipleship, a Wabash grant on teaching diversity, and closest to today's topic of beauty and spirituality, a Templeton Foundation grant exploring spoken word poetry and joy among youth. Professor White is an ordained Methodist minister and, for many years early in his career, worked in numerous churches as youth pastor, associate pastor, and as a conference coordinator for youth ministries.

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He remains focused upon the spiritual needs of youth, but in recent years his research has also focused upon the relationship of beauty to Christian ministry and spirituality, which is the topic of his next book and the title of the essay we will be discussing today, tending the fire that burns at the center of the world. Now, let me note that an abbreviated written version of this discussion will appear in this, the spring 2021 issue of Insights. Let me also say that we will pause briefly in the middle of our discussion for those who may want to divide this interview into two parts for use in group discussion.

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The title of Professor White's essay, I'll say it again, which we will discuss now, is Tending the Fire That Burns the Center of the World, Beauty and the Church's Ministry. Welcome, Professor White. We are looking forward to hearing your insights on beauty, spirituality, and ministry. Thank you, Bill.

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It's good to be here. Now, first, Your essay starts out with a beautiful remembrance of the joy you took growing up in Mississippi, watching and playing baseball. So I have to ask, do you still love and are you still playing baseball?

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What position did you play? Are you still a Yankees fan? And how is being a Yankees fan even allowed in Mississippi? first let me say that in my age, my body type allows me to be more of a coach than a player.

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I sort of peaked at age 14 athletically, but I do enjoy baseball. I enjoy watching baseball and really get jazzed right around College World Series time. That's kind of really my, you know, what I enjoy. I think, so in terms of why one would be a Yankees fan in Mississippi, it's important to remember that at that point, when I was a kid, there were no professional teams in the South.

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The Atlanta Braves didn't start until the late 70s, I mean, the late 60s, you know, and Houston, of course, the Astros were around. But I think this was also coincided with a time when I first began to read books about, the Yankees, Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle and, even further back, Lou Gehrig and some of those guys were sort of pop culture heroes of the time. So that was my entry point into the lore of the Yankees.

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Okay, maybe I should say in terms of turnabout being fair play, I grew up near Buffalo in New York, but when I was growing up, the Bills, those were the days when the Bills never reached the playoffs. So come playoff time, I was like, it was back then it was America's team. I was a Dallas Cowboys fan. So there's a good, there's some give and take.

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Yeah. Anyway, so what inspired you to turn and focus upon beauty? Was there some moment of recognition or an event? that led you to pursue this research focus?

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So, when I was young, I was very, introverted, shy, and you might say that the spoken word was not my first language. I I drew, painted, tried to play music as a way of expressing myself. So it was really sort of a natural response to trying to be seen and heard and known in the world and as a way of engaging the world.

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But I mean, I would also say the deeper I got into art and music, the more I began to recognize that there's something here that is not merely superficial, it's not merely the resonant frequencies of strings vibrating, but there's some depth here, you know, that some inarticulable depth here that gives kind of text, that has meaning. I remember I had a guitar teacher at one point, I've had many through the years, but I had a guitar teacher at one point who who had, I don't know if you'd say afflicted with, but had this condition that he called synesthesia, where he could play a chord or a tone on the guitar.

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And in his mind's eye, he could see color. And I remember probing him and he said that, that music for him had, crossed boundaries, crossed modes. And so it had this kind of depth and texture that it occurred to me that, that it had meaning.

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It was not just, again, something about resonant frequencies or flight of the imagination, but there was something about I mean, I guess along with Karl Barth, I began to sense that there's something here, that embraces larger sense of meaning. So, and how to talk about it, of course, is still very difficult and challenging, but that's, those are some of the experiences that I originally, that originally sort of drew me to wondering about beauty and aesthetics was just a sense that beauty crossed modes and could speak of something that was deep and articulate and mysterious.

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Yes. And that makes the connection. So you've had, it's funny, but that's the connection. It had an incredibility now, but you do youth ministry when you look to what was beautiful and inspiring and in a sense, spiritually significant to you as a youth.

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It was the experience of watching baseball, playing baseball, being with family, the camaraderie with teammates, all of that. And then you moved into jazz, guitar as you got older, and that too became something which typically would not think of as spirituality. It was spiritually significant.

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But in both these places, you're finding a spiritual significance in the beauty. And that's the connection you're making. Kind of like, of course, Barth with Mozart. He had quite the bias towards Mozart.

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But maybe we can talk about that later when we talk about what makes beauty objective, whether that was an objective bias or it's a subjective thing. But that's interesting how you're making that connection and then trying to theorize it so we attend to these things explicitly in our ministry and in our formation. So we're not simply focused upon ideas and concepts and words, but the more indirect, but maybe in some ways more powerful ways in which experiential learning, and especially in the sense as far as that's beautiful, is a part of what we're about.

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Is that a fair assessment? How would you nuance that differently? Or does that kind of make the connections? Yeah, I think that's fair.

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I think, I mean, one of the things that I will just note at the top here is that just a performative contradiction of trying to give systematic words, systematic thought to something that is finally mysterious and, you know, inarticulable and that you never finally nail down and articulate, you know, in any kind of satisfactory way. So that's kind of the, that's the struggle of writing about this and talking about it is that, at the end of the day, when I look back at what I've written for insights, I can say at the same time, yes and no. In some sense, this captures what I think and feel about beauty, but in a very real sense, it doesn't even begin to.

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And I think that will be true of this interview as well, as I'm trying to talk about something that has a depth and a mystery that is challenging to articulate at best. in terms of your baseball analogy, where you talk about, you can know all the statistics, you can understand the strategy of the game, and that conceptual knowledge adds something, but it's somehow not as deep and not as primal or primordial, a sort of knowing as is the actual engagement with the game, which is kind of true of all poetry, or I like to think of theology as a form of poetry, where it's a form of witness. So if you're focused on the words, the words are meant to help us understand and to be better connected to something which is beyond the words and which you're gesturing towards.

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Is that right? I forgot to post that in the form of a question. I was just looking for you to come back and say yes or no or nuance in your own way. But I'm making these connections with what you said in the article.

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It was a nice way you worked in the baseball analogy to, you know, to later on you like stats and all of that. But there's still something, there's something which that attitude, but there's something deeper which is inarticulate. And there's, I mean, there's something about beauty that at once is inarticulable, but, and this goes back to Pseudo-Dionysius and his observations about beauty.

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There's something about beauty that at the same time is, you know, doesn't allow us to finally grasp it or articulate it, but also at the same time makes us want to, you know, that circles back and makes us want to understand it intellectually. So it is kind of the beauty that sparks cognition. and the desire to know. And that connects, I'm going to get ahead of myself here, but you talk about how beauty then drives one to produce more beauty or to want to imitate it or to want to share it.

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Yes. Can you talk about those dynamics to some degree and how they're significant for you? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, this gets into, you know, the epistemology that, you know, I'm gesturing towards.

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They can't be exhaustive. It's probably not that we're all on the same page. And this is a question, of course, I had earlier, but where epistemology is a reference to, you know, ways of knowing, forms of knowing, how we come to know, how we know what we know. So just to make sure that word is out there, we have a kind of a common playing field.

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Back to you on how this speaks to the epistemology of your project. Yes, so unlike knowing ideas, sort of the cognitive intellectual knowing of ideas. Beauty is not neutral.

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It is, in a sense, it is something that we don't know dispassionately or clinically. It is something that grasps us, that calls us beyond ourselves, that takes us up into itself. and that makes us want to share it with other people. And at the end of the day, in this, from Elaine Scarra, we join in covenant with the beautiful in some sense.

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So I, in my, music and art, I found that to be true to 1 degree or another. I think there's always a sense in which some forms draw us and compel us beyond ourselves, more than others. But I would say for me that I have found that to be true.

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It is a way of knowing that I think in some sense you can see that bears resemblance to what we imagine to be true about, what we hope to be true about the gospel. You know, the gospel is something that claims us, you know, that draws us into itself and that compels us to share it with others. And so anyway, that's enough of a nutshell, you know, to speak about beauty as a way of knowing.

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And let me pick up on the reference to the gospel there. So what precisely is beauty's theological significance and how is it manifest? And is there a difference, I'll blend this with another question. I mean, is there both a theological and a secular sort of beauty?

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And are they both good? Are they distinct? Are they good for different purposes? How do you kind of make those sorts of distinctions?

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So I'll start with that question. I think we have to be willing to say that, and this is true of theology historically, although, some in sort of contemporary context, try to separate out beauty, I mean, try to separate out theology as sort of a sub-discipline, that's distinct and that kind of lives in its own silo. But historically and traditionally, especially for folks like Thomas Aquinas and all the way back to Augustine, beauty, I mean, theology was, you know, of course, the queen of sciences, but it was a way to speak of all things.

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All things have theological significance. And so I think we have to be willing to to wonder, about theology's significance to all things. And here, beauty is, the tradition of beauty is making that claim, that the things that we perceive in the world that are beautiful, beauty is not just an anomaly, it's not just a peak experience.

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It speaks to us of a creator. It speaks to us of the glory of a creator. And it speaks to us of, it points towards something that is more perfect in the perfections of God, but also, we might say, in the beauty of the incarnation of Christ. And so beauty is at once both something that is recognizable by everyone in some way or another across the disciplines.

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In my preparation for writing about this, almost everyone now in the sciences, in the humanities, in social science, economic, political theory, almost everyone is writing about aesthetics. And so it's something that everyone recognizes. Theology makes the connection, of course,

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to the Creator, to the creation of all things ex nihilo, which God called good, which can be translated as harmonious or beautiful, kavod or tov. And so anyway, that's, in a nutshell, that's the connection to theology. It is at once something that is perceivable, by all people, but theology gives its significance.

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Theology is what names its depth that finally connects things to God, in which God, which is its source and its telos, its beginning and its end. You talk about Elaine Scarry's appeal to the surplus of aliveness that is a gift of beauty. And you also used language of excess. Beauty's excess, you say, is woven into the fabric of creation.

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Could you speak a bit more about this excess that you mean and relate it to the surplus of aliveness that Scari speaks of? Yeah, I think this question is best articulated as a response to to modernity. I think we are at the far end of an era, historical era, in which reason, pure reason, sort of had a certain kind of appeal, but in which also postmodern philosophy is discovering its flaws, how it hides biases, it hides its shadow, and it serves in some sense as a, can serve as a source of oppression.

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And And so it does that in part by objectifying things. We live in a world where, you know, in our attempts to think in terms of reason, I look out my window and I see a tree. And when I try to think about it in purely those terms, I can think about it in terms of cellular biology or photosynthesis, or I can think about it in economic terms as board feet of lumber.

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And in other words, I can think about it as an object, an object that is abstracted from its ground of being, an object which which doesn't have significance beyond its use value for me or for the world. And this is what I'm trying to speak against and what I think Von Balthazar and others who are trying to reclaim beauty are trying to speak against, this disenchantment of the world. And so when I use terms like excess,

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or when I think Scari uses the term surplus of aliveness, what we're trying to say is that there's something significant about this tree that speaks of more than just its use value for me or my ability to parse it in terms of biochemical or physiological, you know, cause and effect. It speaks to something that it speaks of wonder, it speaks of mystery, and finally, it speaks of God. And so part of what's happening here is an attempt to re-enchant the world, an attempt to restore the world to this sense of

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This is Charles Taylor's terms, that we are porous to the world, that we are not just buffered selves divided off from the world and relegated to our mental capacities for projecting onto the world, but that we are in some very real sense open to the world, that the world has meaning and significance. for us beyond the mere facts of cause and effect, efficient causality, or the mere facts of, economics or use value. So that's what we're trying to reclaim. And that's, I think beauty is one way of doing that.

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And I know you're, in your own work, you're trying to do that in other ways. But I think for many of us, that is, That's at the bottom, that's the ground of what's at stake here, is trying to reclaim a sense of how we engage a world that is more than just, you know, use value. It is trying to reclaim a world that is sacred, that is sacramental, that is alive with God, alive with not just fact, but value.

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I really like the notion of re-enchanting the world in these ways. Let me use this as a way to sharpen the question about the contrast between the secular and the theological. Maybe that's not a good contrast in your mind. I'm not sure.

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But when you speak of it, speaking to God, speaking to creation, speaking to theology, but then you, know, scari, of course, is not religious in any of those senses at all. and neither a number of the other people you cite, Nehemas and others who are making this affirmation of beauty. So can you say a little more, is it mistaken to ask this sort of a question about what's theological about it? Would they, in a way, have the same understanding of it speaking to creation?

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Or what is distinctive about, is there something distinctive about beauty that speaks to Christian ministry. And this doesn't have to be exclusive. It might be there's different ways it speaks to other faith traditions, right?

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So I don't mean for that necessarily to be exclusive. What would be special or distinctive about it in the way you're pursuing it, connecting to Christianity? So I heard several questions. Let me jump in and talk a little bit, and you tell me if I'm not answering the ones you wanted me to answer.

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But I think one of the things that seems to be true of folks like, especially Iris Murdoch, Alexander Niamos, I can't speak so much to Daniel Stern, but a lot of these folks are trying to, They're seeing something more than use value. They're seeing something that's in the world that also speaks of transcendence. Now, you know, Iris Murdoch, as you know, is, I mean, she's trying to reclaim a kind of Platonism as a way of, you know, responding to this, you know, beauty's significance.

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Neomas is, you know, talking about I mean, his conclusion is that beauty speaks of hope, but he doesn't really talk about, he doesn't address the metaphysical, where does hope come from? Where does it go? So I think all of these folks are working sort of at the edges of what modernity is capable of, secularity is capable of doing, but they're doing so in a way that I think leaves them open

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to, other conversations about transcendence, about, religion. And so, then we see folks like, your folks like Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion, who are, who have once again, made it possible for philosophy to work in theology or to, reclaim theology in a sense. And so I think what we're seeing here at the end of modernity and in this sort of new postmodern, if that's what we're calling it, age, that we've reached the limits of pure reason and we're now sort of exploring the edges of what is possible, you know, in terms of reason. And so I think

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So that's what I think is happening for a lot of these figures, that they're noticing that beauty does something that can't be accounted for by pure reason. But I think for Christians, this, you know, none of this should be a problem. For Christians, Christians have always had embedded in our liturgies, embedded in our Psalms, language for glory, language about beauty. And so this is simply a way of restoring to Christians something that was lost, I think, in the modern sort of retreat into pure reason.

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And so that's what I think is at stake here for Christians. It's trying to drink from our own wells again. It is trying to trying to find something, in beauty that is at the heart of the tradition, something that was understood fully by the Patristics, especially those in the Cappadocian tradition, understood fully by Maximus the Confessor, understood fully by folks, you know, Thomas Aquinas on up until late medieval period, that, you know, that there are, that beauty

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is capable of speaking to us of something that is beyond it. Beauty connects us to transcendence. It connects us to the incarnation. So I think I've circled back around to repeating myself.

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So tell me if I'm answering the questions that you're interested in, Bill. Yeah, well, no, and I think it's interesting how you, know, you say beauty is a category of theology, and I think you're right. This has been kind of neglected. But it's there.

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This is not something new. It's A retrieval and a drawing of attention to something which is not, you know, has not disappeared. I mean, I think of the stained glass windows and of the liturgies and of the hymnology, the hymns we have and the music and the choirs. I mean, people are just surrounded by beauty.

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in church liturgies. We do all sorts of creation spirituality nowadays, where we're looking at the beauty of creation and drawing spiritual connections there. So it's interesting in ways in which, you know, I mean, it kind of goes with your baseball analogy to some degree. In a way, we know this

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in a bodily sort of pre-articulate sort of way, and it's a part of what we take joy in and celebrate with one another, but perhaps there hasn't been enough of a thematic analysis, so we've lost the ability to be as conscious about it and maybe to be as conscious about using it as we might. You make a distinction between Near the beginning of your essay, you talk about how when I say beauty, people might just think of superficial beauty, decoration, or eroticism in a negative sense or things like that. What is the distinction for you between decoration and beauty?

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And what are ways in which maybe beauty has been misunderstood or understood in a way that's contrary to the sort of depth you want to be bringing out? in it in terms of its spiritual richness. Yeah, so Hans Urs von Balthasar, who is perhaps the 20th century's leading, if not his history's leading, you know, advocate for reclaiming beauty, you know, he had a, he once said that the problem is that beauty in the modern era, beauty has been aestheticized. which kind of seems like an odd way to speak about beauty, because of course beauty is aesthetic.

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But what he meant by that is that in the modern era, beauty has been flattened into surfaces. Beauty has been reduced to simply, you know, the appeal of, the decorative appeal of something. And for him, the grand tradition that he's drawing from it is much deeper and wider than that.

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And so for him, beauty, and you have to read his many thousands of pages to get the full sense of this, but for him, beauty is a way of speaking about wonder. It's a way of speaking about, you know, thalmazine, the Greek term, you know, wonder. that the creation opens into something beyond it. And so for him, it is not, he thinks that beauty in the modern era, as it has been sort of co-opted by advertising and sort of, course, relegated to the margins by reason, you know, that there's a sense in which beauty has become flattened itself for, you know, for its

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ego use for its advertising use for its own purposes that don't connect with transcendence. So that's, for Von Balthasar, that's what's at stake here, you know, is trying to flesh out the traditional sense of beauty that does all of the things that we've been talking about. It is at once, It does draw us.

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It does have appeal. Its form is significant. But for von Balthasar, and I'll say this, I might, maybe I should have said this earlier when we're talking about epistemology, but I think it fits here as well. When we see beauty, we're perceiving 2 aspects.

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We're perceiving beauty in two of its aspects. It's form and it's lumen. It's lumen and its species are two different ways he talks about it. So when we perceive beauty, we're drawn into it by the shape it given by art, by the shape

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the unity of dark and light, the unity of the elements of an artistic or a natural scene of beauty, we're drawn into its form. But he says there's also something beyond it that he calls lumen, or the light that's beyond it, that prevents us from ever sort of exhaustively comprehending it. And here, it can be helpful to think of an icon, how an icon draws us into it, but also draws us, draws our eyes, draws our gaze beyond it.

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And so beauty does something of the same kind of thing for Von Balthasar. He's talking about beauty as a way of knowing that draws us, evokes our desire, along with all of the things we have said, but also draws us beyond it, draws our gaze beyond it. So, and ultimately, of course, to its source in God.

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So, does that help? Did I get to all your questions? I mean, it's such an expansive topic. These are questions.

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It's just interesting to think about beauty in a way, just to be attentive to it and how it functions to move us and its power to connect us to being in a different sort of a way. Let me change tacts a little bit here and go. You have David Bentley Hart. who's another author, he wrote a book called The Beauty of the Infinite, which you cite from.

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And he says, beauty places time's tragedies within a broader perspective of harmony and meaning such that beauty seems to absolve being of its violence. And elsewhere, you cite him as saying, beauty proclaims God's glory and creation's goodness with equal eloquence and truthfulness in each moment, in each interval within being. But wouldn't this seem a little Pollyannish?

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I mean, I could name, of course, numerous horrors, right, in the world where I would be surprised for someone to say in those moments that there's beauty. And I also might be surprised, or certainly some people would wonder if how the other beautiful moments on the whole absolve those moments of violence. So in terms of the relationship of beauty to violence, or I don't know the category that would be used, what's ugly maybe, can you discuss that?

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You get the sense of my question. There seems to be a way in which Hart suggests, it's kind of like a superficial rendering of the all things work together for good, interpretation of that in a kind of superficial way, which I don't think is what Paul meant, but in a way which means that whatever is happening, it's not actually bad if you could see it in a broader perspective. And that for many people is a troubling inability just to name the reality of evil without remainder.

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Could you comment on that or what they do with that or how you think about that? so I think that's a risk and you're naming something that is hard to address in a 3,000 word essay, but I am in total agreement that To whatever extent Hart is trying to articulate anything like a theodicy that reconciles God or beauty with evil in the world in any kind of easy or immediate way, I mean, I reject out of hand. I think that I don't find theodicies of any sort satisfying.

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As a matter of fact, speaking confessionally, suffering in the world of the sort that you and I have talked about, the Brothers Karamatsov, when Ivan Karamatsov, is telling of all of the horrors of children who are being abused and that he wants to give back his ticket if the price to be paid is the tears of a small child, one small child. So I'm in total agreement that there is no way to finally make meaning out of evil in this world, and beauty does not do that.

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The only thing beauty, I think, does, in my sense, is it provides a kind of backdrop, a reminder that beauty is the foundation of things, that beauty that the world was created in beauty, that the world, I mean, in a sense, what I'm saying about beauty is not any different than what Dr. King says about justice. You know, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

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I'm only trying to say that evil is in the world. There is no easy way of making sense of it, if we even can make sense of it. but that, but the world is created in beauty and in some obscure, mysterious way points towards God and ends with the beauty of God in all, or God is all in all. So that's kind of what I'm saying here.

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And I think, of course, Beauty is not the only way to think about this. Moltmann, you know, for Moltmann, his term is hope. And the work that hope does in his system is that hope is a way of reclaiming motivation for works of goodness in the world, works of justice in the world.

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And I would say in a similar way, to be reminded of beauty, reminds us and compels us towards doing works of goodness in the world. It doesn't absolve finally the horrors of, or reconcile in any easy way, the horrors of evil in the world, but it can, you know, we perceive it where it is, you know, it can tell us to be about God's work of goodness and beauty and justice in the world.

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And as we set aside, so let's set aside the problems of the ways in which it sounds like that can deny the reality of evil. Once we set that aside, then there's a way in which beauty can be healing, right? I mean, it's not a denial, but nonetheless a resource for those who have been hurt or harmed.

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You speak kind of in this way. It's A fascinating story about research done with English-only speaking graduate students who had an option of being, I take it in different places in a building, but in one place there was the cooing, playing a recording of the cooing, you say, in Chinese, of Chinese mothers and fathers to their newborns. And what they found out was these graduate students who were unaware of anything going on at all and didn't speak nowhere to Chinese, nonetheless, over time, they would congregate in that area where they would hear this cooing sound. So you could use that to speak to ways in which beauty is especially powerful when one needs comfort or strength.

00:41:44.080 - 00:42:39.120

in the face of hardship or suffering. the example, that example I was, drawing on to make the point about how beauty crosses modes, how it, beauty doesn't remain, local to its, enactment or to its perception. but it crossed his modes. From the beautiful cooing of the mother, it crosses over into not only the response of the infant, but also to these, graduate students who find themselves gravitating to the room, who didn't understand Chinese, but who were gravitating to this room for their own comfort in the midst of, I think, the study, in the study,

00:42:39.920 - 00:43:08.320

this was a particularly stressful time. Maybe it was finals week or something. And the graduate students would gravitate to this room just for self-comfort. But I think there's a sense in which, and this gets back to Hart's observation, I think there's a sense in which, and also Neomas, I think beauty, there's something about beauty that promises

00:43:09.200 - 00:43:59.960

that promises more, that is healing, but also constitutes something like a promise of more complete healing. You talk about Von Balthasar seeing the cross-shaped form of the Word made flesh as God's art, and that it calls forth sacrifice on our part. which again, I found a really interesting combination of thoughts and images. But there will be, of course, people who worry about associating the cross quickly with sacrifice and also with seeing the cross as

00:44:00.480 - 00:44:28.080

beautiful. So you'll be familiar with those critiques. So I was just wondering if you could, one, address those critiques and also expand on how we see God's art in the cross-shaped form of the Word made flesh. Yeah, so this is Von Balthasar along with

00:44:28.720 - 00:45:22.160

Others before him, Magnus the Confessor and I think Dionysius, they're identifying the incarnation, they're identifying Christ as God's art, you know, as the beauty that found, that finds its origins, its ground in God, in the infinite, perfected in God. but is manifest in a concrete, way in Jesus Christ. And not only in His, crucifixion, but in His life and in His teachings. From start to finish, we might say, you might say that Christ was always in His incarnation about crossing over and,

00:45:24.880 - 00:46:05.680

decentering himself, crossing over, and joining in solidarity with the other on behalf of the other. We find this, of course, in the various stories of the woman at the well, joining with the tax collectors, healing the lepers, the Good Samaritan story. I mean, all of the parables sort of have something of this ethic of crossing over and joining in, some sense, in an ecstatic sort of self-giving sort of way on behalf of the other.

00:46:06.240 - 00:46:35.840

And so this is what von Balthasar was identifying as the characterizing beauty of God, the characterizing beauty of the gospel. And from von Balthasar, this is sort of the origins of this self-giving love are found in the Trinity. And so he's arguing, of course, that Christ in his, you know, in the gospels and all of the parables and the stories we have.

00:46:36.560 - 00:47:01.760

And in this sense, his crucifixion is not is in continuity with his life. It is giving himself on behalf of others. So anyway, this is what, this is how Von Balthasar is, you know, is elaborating this notion of God's art.

00:47:04.560 - 00:47:15.160

So I'm not sure that I, answered all of your questions. What am I leaving out here? I don't know.

00:47:16.560 - 00:47:37.520

I want to give you a chance to respond to the general question, so I don't want to keep driving a point. I think one of the things I love about this, you know, it when you think of God, you think of the classic attributes of God. You go to omniscient, all these different omnis, or also the Trinitarian sorts of confessions.

00:47:37.680 - 00:47:54.640

But what you don't usually hear is God is beautiful. That's kind of what's striking about Hart's title and the approach you're taking. And also in terms of the contrast to modern thought, you know, I mean, you think of the famous argument, from the watch, right?

00:47:54.640 - 00:48:24.720

The watchmaker God. In modernity, God is this kind of creator who is almost, in the motto of an engineer or a mechanic, which kind of, you realize, is quite a limited way of imagining God, instead of seeing God, as you're suggesting, as an artist and as beautiful in beauty. In what ways along those lines that you're kind of opening it up for us to kind of name and then celebrate and affirm? And I think identify as divine.

00:48:25.760 - 00:48:41.120

Even things that, I mean, as you said in the article, you've brought forth ways in which secular thinkers have identified realities, which for you are spiritual realities. They see them even though they wouldn't name them as such. They benefit from them, in that sense, the gift of God.

00:48:41.680 - 00:49:15.760

In other sorts of ways, what are the main ways in which, using this metaphor, and thinking in terms of beauty as you do theology and Christian formation and education, what are some of the most powerful ways this metaphor, as you've been engaging in this year, has opened you up to different ways of thinking of the divine and thinking of what is worship or spiritually enlivening? Yeah, I think it has opened up the world as sacrament, in a sense. I think it has opened up

00:49:17.040 - 00:49:42.080

the cosmos as theophany. I think, in a sense, it, compels us, and I don't want to suggest that I, live into this ethic as fully as I would want, but, in this... Like all the rest of us who live fully into our ethics. There's a reason we have confession every week, right?

00:49:44.360 - 00:50:13.880

That's right. But I think in a world that has flattened everything into efficient causality, that has flattened, our political parties, just to use a more, immediate reference, we flattened each other, the political parties have flattened each other into caricatures, into ideological caricatures, and we have forgotten how to see the depth in each other.

00:50:13.880 - 00:50:58.560

And so I think, and our denominations have their own versions of that, of course, but I think the world is in a crying need, cries out for something like, reclaiming the contemplative practices of the artists, who linger for a long time with a landscape as they paint it in order to know it well. They do study after study to see it in its different light. And they experiment with how different colors are more true, constitute, create that thing more in its truth.

00:50:58.960 - 00:51:27.440

And so I think we, I think we would do well to reclaim some of these practices of lingering more contemplatively and appreciatively. You know, this is not a new thought for contemplative, you know, spirituality. It was Walter Burkhardt's, you know, observation that contemplation is a long, lingering, loving look at the real.

00:51:28.000 - 00:51:45.280

And this is something all artists know. art is not just trying to, pull something out of my head. Art is trying to name what is truly there. That's the shimmering goodness that lies beneath the ordinary.

00:51:45.520 - 00:52:10.240

I mean, that's what that's what artistry is trying to do. And so that's what I think using terminology around beauty and poiesis is an attempt to try to reclaim something like that practice, that set of practices. I, you know, this is not just for me an esoteric, you know, hobby.

00:52:10.240 - 00:52:38.080

This is, there's real urgency for me that we reclaim something like this. If we're going to live in a world that isn't violent and hostile and that can work in any sense collaboratively, I think we need something like these practices that call us to attend to the beauty in each other. So does that make sense?

00:52:38.160 - 00:52:52.960

Oh yeah, I love it. And I love the, I mean, there's something redemptive about beauty that's being lost in the flattening you're talking about. I mean, maybe that's the way in which you're saying, especially as you talk about needing to spend time and to contemplate, to be awakened to the beauty.

00:52:52.960 - 00:53:14.400

It's not something you just do, you know, rapid fire. To really see a sunset, to really be in a forest, it takes time to have that in such a way. And there are multiple things going on, but to the beauty, and maybe in that sense, you only could say the the distinction between the decorative and the artistic may not lie in the object.

00:53:14.480 - 00:53:40.360

I mean, I get frustrated when I see mainly works of art in the newspaper. The main time I see them is when they've gotten a high dollar value at auction. and which completely erases them as works of art, and flatten them exactly, precisely into the economy you're talking about. Whereas suddenly what you're seeing is a $415 million sale of some piece.

00:53:40.360 - 00:54:01.760

I think that actually was the price of what I saw a couple of days ago, which is kind of obscene in its own right in terms of need and money, but also obscene in the sense that that that's not to see the art. So you can go by and you can see the Mona Lisa as a piece of decoration. So now I've added it to the collections I've seen in person.

00:54:02.080 - 00:54:27.280

Or you can, you know, probably with the Mona Lisa, this is impossible, spend time with the piece and allow yourself to be moved by it or other pieces. So the decorative, everything becomes decoration, not because it is inherently decorative, but because something about modern rationality has put us into a mode where we only can discern the decorative. And so we've lost the depths of beauty you're talking about.

00:54:28.160 - 00:54:39.560

The tremendous... potential here to rehabilitate beauty in its real depth. That's really stunning. Comment on that.

00:54:39.560 - 00:54:59.960

And also you've referenced just in passing a moment ago, seeing the earth. I forget the language you used, but it came close to saying the earth as sacrament. And kind of, and you've been naming, who's it, Maximus the Confessor. I'm not precisely sure where these people are, but this one's putting you really in a strong way with Eastern

00:55:00.040 - 00:55:25.840

Orthodox thought, right? And of course, David Bentley Hart, who you cite and did The Beauty of the Infinite, is an Eastern Orthodox theologian. So does this also maybe speak to, as is, by the way, Dostoevsky, whose work on beauty is also significant. So does this, do you speak to resources maybe coming from the Eastern Orthodox tradition and its way of seeing affirming creation

00:55:26.640 - 00:55:41.760

in its sacramental depths. Is that a part of what you're working at and thinking about? I think so, but maybe not in quite the way. I would not want to suggest that I am any kind of expert on Orthodoxy, Eastern Orthodoxy.

00:55:44.400 - 00:56:16.720

But I do think, and this is in the Wesleyan tradition. John Wesley was trying to reclaim something that he saw in the Cappadocian Fathers, that he thought the Reformation didn't do adequate, justice to. So for Wesley, Wesley was trying to reclaim beauty in a more expansive sense and grace, prevenient grace in a more expansive sense.

00:56:18.880 - 00:56:55.280

that he saw in the Cappadocians, which also the Orthodox are drawing from, the Eastern Orthodox folks are drawing from heavily. So I think that may be the connection. But I do think there is, I do think we are living in a moment where it's important, I think, for Protestants of all sorts and, you know, to try to mine these resources again, and to ask the questions, what we've lost, by moving, more fully in the direction of rationality.

00:56:55.280 - 00:57:04.000

So anyway, that's the connection I would make. Does that make sense? Sure. And I'm glad you brought in Wesley there.

00:57:04.000 - 00:57:34.800

Let me bring in Calvin referring to creation as the theater, God's glory. I mean, what kind of opened to it, we realized the degree to which modern Western rationality in particular for all its gifts, and they are many, at the same time has some significant limits and perhaps has cut us off from resources we need to be rediscovering. And as you suggest, as people are rediscovering across the board, secular and religious.

00:57:35.680 - 00:57:49.040

In your conclusion, you use this wonderful image of shook foil. I found that to be, I just could kind of picture that, feel that sound. It's a very vibrant image.

00:57:49.680 - 00:58:09.360

But use that image to describe the sort of being you are exhorting us towards as children of God. Could you explain a bit more that image and what you're trying to exhort us towards with it? of course, that's not my image. That's Gerard Manley Hopkins.

00:58:12.080 - 00:58:32.400

So, but what Hopkins is trying to get at here is just the alterity, you know, of the earth, the alterity of the created order. Could you just define alterity? Maybe that's what you're about to do. just that it is other than me.

00:58:32.400 - 00:59:12.160

It is other than us. And that there is in the, there is finally a shimmering goodness that lies beneath the ordinary that can't be reduced to the ego that I project upon it. I mean, here, you know, we can, we can talk about, you know, this is your guy, Jean-Luc Marion, you know, and sort of his understanding of the idol and the icon. And so for Marianne, I'm going to butcher this, Bill, but Marianne sees the idol as that which is only, that draws our gaze, but in the end only reflects back to us our own ego.

00:59:12.800 - 00:59:33.920

The icon draws our gaze beyond it. And so I think that's kind of what the image of Shook Foyle is trying to speak of something There's something about the created world that is, the world announces itself. It announces the holy.

00:59:34.320 - 00:59:49.600

It announces its otherness from us. And so, that's more or less what I'm trying to get at. Shook Foyle, you know, this is, this was a theme of Tolkien. J.R.R.

00:59:49.600 - 00:59:59.440

Tolkien in his imaginative fantasy writing. And this is these ideas he was drawing, borrowing from G.K. Chesterton.

01:00:00.160 - 01:00:49.440

You know, their work with imaginative fantasy literature, you know, which we've, of course, taken to be children's literature or, you know, some sort of exotic genre, subgenre of literature. But Tolkien says that those who write imaginative fantasy They write about golden apples and rivers that run with wine in order to awaken us to the outrageous beauty and the otherness of the created order that we first discovered. And so this is what Tolkien is trying to do in his, in creating these figures, he's trying to

01:00:50.160 - 01:01:18.960

He's trying to awaken us to the outrageous beauty of the created order itself, not to evacuate us into some mystery land so much as to awaken us to the beauty of the created order as it exists. So that's kind of what I'm trying to get at here by using, evoking Hopkins' image of Shook Foyle. All right. Finally, we'll get down to our last question here.

01:01:19.560 - 01:02:06.080

As a closing word, can we ask you to share in one pithy sentence, maybe it's a run-on sentence, maybe there's lots of semicolons or such, but the essence of your convictions and hopes about the reality and promise of beauty. So my hope is that The church, especially, can break its bondage to reductive and objectifying forms of thought and action, that we can once again live and move in a world alive and enchanted, where fact and value are united, where all things point to God, and where God points to the goodness of all things, and to creative human work. So that's a long sentence.

01:02:08.040 - 01:02:37.280

In a nutshell. So we'll leave it with that. But I think, I mean, it's just so wonderful to attend to this. And I wonder if a lot of people may, I remember early on in the crisis of COVID and the lockdown, the number of people who we were reading about and who were finding solace in nature, in beauty, in sunsets, just, you know, as a place for peace and solace and hope.

01:02:38.320 - 01:03:26.320

And I think it's just a tremendous reawakening you're urging us towards to kind of, you know, we're already surrounded by so much human and natural creative, creaturely beauty and to be attentive to it and to see it as a real theological gift, a spiritual resource. and to figure out how to make that more real for ourselves and others, and how to struggle against the ways in which certain patterns of rationality have cut us off from that. I think that's just a wonderful endeavor, and I want to thank you for sharing it with us and alerting us to it here.

01:03:26.320 - 01:03:45.680

So thank you so much for your essay and for the journal that you have stimulated on this topic, which is full, by the way, of great reflections on this theme, and then for your work. And we'll look forward to the book coming out on beauty. So thank you very much, David. Thank you, Bill.