ANSELM’S
APPROACH AND ITS LIMITATIONS
It is clear from this brief
survey of his writings that Anselm deploys aesthetic considerations in two
rather different ways: sometimes as an argument in itself for a particular
conclusion, more commonly as confirmation that a particular conclusion is the
correct one. Another way of making this distinction is to observe that, whereas
for Anselm ‘not fitting’ entails ‘necessarily not true of God’ (cf. Why God
Became Man: 2.8), ‘fitting does not of itself automatically carry the same
necessity. Both versions, however, rely on the same presupposition that God is
beauty and everything derived from the divine must therefore partake of the
same characteristic. In doing so, Anselm displays a confidence that few of us
would have today. For many, perhaps most, in modern society, beauty is taken to
be a purely subjective judgement, dependent on whatever happens to please the
individual concerned. But even those who incline towards some objective
standard would admit the difficulty of finding any easy reconciliation with
questions of truth and goodness. So, for instance, few would deny that the rape
scene in the Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange (1971), set to
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, has the beauty of a ballet, yet it is hardly a good
act. Such problems no doubt explain why there has been such a large- scale
retreat from treating beauty as one of the transcendentals directly applicable
to God.
But for Christianity the
difficulties in fact run much deeper, since there is little evidence to suggest
a consistent Christian position on the theme of beauty across the centuries.
Thus in Anselm’s case his understanding is in fact much more closely allied to
notions originating in classical Greece than anything we find in scripture.
Although in adopting such a view Anselm reflects the general patristic
position, including that of Augustine, it is as well to note the tension. This
is not to suggest that scripture must always function as the primary
theological norm. It is simply to observe a tension of which Anselm himself was
certainly unaware. The noted Old Testament scholar, Gerard von Rad, even
maintained that ‘Israel lacked all critical reflection on the phenomenon of
beauty’ (von Rad 1962: I, 365). While that is probably an exaggeration, his
words do stand as a caution against Hans Urs von Balthasar’s over- confident
deployment of the biblical ‘glory’ as an equivalent term (Balthasar 1982).
Certainly, both Hebrew kabod and Greek doxa are used in an aesthetic sense, but
the meaning seems more to do with what overwhelms with its magnificence or
splendour rather than with Greek notions of elegance, balance, or proportion.
Indeed, quite different words are used of ordinary human beauty (Penchansky
2013), and in the Hebrew scriptures kabod is only applied to the human when
kings or others might potentially at least offer a similar splendour (e.g. Job
40:10). It is to the late Greek Book of Wisdom that one must turn before beauty
in our world and in the divine are firmly linked as in the Greek hierarchical
model, with God now described as ‘the author of beauty’ (13.3). However, in the
Fathers even as early as Irenaeus we find aesthetic considerations of this kind
being adduced for divine action, as, for example, in his arguments with the
Gnostics over why there should only be four gospels (Against Heresies: III, xi,
8). By the time of Augustine, divine simplicity is firmly rooted aesthetically
(as well as for other motives) and serves as an approach to the problem of evil
that sees light and shade as integral to an adequate response (defended in
Farrer 1962).
Yet to leave matters on this
note of a bewildering variety of approaches to beauty would seem unfair to
Anselm, not least because it appears a basic human intuition about the nature
of divinity that it should embody all that we positively value, and so should
include beauty. So, however great the problems, recent attempts to rescue
beauty from the margins of discussions in philosophical theology (e.g. Tallon
2012) are surely to be welcomed. But perhaps the difficulties within
Christianity should be seen as in large part self- generated, and it is here
that Anselm may still have something to teach us. In marked contrast to much
modern writing, he never declared Christ’s actual suffering on the cross
beautiful; for him it was rather key aspects of the event that were beautiful
and which helped determine the divine choice, such as the wood of the cross
balancing the tree of the Fall, and so on. Instead, as noted above, Anselm
remained remarkably restrained in his description of Christ’s sufferings. The
pressure to talk of them as beautiful comes only if we suppose doxa to be
concerned with essentially the same idea. But is it? When John and Paul talk of
the divine ‘glory’ being revealed on the cross, is it not more like something
that generates in us a sense of stupor and amazement? While there is no doubt
an aesthetic element to such a response, to talk of it sharing anything with
delight in beauty is surely perverse. What attracts our admiration and wonder
is that a being so removed from such horrors deigns to identify with our
experience of them, and so took on what had, in the words of Isaiah, ‘no form
or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire
him’ (53.2). In other words, it is the entirely unexpected character of the
event that gives it such revelatory significance, not any putative connection
with beauty. The ‘glory’ of which the Bible speaks and which so much modern
Christian writing has identified with beauty is really something quite
different: a matter of revelation, not natural theology. With that much
acknowledged, the beauty of which Anselm spoke and which derives from the Greek
tradition can then continue to exercise an epistemological role in
philosophical theology, in particular in shaping what is possible for human
experience of God. How extensive these roles might be is too large a question
to open here. (David Brown, “Anselm,” in The Oxford Handbook of The
Epistemology of Theology, ed. William J. Abraham and Frederick D. Aquino
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017], 404-6)
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