This thesis begins a dialogue between Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics and Chinese academic aesthetics. We identify a tension between aesthetics and religion in Chinese academic aesthetics, and argue that a dialogue with von Balthasar’s work has the potential to contribute to the development of Chinese academic aesthetics with regard to overcoming that tension. In order to set a ground for the dialogue, von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics is examined in Part I. His theological aesthetics reveals that genuine beauty can never be fully accounted for by a perspective based in modern aesthetics, an aesthetics that limits itself to worldly categories. Rather, genuine beauty comes only from the beauty of the Christ form, in which religion and aesthetics converge. In Part II, we examine the tension between religion and aesthetics in Chinese academic aesthetics. The origin and influence of Chinese academic aesthetics stems from Cai Yuan-pei’s proclamation calling for the “substitution of aesthetics for religion”. For Cai, with a perspective based in modern aesthetics, aesthetics and religion occupied opposed and incompatible positions. Social and historical factors, for example government backed Marxist ideology, also contribute to hostility towards Christianity. We argue that due to the lack of the transcendental dimension, a result of rejecting the divine and so divine beauty, the further development of Chinese academic aesthetics may be stunted. Finally, in Part III, we outline the beginning of a dialogue between von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics and Chinese academic aesthetics. We argue that by dialoguing with von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics, Chinese academic aesthetics may potentially obtain a transcendental dimension in coming to recognise genuine beauty, divine beauty. In coming to recognise genuine beauty, we argue that true progress in Chinese academic aesthetics may be made.

Thesis advisor: Brian Robinette / This project seeks to critique the occupation of Palestine with the categories and methods of a critical theological aesthetics. The theological aesthetics employed here is critical because it develops Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic project: beauty is dialectical, historical, and, above all, negative. Beauty is negative as it is founded on renunciation: beauty renounces ugliness. Adorno’s project is advanced through an encounter with Christ. Christ, as witnessed on the Cross, is the absolute fulfillment of negative beauty: Christ, who is absolutely personal, material, and relational, renounces renunciation itself. This fulfillment of negative beauty demands engagement and participation: to follow Christ is to do beauty; it is to renounce ugliness in a beautiful way. The occupation of Palestine, especially revealed through the phenomenon of suicide bombing, stands as an unsettling and dark ugliness. Because the occupation is funded and supported by so-called Christian Zionists, it is an occupation that challenges that character of God. Because occupation works aesthetically to occupy flesh and relationship, it is an occupation that desacralizes the living image of God. This demands prompt renunciation and beatification. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

In this doctoral dissertation I examine the development of Kierkegaard's sense of vocation as a Christian creative artist by research into his journals and published works, as well as investigating how this was influenced by his scriptural hermeneutic. I then attempt to sketch some starting points for a theology of Christian creative artwork contextualised within modern theological aesthetics by drawing upon this examination. I argue that Kierkegaard began writing without documented reflection on his intentions and communicative methodology, but was nonetheless a religious author from the start of his career, as his text The Point of View for my Work as an Author later claimed. I trace how he began with a more "indirect" approach in his writing and gradually developed a theory of "indirect communication", though there were more "direct" elements present in his work from the beginning (the "first authorship"), yet as he continued in his authorial career he became ever more "direct" in his mode of communication (the "second authorship"), until it eventually became exclusively more "direct" religious writing (the "attack on Christendom"). I conclude that the most concise and complete formulation of Kierkegaard's mature conception of his task as a Christian artist becomes "to communicate Christianity in Christendom" in a more direct mode-to explain straightforwardly what authentic Christianity is in an age of cultural, purely nominal religion. I allow that this task is in some ways unique to his own historical situation but contend nonetheless that a consideration of it is profitable for contemporary theology because of the many different ways that he attempted to carry it out. In Kierkegaardian terms, and following on from resources in Kierkegaard and his use of scripture, I argue constructively from all of this that more "direct" communication is the more valuable form of communication to the Christian creative artist for theological reasons, but that more "indirect" communication can still be useful, in the task of communicating creatively through art.

Thesis advisor: Boyd Taylor Coolman / Many vaunt the Summa halensis, conceived but not drafted entirely by Alexander of Hales, for its aesthetics. Few, however, read the text’s aesthetics theologically—as a teaching about God. This dissertation argues that Alexander’s aesthetics are deeply and inexorably theological. It takes as its keystone a passage in which Alexander identifies beauty with the “sacred order of the divine persons.” If beauty be a trinitarian structure instead of a divine attribute, then we should find beauty where we find Trinity. This dissertation trawls the massive Summa halensis for trinitarian beauty. And it finds beauty nearly everywhere. The result is a study of Alexander’s aesthetics that appreciates beauty beyond the constricted limits and categories of modern aesthetics. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

This study examines both the theological aesthetics of George Herbert (1593-1633), English priest and poet, and those of his friends, the Ferrar family of Little Gidding, who founded a quasi-monastic religious community near Cambridge from 1624-1646. In their writings, Herbert and the Ferrars negotiated two traditional but usually competing aesthetic stances: the "beauty of holiness"; on the one hand, and austere plainness, on the other. They skillfully navigated between conflicting theological positions during the years leading up to the English Civil War. Chapter 1 reviews the historical connection between Herbert and Nicholas Ferrar (1592/3-1637) in light of recent revisionist biographies. It describes and contextualizes the anomalous and controversial devotional life at Little Gidding within the complex religio-political landscape of the 1620s and 1630s; it also argues for a shared theological aesthetic between Herbert and the Ferrars as evident in their collaboration on various projects. (Herbert also designated the Ferrars his literary executors.) Chapter 2 revisits the question of Herbert's paradoxical "plain style," a topic that has engaged scholars for decades, by exploring his poetic use of clothing images in conjunction with the Renaissance commonplace of the "garment of style." Chapter 3 examines in detail liturgical practice at Little Gidding, both the family's public and private worship life, as well as their extensive renovation of two churches. Here I argue that the community did not fit easily within any single category in the "worship wars" of the early seventeenth century, but instead drew upon influences across the liturgical spectrum, from Laudianism to puritanism. Chapters 4 and 5 explore how Herbert (in his poetry) and the Ferrars (in their religious dialogues called the Story Books) use narrative of various kinds, but especially parable and exempla, for catechetical ends, and emphasize the centrality of "true stories" to Christian belief. The conclusion argues that these texts present a theological aesthetic that is deeply connected to a lived, practiced ethics. This project fills in a major gap in Herbert studies while recovering important primary sources for the understanding of religion, literature and culture in early modern England. / 2018-04-30T00:00:00Z

John Smith (1618-1652), the 17th century Cambridge Platonist, employed the traditional language of the spiritual senses of the soul to develop an early modern theological aesthetic central to his religious epistemology and thus to his philosophy of religion and systematic theology. Smith's place in this tradition has been under-appreciated by scholars working on the Cambridge Platonists and the spiritual senses. However, as a Christian Platonist, Smith advocated intellectual intuition of Divine Goodness as the key to theological knowledge and spiritual practice. Furthermore, Smith's theory of prophecy rests on the reception of sensible images in the imagination. In order to demonstrate this the dissertation first presents an interpretive summary of the spiritual senses tradition and proposes a functional typology that registers three uses of non-corporeal perception throughout the history of Christian theology: (1) accounts of the origin and methods of theological knowledge, (2) descriptions of spirituality, and (3) attempts to systematically present or defend Christian theology. Additionally, Smith's historical and intellectual context in early seventeenth century England is discussed with particular attention to how his education prepared him to contribute to the mystical tradition of the spiritual senses of the soul. Through a close reading of his extant writings it is shown that Smith's theories of theological knowledge, method, and prophecy rest on his development of the spiritual senses tradition, combining intellectual intuition and imaginative perception. Likewise, the role of spiritual aesthetics in Smith's prescriptive account of Christian piety is presented. Here the spiritual senses are both means and reward in the spiritual life through the process of deification (theosis). Moreover, it is shown how Smith's theology forms a coherent system with intellectual intuition informing natural theology and revelation being supplemented by spiritual perception via the imagination. The central uniting feature therefore is the spiritual perception of theological truth. Finally, the dissertation closes with a summary of Smith's various uses of the spiritual senses and proposes future research on his influence upon later figures including Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, and suggests future constructive work inspired by Smith's combination of reason and experience in religion.

Modern religious architecture is studied and understood inadequately, partly because modernity has been considered antithetical to religious practice and belief, and partly because studies of modern religious architecture have typically sidelined its distinctively religious aspects. Furthermore, would-be interpreters have lacked an adequate interpretive framework for the modern and religious identities that together characterize modern religious architecture. Thus, the problem is rooted both in history and theory: the solution requires 1) an interdisciplinary approach to the historical context of modernity that can properly situate such buildings in architectural and religious terms, and 2) a hermeneutic that is sufficiently rich to address the religious content, yet fluid and modest enough to be fruitful even from outside such theology-laden contexts. As identity is largely a matter of mainstream practice, the historical setting for this research is a significant but non-experimental context: post-WWII Rome. This period is marked by both a multifaceted identity crisis with distinctive political, architectural and theological aspects, and the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) that marked a shift in Catholicism’s attitude towards modernity. The chief interpretive concept offering sufficient richness and fluidity to address modern religious architecture is mediation, relevant to both religious identity (especially on beauty and sacrament) and the identity of modern architecture (especially on ornament). The main interlocutors here are Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-88), Karsten Harries (1937-), Oleg Grabar (1929-), and Jacques Maritain (1882-1973). The hermeneutic framework is forged and tested through formal and phenomenological analyses of four post-WWII Catholic churches in Rome that are exemplary of four modes of mediation: 1) San Giovanni Bosco (1952-59), by Gaetano Rapisardi: critique; 2) San Gregorio VII (1959-61), by Paniconi and Pediconi: updating; 3) San Policarpo (1960-67), by Giuseppe Nicolosi: retrieval; 4) Sancta Maria Mater Ecclesiae (1965-70), Luigi Moretti’s unbuilt “Chiesa del Concilio”: invention. These analyses also reveal four distinct forms of ornament — material, tectonic, geometric, and spatial — that are discernible largely through a reconsideration of ornament as defined primarily through its mediating function. The conclusion evaluates the fecundity of the hermeneutic and suggests possibilities for further research. / text

The thesis is organized as two sections of two chapters each: the first section establishes a theoretical framework of a broad and reinvigorated Christian sacramentality within which to situate the second—an investigation of the theories and practice of the mythopoeic art of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien in this sacramental light. The first chapter acknowledges the thoroughgoing disenchantment of modernity, an effect traced to the vanishing of a sacramental understanding of the world, and then explores the history of the sacramental concept that would seek to be reclaimed and reconceived as a possible means of the re-enchantment of Western culture such as in the recent work of David Brown. An appreciative critique of Brown's work is offered in chapter two before proposing an alternative understanding of a distinctly Christian and reinvigorated sacramentality anchored in the Incarnation and operating by Transposition. A notion of sacramental vision is developed from the perceptual basis in its classic definitions, and a sacramental understanding of story is considered from a theological perspective on the infinite generativity of meaning in texts, along with recent theories of affect and affordance. The second half of the thesis expounds the views of mythopoeia held by Lewis and Tolkien in order to show how they are not only compatible with but lead to a sacramental understanding of story as developed in part one, with mythopoeia affording the recovery of a potentially transformative vision of reality, awakening it into focus in distinctly Christian ways (chapter three). The final chapter demonstrates how their mythopoeic theories are exemplified in their art, examining specific ways Till We Have Faces and The Lord of the Rings afford the recovery of a potentially transformative vision of various themes central to them. In closing it is suggested that such a sacramental understanding of story may contribute to the re-enchantment of Western culture, not to mention the re-mythologization and re-envisaging of Christianity, whose significance in these regards has been hitherto mostly unrecognized.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 303-325) / The topic of God’s beauty, while receiving attention in theological aesthetics, is not often a focused pursuit in Christian spirituality. The study attempts to answer the question of what the nature would be of an Evangelical Protestant Christian spirituality predicated upon seeking and apprehending God’s beauty. The study establishes the relevance of beauty to Christian spirituality. It then develops a definition of God’s beauty from Jonathan Edwards. God’s beauty is found to be his love for his own being. Examining Scripture and Christian history, the study establishes that God’s beauty was regarded as an objective reality until the Enlightenment. The focus of the research then turns to the subjective apprehension of beauty, and examines the methodology of pursuing beauty in art, and finds parallels in spirituality. The study considers the epistemological dichotomy of subject and object with reference to beauty, and considers Christian proposals for a form of correspondence theory for transcendentals. The findings are united in a model of spirituality. Apprehension of God’s beauty occurs through the subject possessing a correspondent form of God’s love. Findings from the aesthetic and epistemological study are united with theology to suggest that this love can be cultivated through four areas: Christian imagination, an implanted new nature, the exposure to communion with God, and the nurture of spiritual disciplines. Each of these areas is explained and justified as means to cultivate correspondent love. The postures and approaches found in the study of art and epistemology are used for explaining the nature of correspondent love. Evangelical Protestant Christian spirituality predicated upon seeking and finding God’s beauty is one which cultivates love for God that corresponds with God’s own love. / Christian Spirituality, Church History and Missiology / D. Th. (Christian Spirituality)

The orans, although a gesture with a long ‘pagan’ past, was easily adopted by Christians for its symbolic meanings of prayer and piety and quickly attained a number of other more nuanced meanings as it was refined and reused. By restricting the scope of this thesis to the orans in the Christian catacombs of Rome, it becomes possible to approach the figure from a multi-directional perspective, not merely concerned with what the gesture meant to the Christian, but with its literary and material pedigrees, its transition to Christian art, and its cultural significance. To this end, chapter one examines ‘pagan’ precursors of the Christian orans through an examination of coins, sculptures, inscriptions, and reliefs, as well as by looking at the two figures whose appearance most influences that of the orans – the goddess Pietas, and the Artemisia-Adorans funerary portrait type. Chapter two addresses the importance of the orans in the Christian literary community, and examines not only the actual usage of prayer with raised hands by the Christian faithful, but also examines the aesthetic and theological reasons for the popularity of the gesture – the parallel between the spread arms of the orans and the posture of the crucified Christ. Finally, chapter three presents a spatial-thematic analysis of the usage of the orans in the Roman Christian catacombs, using a corpus of 158 orantes. This chapter enables the reader to draw conclusions about the veracity of the academic theories presented in the previous chapters, as it compares the usage of the orans against its scholarly interpretation.