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The beauty of the body and the ascension: A reclamation and subversion of physical beauty
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 March 2024
Abstract
In the last century, beauty has not often found itself enlisted in struggles for justice. As Alexander Nehemas recounts, beauty's severance from goodness and truth in the modern period renders beauty dangerous, its charm easily wielded as an instrument of oppression in the hands of the powerful. While some scholars have argued for a return to the pre-modern metaphysics that binds beauty to truth and goodness, the abuse of beauty is not simply a modern phenomenon, and its resistance requires more than a pre-modern solution. Beauty is eschatological; thus its abuse points to a failure to order it properly to its eschatological end. This article will argue that the abuse of beauty can be resisted not by spiritualising beauty, but by ordering physical beauty to its eschatological end. This end is most clearly seen in the ascended Christ, with his beautiful body that is human, wounded and hidden.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 Nehamas, Alexander, Only a Promise of Happiness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 2–3Google Scholar.
2 See Schindler, D. C., Love and the Postmodern Predicament (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018)Google Scholar; King, Jonathan, The Beauty of the Lord: Theology as Aesthetics (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018)Google Scholar; and Johnson, Junius, Father of Lights (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2020)Google Scholar.
3 Sherry, Patrick, Spirit and Beauty: An Introduction to Theological Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 163Google Scholar.
4 Ibid., p. 168. It is important to note here that this eschatological change will be a transformation of the corruption and decay of beauty that sin has caused, but not an erasure of creaturely finitude.
5 Begbie, Jeremy, A Peculiar Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018), p. 10Google Scholar.
6 Ibid.
7 Carnes, Natalie, Beauty: A Theological Engagement with Gregory of Nyssa (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014), p. xiiGoogle Scholar.
8 It is worth reinforcing that by ‘here’ I do not mean in this physical world as opposed to a transcendent immaterial world, but ‘here’ as in this moment of time. This distinction is important because in the former, material beauty is jettisoned in favour of immaterial beauty. This jettisoning does not solve the problem of beauty's abuse, but simply relocates it.
9 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Seeing the Form, vol. 1 of The Glory of the Lord, eds. Joseph Fessio SJ and John Riches, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (London: A&C Black, 1982), p. 233.
10 Ibid., p. 245.
11 Ibid., p. 465.
12 Gregory of Nyssa, ‘On Perfection’, in Ascetical Works, trans. and ed. Virginia Woods Callahan (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), p. 106; ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.divinity.idm.oclc.org/lib/undiv/detail.action?docID=3134858.
13 While the focus of this essay is on the beauty of the human body, taking the Son as the archetype of beauty also has implications for the beauty of non-human creatures. One expression of this is found in the divine ideas tradition, which takes the incarnate Word as the exemplar of all creatures. See Mark McIntosh, The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology (Oxford: OUP, 2021) for a summary of the divine ideas tradition and a treatment of its implications for the beauty of the non-human creation.
14 The ascension has suffered from considerable neglect in modern theology, and where it has not been neglected, it has tended to be treated as mythological: an event that cannot be affirmed historically due to its incompatibility with a modern cosmology and so instead is interpreted metaphorically. As Robert Jenson observes, ‘A body requires a place, and we find it hard to think of any place for this one’, The Triune God, vol. 1 of Systematic Theology (New York: OUP, 1997), p. 202. See also Mark Harris, ‘Science, Scripture, and the Hermeneutics of Ascension’, Theology and Science 12/3 (2014), pp. 201–15.
15 David Fergusson, ‘The Ascension of Christ: Its Significance in the Theology of T.F. Torrance’, Participatio 3 (2012), pp. 92–107.
16 Thomas F. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, 2nd edn (London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2018), p. 145.
17 See Douglas Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), pp. 72–3.
18 It is outside the scope of this paper to address this difficulty. For a helpful discussion, see Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, p. 128: ‘the ascension must be thought out in relation to the actual relations of space and time. On the other hand, however, the ascension must be thought of as an ascension beyond all our notions of space and time (cf. “higher than the heavens”, Heb. 7:26), and therefore as something that cannot ultimately be expressed in categories of space and time, or at least cannot be enclosed within categories of this kind…We have heavens that are appropriate to human beings, the sky above the earth, the “space” beyond the sky, but all these are understood anthropocentrically, for they are conceivable to men as created realities. But God in his own nature cannot be conceived in that way – God utterly transcends the boundaries of space and time, and therefore because he is beyond them he is also everywhere, for the limits of space and time which God transcends are all around us. Hence from this aspect the absence or presence of God cannot be spoken of in categories of space and time, but only when categories of space and time break off and point beyond themselves altogether to what is ineffable and inconceivable in modes of our space and time’. See also David Wilkinson, Christian Eschatology and the Physical Universe (London: Bloomsbury, 2010); https://www.perlego.com/book/804084/christian-eschatology-and-the-physical-universe-pdf; and Harris, ‘Science, Scripture, and the Hermeneutics’.
19 Irenaeus of Lyons, Against the Heresies 5.31.2, trans. Dominic J. Unger (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1992).
20 Ibid.
21 Graham Ward, ‘Bodies: The Displaced Body of Jesus Christ’, in John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (eds), Radical Orthodoxy (New York: Routledge, 2002).
22 Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, p. 133.
23 Balthasar, Seeing the Form, pp. 20–21.
24 Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia, p. 55.
25 Emmanuel Falque, God, the Flesh, and the Other: From Irenaeus to Duns Scotus, trans. William Christian Hackett (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015), p. 153.
26 Balthasar, Seeing the Form, p. 448.
27 Richard Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics: God in Imagination, Beauty, and Art (New York: OUP, 1999), p. 193.
28 Ibid., p. 198.
29 Carnes, Beauty: A Theological Engagement, p. 181.
30 Ibid., p. 162.
31 The claim of the permanence of Christ's wounds follows pre-Reformation theologians, such as Cyril of Alexandria, Bede and Aquinas, who argue for the importance of Christ's ascended body having continuity with his earthly body. As Peter Widdicombe shows in his review of pre-Reformation and Reformation views on the permanence of Christ's wounds, pre-Reformation theologians understood one theological significance of Christ's wounds to be that they testify to the suffering and death of Christ, a testimony that was not erased in his glorification. This claim does not understand Christ's wounds to be signs of corruption. In contrast, Calvin does not see Christ's wounds compatible with glory. See Peter Widdicombe, ‘The Wounds and the Ascended Body: The Marks of Crucifixion in the Glorified Christ from Justin Martyr to John Calvin’, Laval théologique et philosophique 59/1 (février 2003), pp. 137–54.
32 See Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, chapter 8, for a discussion of time and the resurrection event.
33 Ernst Conradie, ‘On Human Finitude and Eternal Life’, Scriptura 88 (2005), p. 47.
34 Summa Theologiae, vol. 55, trans. C. Thomas Moore (London: Blackfriars, 1976), p. 35; quoted in Widdicombe, ‘The Wounds and the Ascended Body’, p. 150.
35 ‘[T]he talk of self-surrender and abandonment, obedience, and a pure readiness to suffer, all suggests a pattern of human existence which can easily be infected by human domination or self-disparagement, and so become just the opposite of the liberating and empowering form of human life which Jesus as savior might be expected to model’. Mark McIntosh, Christology from Within (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), p. 139.
36 Carnes, Beauty: A Theological Engagement, p. 206.
37 Johnson, Andy, ‘Resurrection and Ascension of True Humanity in Luke-Acts’, Journal of Theological Interpretation 15/2 (2021), p. 256CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
38 Carnes, Beauty: A Theological Engagement, p. 181.
39 Ibid., p. 206.
40 Balthasar, Seeing the Form, p. 509.
41 Ibid.
42 de Gruchy, John W., Christianity, Art and Transformation: Theological Aesthetics in the Struggle for Justice (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), p. 122Google Scholar.
43 Astell, Ann W., Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), p. 48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
44 Referenced in Astell, Eating Beauty, p. 46.
45 Balthasar, Seeing the Form, p. 504. Balthasar's language here has the potential to play into negative portrayals of the Jews in Jesus’ time. However, rather than functioning in contrast to Gentile expectation or reception, the subversion of Jewish expectation is better read as representative of the way Christ's identity subverts all expectations, both Jewish and Gentile. In this reading, Jewish belief becomes the mirror through which all our distorted and mistaken assumptions about Christ can be revealed.
46 Ibid.
47 Leo the Great, ‘Sermon 74’, in St. Leo the Great Sermons, trans. Jane Patrician Freeland and Agnes Josephine Conway (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1996), p. 327.
48 Augustine, ‘Mystery of the Lord's Ascension’, The Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers, vol. 2, ed. and trans. M. F. Toal (London: Longmans, Green, 1958–1963), pp. 417, 419.
49 Ibid., p. 417.
50 Balthasar, Seeing the Form, p. 508.
51 Ibid., pp. 662–3.
52 Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, p. 145.
53 Canlis, Julie, Calvin's Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2010), pp. 189–90Google Scholar.
54 Balthasar, Seeing the Form, p. 508.
55 Ibid., p. 413.