Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 63:1 (Spring 2001)
Article: Aesthetics Beauty Avenged, Apologetics Enriched
Author: William Edgar

---

WTJ 63:1 (Spring 2001) p. 107

Aesthetics
Beauty Avenged, Apologetics Enriched

William Edgara

I. Sleeping Beauty

Despite what would seem their obvious integral place in human experience over the centuries, beauty and the beautiful have been sent into hibernation in academic circles. Scholars and critics have been so shy to use the term beauty that we hear of accounts of an unspoken gag rule on aesthetics. Ironically, this is most often felt in the humanities, particularly in literature or the arts. Recently a student at Southern Utah University complained (on the Internet) about the taboo on beauty. “If I were to say, in any of my upper-division literature courses, that I found a particular poem beautiful or emotionally moving, I would be met with rolling eyes and unchecked laughter. Those things we don’t say in academe.”1

Why would this be? One of the reasons is a concern for justice. In the prevailing schools of the 1980s and 1990s—post-structuralism, deconstruction, semiotics, and cultural studies—declarations about the beauty of an object were deemed insensitive to social concerns. This could happen in two ways. First, talk of the beautiful is a distraction from injustice, and therefore undermines our commitments to bringing about equity and well-being in the world. It holds to a wrong agenda. Second, when we look at something beautiful, be it a person, a natural object, or a work of art, we judge it. We thus feel superior to it, and reduce it to an object. Gianni Vattimo rails against regarding poetry and art as timeless expressions of genius. At best, they are reminders of mortality and decay2 In the “new historicist” school, works of art are examined as symbols of attitudes toward power. For Roger Greenblatt, as an example, the plays and literature of the Renaissance are a commentary on the transition from the

WTJ 63:1 (Spring 2001) p. 108

rule of the church to the rule of modernity. To call Shakespeare’s writings beautiful is to miss the point of their true language.3 Louis Montrose adds that literary texts are symbolic formations which ultimately differ in no respect from other symbolic formations, including historical events and trends. Typically; the literary texts are “complex,” not because of any aesthetic essentialism, as New Criticism might have it, but simply because the history they produce and the history they reflect are incapable of coherence and stability. Struggle, not beauty, is the issue in the Faerie Queene or Hamlet.4

visitor : : uid: ()