NATALIE CARNES HAS WRITTEN a remarkable book. She has carefully and lovingly brought Gregory of Nyssa—and indeed his distinguished family—to life, and succeeded in putting them in conversation with critical discussions of beauty over the last few centuries. In the process she has shown that the impasse created by a modern focus on “use” on the one hand, and on “disinterested contemplation” on the other, has been nicely answered by Gregory’s description of beauty as fittingness and as gratuity. She contrasts Gregory’s ability to discover a deepening of the creature’s beauty in the higher beauty of God, with the modern sense that objects refuse reference either to spirituality or the transcendent.

But rather than making further comments on the richness of Gregory’s thought and the sensitivity of Carnes’ appropriation of this, I want to problematize her easy assumption that Gregory provides wisdom that 21^st century persons may appropriate. David Jasper in his blurb praises Carnes for portraying Gregory as a “theologian for our time, at once modern and post-modern”. In an important sense she succeeds admirably in this—more on this below, but in another sense there is something incoherent about the claim that a 4^th century theologian speaks a contemporary language. It is this incoherence that I want, briefly, to tease out.

Reading Gregory recalls Peter Brown’s observation in his classic biography of Augustine of Hippo, that in Augustine’s day (which was also Gregory’s) Neo-Platonism was the default world-view—much like, he suggests, a belief in Evolution might be assumed today.1 This truth highlights the remarkable achievement of Gregory in his use and adaptation of the Platonic philosophical tradition. Carnes notes that in the 350s in Athens “Christians and pagans studied rhetoric and philosophy together” (7). As the Roman Empire declined, the religious core of classical culture had died a natural death, but its philosophical heritage survived. As Alan Cameron has argued, “there never was a serous break in the devotion of Christian members of the Eastern elite to Greek grammatical rhetorical, and even philosophical culture.”2 For Gregory this tradition was mediated, Carnes claims, through the Alexandrian Christianity of Origen. Through him Gregory (along with his famous brother Basil), inherited Plato’s negative theology and his apophatic impulses; though large portions of Plato, especially from the Phaedrus, Gregory adopted directly (7).

But Carnes makes clear that Gregory did more than simply copy Plato. Indeed, in the supple hands of Gregory, this heritage provided a carrier that offered fresh insights into the Christian Gospel. As she notes Gregory’s understanding of God—for “beauty names God” she reminds us—took his reflections on beauty to places that Plato could not go. She argues “Gregory’s doctrine of God opened up possibilities for beauty unavailable to someone with otherwise similar philosophical commitments about beauty” (44). Similarly where Plato had no place for fleshly mortal women in the rise to beauty, Gregory can foreground the bodily beauty of his sister Macrina rhetorically represented as an opening to the beauty of God. Here, Carnes notes, “the narrative of Gregory’s stories does not proceed as a Platonic narrative should” (67).

There is a large school of thought that would claim this appropriation of Platonism by Christianity was disastrous for that tradition, bequeathing tensions that still trouble the Christian soul.3 As a Reformed theologian I am sympathetic with this complaint. But I also recognize the problem with this common lament: Fourth century Asia minor was not like my setting in 21st century California, where one has multiple philosophical options to choose from, so that a more biblically attuned thinker might have chosen a more appropriate framework. As Peter Brown reminds us, Neo-Platonism was the primary option on offer. I think in fact one might make almost the opposite claim: Gregory and his contemporaries, in their rewriting of Plato (and Plotinus), actually saved Plato for Christianity—much like Dante would do with Virgil a thousand years later. That is to say these 4^th c. Fathers and Mothers interpreted Plato in a form that was not only consistent with the revelation of Christ, but one that would become enormously fruitful for the subsequent development of Christian culture. One cannot imagine the flowering of monastic spirituality, or of the medieval mystics apart from the Christian Platonism of Gregory—as Carnes generous use of Denys Turner makes clear. One might even claim that the current re-appropriation of these medieval traditions would be unthinkable apart from the philosophical resources that Gregory has mobilized and that Carnes has brought to light.

Of course every cultural and philosophical framework, even as it shapes and perhaps even enhances aspects of God’s creative and re-creative story, necessarily suppresses other parts. Surely Carnes knows this, but at times I wondered if the deep attachment she feels for Gregory inhibited her from pointing this out. One of the special strengths of Carnes treatment of Gregory is to show the reader how a neo-platonic spirituality in his hands actually enhances the importance of the body and heightens the role of senses—in a way that Plato himself was unable to do. Making use of Susan Harvey, Carnes shows how the focus on touch and smell is a direct result of the reality of incarnation and creation as God’s good gifts, something that was further developed in his rich view of the Eucharist. Carnes writes: “It seems that the body can participate in God in a way that the mind qua rationality cannot” (p. 233). Precisely. But reading this claim sparked for me the following question: what does this imply about the limits of Plato’s view of the world? What she might have pointed out is the way these same gifts—of touch, and taste, provided an opening by which the Platonic framework itself would eventually be undermined. Augustine gives some indication of this in the role that creation plays in his City of God; but it would take the recovery of Aristotle’s logic by Thomas Aquinas to further overhaul the philosophical framework that Christianity would thenceforth appropriate. Indeed it was this empirical turn that would open the way, in subsequent centuries, for the understanding of creation as one of the two books of God, something the Platonic tradition could not have imagined. Though Aristotle played no role in Gregory’s theology, and is mentioned only incidentally by Carnes, surely his focus on embodied virtue would have expanded Gregory’s notion of spiritual discipline.

In short one looks in vain in Carnes’ moving explication of Gregory for any critical appraisal of his Platonic framework. She does actually cite the critique of Kaja Silverman at one point. Silverman notes that the problem with the Logos (and Platonism) is not that it fails to name kinships and analogies, but that the analogies it identifies subordinates “our world” to “a higher one” thereby generating “hierarchical and nonreciprocal relationships” (193).4 But Carnes passes over this critique without comment. Toward the end of the book Carnes notices that Gregory’s later work builds on the dichotomy between the physical and spiritual and its trajectory of limited and limitless, but there is no mention of ways that this dichotomy, so persistent in subsequent Christian thinking, has hampered integration of the perceptual and the intelligible. Rather than a hierarchical dependence of the body on God—in which human activity exists only in and by divine activity (see p. 109), what if we saw creation as having its own space and time given by God, but not continuous with his own reality?

This is where the application of Gregory to our contemporary conversation falters. For we, in the West, live in a world indelibly marked by the Enlightenment and Romanticism. We are now, as Charles Taylor notes, buffered selves living in an immanent frame; we cannot go back to the world of porous selves that is evoked in Gregory. The notions of use and disinterested contemplation are not simply the result of new institutional arrangements in the art world; rather those arrangements themselves reflect deep-seated changes in the way we relate to the world, changes that are, in part, a reflection of Judeo-Christian views of the person and creation that animated Gregory. This means that we necessarily are working with different metaphysical assumptions. In a recent reflection in the Christian Century, Amy Frykholm wonders whether the ancient patterns of faith and practice (like those of Gregory, though she does not reference him) can be authentically indwelt today. She muses: “I could pretend there was no such thing as the Enlightenment, try to reach back behind it and believe as my spiritual ancestors did, but that seems like an exercise in nostalgia.”5 Such an exercise in nostalgia risks accessing only an imagined Christianity.

For others who do not live in the shadow of the Enlightenment, the risks are, if anything, even greater. One of the great failures of the western missionary movement, at least in Asia, was to assume an unbreakable connection between Christianity and the Greco-Roman form of its intellectual heritage. As a result, Aloysius Pieris argues, the Christian mission has for most people meant a disembodiment. The missionary movement in India, Pieris claims, never succeeded in breaking the Greco-Roman pot in which Christianity arrived.6 Not only has this meant that Christianity remained a foreign import, but the potential gifts of that Indian heritage have not been pressed into service in expanding our corporate vision of the renewing work of Christ.

Still it would be unfair to leave matters here. Natalie Carnes is to be thanked for daring to open a conversation with the modern secularization of beauty, and she uncovers resources that conversation desperately needs. And here Carnes joins a chorus of other contemporary voices busy with a retrieval of this philosophical tradition.7 What accounts for the contemporary attraction of this ancient tradition? While this is not the place, and this writer is not the person, to address all the complexities involved in this question, I would propose one central reason. To replace Plato with Darwin—procession with evolution, if we follow Peter Brown’s suggestion, is clearly to reduce the scope of human imagining. It is to focus on the what and how, while obstructing, even refusing, the why, and, in the process, eliminating the mystery and wonder that Gregory’s framework sparked. As a metaphor the higher life still attracts us. It is always true that humans want to move beyond the ordinary in their lives, to grow and, yes, to rise to other levels of insight. Ladders and upward paths are everywhere in contemporary culture from the art of Juan Miró or M. C. Escher to the internet games like Temple Run that our children play. The question these pose is whether there is anything that can lift us, any ladder we can climb, anything that is worth living and perhaps even dying for. Gregory’s writings portray a God into whose life of beauty we can be drawn and where we can flourish. As he writes in his commentary on the Song of Solomon:

This explains why the Word who raises up the fallen, calls out through the windows of the church and says “rise up!”…She [who hears this command] is empowered by the Word. She rises up. She moves forward. She is brought close. She becomes a beauty.8

Gregory convinces us that our life, as Augustine put it, is a journey of the affections, that is meant to lead us to our true homeland who is God; that life, as Dante claimed, is not a race to death but a pilgrimage to God. This of course is the message of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, not of Plato or the Greek heritage, but in Gregory’s hands, that heritage added a splendor which still attracts the hardest secular thinker on beauty, even if the attraction is one of metaphor rather than metaphysics. For the latter, I would argue, we need to look to other guides and other traditions for help. And these we dare not overlook. For, just as Gregory found in 4^th century Neo-Platonism, these can provide carriers that will expand our Christian imagination.

“There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.”
—Nadine Gordimer, Tanner Lectures, 19841

NATALIE CARNES TAKES ON an ambitious project in her first book: to recover beauty as a useful term for theology and philosophy, while taking seriously the critiques that have been leveled against it as a tool of oppression, a bourgeois construct, and an irredeemably vague term. Her central allies in this task are the theologian Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory’s sister Macrina, who was his teacher and mentor, but is known to us today only through his writings. The fact that Gregory is a fourth-century theologian is on the one hand a challenge, because his thought is not set in terms that correspond with recent debates about beauty. His distance from the twenty-first century, however, is also an opportunity: beauty’s story in philosophy and theology has been going on now for many centuries, and knowing the arc of that story puts our current positions in context. It reminds us that, for example, the condescending silence on beauty in much of the academy and the art establishment is brand new, historically speaking.

Carnes moves from her genealogies of beauty and of Gregory to an expansion of what she means by “fittingness” and “gratuity” as the markers of beauty. Here, she aims to do for beauty what Nicholas Wolterstorff “has done for the arts in disentangling them from disinterestedness [in Art in Action and in the essay he contributed to Theological Aesthetics After van Balthasar]” (58). Fittingness replaces functionality in her account of beauty, which leaves beauty flexible to pursue many different aims (a spoon used for eating can now be beautiful as well as a painting that hangs in a museum). Gratuity replaces disinterestedness, and one of the benefits is that gratuity leaves space for the perceiver and the perceiver’s desire, without turning beauty into a term of merely subjective approbation. To be beautiful, a thing must both be strikingly fitted to its aim, and it must be extravagant, given, gratuitous. Fittingness and gratuity are also consonant with the relational and feminist account of beauty Wendy Steiner proposes­ in Venus in Exile, though Carnes only briefly mentions that book.

From fittingness and gratuity, Carnes moves more deeply into Gregory’s theology of beauty and suffering, drawing on homilies in which, among other things, Gregory preaches (during a famine) on the importance of seeing the beauty of Christ’s face in the starving poor, and of responding with action and care. The Beauty Gregory proposes as one of the Names of God is neither classical beauty, nor certainly bourgeois beauty, nor the subjective liking sometimes meant by the word “beauty” today. Christ displays God’s glory by taking up need and suffering in an act of charity: this is what is beautiful. Carnes points out that this is both like and unlike Plato’s account of Love as the child of Need and Resource (160-61). A beauty characterized by fittingness and gratuity is promiscuous, in that it is open to any aim (including Nazi racial-purity aims), which is why Gregory’s theology is so important to Carnes: a beauty whose fittingness and gratuity are aimed at a movement of identification and care for material and spiritual poverty is no longer usable as a tool for bourgeois oppression.

If beauty is often hidden and shines out in unexpected places, how do we learn to see it? And is training into such beauty something available only to the privileged? This is the question Carnes pursues in her last chapter. She opposes Gregory’s (and Macrina’s) positions on beauty to Arthur Danto’s view of art as pure surface, and allies Gregory and Macrina with Jean-Luc Marion and Kaja Silverman as they attempt to develop accounts of selfhood based on love. In order to understand what Gregory means when he says that Beauty is a Name for God, we must train our spiritual senses “through attentive love to the neighbor and the afflicted and through the liturgy of the church” (xiv). If we want to see what Gregory calls Beauty, we must learn “to follow God,” which is “to imitate God’s love” (165).

It is a relief (to anyone who finds beauty powerful as a concept and a reality) to see its history so precisely, sympathetically, and yet unsentimentally traced out, and to see its critics met with such seriousness and grace. The discussion about beauty can be a philosophical and ethical morass, in which it is easy to lose track, not only of how to say what one means, but of what one means in the first place. This book is sensitive to the horrifying ways in which beauty has been misused (“beauty has a history that calls for sackcloth and ashes” (xii)), and it is articulate in developing, if not a definition, then categories for beauty (fittingness and gratuity). Most difficult of all, it provides an argument for how fittingness and gratuity can both describe a position like Gregory of Nyssa’s, in which beauty is one of the names for God, and describe the ways in which beauty can be used as part of the rhetoric that motivates genocide. I will be referring people to this book’s lucid, compellingly written accounts of beauty and of Gregory.

In pressing Carnes further, I want to go all the way to the end of her book, to the first page of the epilogue, where she returns to a key question in the theology of beauty: in what sense may we, as Christians, rightly call the Cross beautiful? “The Cross,” Carnes writes, “is beautiful for Coetzee’s Joseph [in his novel Elizabeth Costello] and the apostle John because it testifies to the unyieldingly creative depths of a Love that will not be thwarted by death, torture, malice, envy, indifference, or fear. That is, the Cross is beautiful because Jesus rose from the dead” (251). She is arguing here that the cross is ugly to the disciple John, and to Mary the mother of Jesus, who are seeing it in the moment of its full horror as brutal torture and defeat; while to the apostle John, who sees it with hindsight, from beyond the Resurrection, it is more fully visible, and its beauty is recognizable. The horror of Jesus’ torture and death is undeniable, and would have been devastatingly present to those who watched it and loved him. But I do not want to locate Christ’s victory exclusively in the Resurrection, or to exclude the possibility that onlookers like John the disciple, or Mary Jesus’ mother, might even on Good Friday have recognized an overpowering beauty at work in the midst of the horror. One way we might describe this beauty is as the beauty of willing sacrifice.

To come at what I mean from a slightly different angle: where in Carnes’ account is there room for the centurion who stands at the Cross (on Good Friday, without any formation by the church) and says “Surely this was the Son of God”? In Matthew, this comes in response to an earthquake, but in Mark it is a response to “the way [Jesus] breathed his last” (15:39). This is not a rhetorical question; I think there is room, but I want to find out where. How does such spontaneous perception relate to Gregory’s account of human formation to become beauty-perceivers? It seems compatible with his anthropology, in which the Holy Spirit is the one who trains us and enables us to see. This usually happens through the church, but there could be exceptional cases like the centurion’s without damaging Gregory’s general argument.

In claiming that the beauty of the Cross is visible only from beyond the Resurrection, with hindsight and Christian formation, Carnes makes the perception of the beauty of the Cross an ending point, a place of arrival. Seeing the beauty of the cross is a place of arrival, in the sense that we see that beauty more and more deeply as we are remade in God’s image. And certainly Elizabeth Costello’s response of revulsion and horror at the Cross is real, and common, and makes sense. The Cross is horrifying. If we miss its horror we have not seen it. And yet—don’t we also want to say that even before the Resurrection, there is beauty in the willingness and freedom of Christ’s sacrifice? And don’t we want to make space for a recognition of the beauty of that sacrifice as a possible beginning point into Christian community and formation, in addition to being an ending point?

Nadine Gordimer, David Bentley Hart, and Simone Weil all help me think about the beauty of the Cross as a beginning point for Christian seeing. In 1984, Gordimer, speaking of writers and their choices to get (or not to get) involved in South African politics in ways that risked comfort and freedom and safety, wrote that “there is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.” Christ’s willing descent into suffering and death is a sacrifice with absolute moral authority.

Carnes draws on David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite, in which he argues that in order to be good news, the gospel must be peacefully persuasive, and that therefore, it depends upon beauty as a nonviolently persuasive form of rhetoric. If we put this together with Gordimer’s statement about the moral authority of sacrifice, we get the beauty of the Cross as an at least potentially recognizable beginning point in the persuasion of the gospel.

Simone Weil is a concrete historical example of someone to whom Christ’s unforced descent into suffering is beautiful even without reference to the Resurrection. In the notebook entries selected and collected after her death into Gravity and Grace, the title section describes the spiritual equivalent of physical gravity: the force which continually pulls us down, whatever we may intend, and from which we cannot escape no mater how great a moral effort we make. The only force in the universe that is capable of going against gravity is grace. And what marks grace for Weil is not, at first, that it moves up where gravity moves down. Rather, it is that it moves down willingly where gravity moves down under compulsion. It is Christ’s willing descent, a coming down without being forced to, that is the greatest victory for Weil, and that breaks gravity from within. And it is this willing descent that she finds more beautiful than anything else in the world. I think that Weil’s view is harmonious with the account Carnes gives of wounded and yet triumphant beauty. Is it?

IN THE IDIOT, Dostoevsky’s most unsettling novel, the protagonist Prince Myshkin is drawn to beauty, and several times comments on beauty or is reported by others to have expressed an opinion about it. This should not be surprising, if, indeed, Dostoevsky was at all true to his stated intention in writing the book, which was to portray “the perfectly beautiful man.” What can be puzzling is that the Prince seems to contradict himself about beauty.

Early in the novel at the Epanchin family home, Lizaveta Epanchin, the mother of three eligible daughters, asks Myshkin to offer his impressions of the youngest named Aglaya. The Prince responds, “You’re an extraordinary beauty, Aglaya Ivanovna. You’re so good-looking that one is afraid to look at you.” Significantly, he also adds, “Beauty is difficult to judge; I’m not prepared yet. Beauty is a riddle (p. 77).”

Later in the novel, not one but two characters mention that Prince Myshkin has been heard to say that, “beauty will save the world.” Aglaya Epanchin confronts Myshkin with this declaration, and also the young radical Ippolit Terentyev, who is dying of consumption.

Impatient with Myshkin’s idealism and tentativeness about marriage, Aglaya flings the Prince’s words about beauty back at him before a dinner party announcing their engagement. She exclaims: ”Listen once and for all . . . , if you start talking about something like capital punishment, or the economic situation in Russia, or that ‘beauty will save the world’ . . . I’ll certainly be glad and laugh very much, but . . . I’m warning you ahead of time: don’t let me set eyes on you afterwards (p. 526).”

This rhymes with Myshkin’s earlier confession that Aglaya is “an extraordinary beauty.” But not entirely, since on that occasion, he also confesses that he is not ‘prepared” to speak about beauty definitively. “Beauty is a riddle,” he says. Yet if beauty is a riddle, how can Myshkin be so sure that beauty will save the world? If the beauty he has in mind is that of a woman, how can he be taken seriously? Aglaya certainly does not. She scoffs at the notion, for she takes Myshkin to mean beauty in just such terms.

The dying Ippolit Terentyev hungers for salvation, but despairs of it because the empirical knowledge in which he places his entire trust supports no such possibility. Ippolit believes that Christ exists, and even describes Christ as “a great and priceless being.” (p. 408). He does not, however, believe in Christ as his redeemer; he does not believe in the Resurrection. Christ could not save himself; how could he have saved the world?

Nonetheless, Ippolit is unable to let go of the possibility of salvation. And though it is not said outright, the reader may surmise that at some deeply intuitive level Ippolit recognizes that the beauty Myshkin says can save the world is not the beauty of a woman, such as the one Myshkin loves, or any other merely earthly being, but the Christ of Christian faith whom he, Ippolit, cannot bring himself to embrace. Ippolit tauntingly, but with a shade of pathos, asks Myshkin:

Is it true, Prince, that you once said ‘beauty’ would save the world? Gentlemen, . . . the prince insists that beauty would save the world. And I insist that he has such playful thoughts because he’s in love now. Gentlemen, the prince is in love ; as soon as he came in today, I was convinced of it. Don’t blush Prince, or I’ll feel sorry for you. What beauty will save the world? Kolya told me what you said . . . Are you a zealous Christian ? Kolya says you call yourself a Christian (p. 382).

Thus, Ippolit dismisses the thought that the beauty of a woman can save the world. He calls this notion a playful thought. Yet he also suspects that Myshkin has something else in mind that would have to do with Christ. This beauty has revealed itself most powerfully to the eyes of faith in the most unlikely of places, in the crucified Body of Christ on the Cross. “Are you a zealous Christian? Kolya says you call yourself a Christian,” Ippolit presses. We hear more about this in a speech he delivers to a group of friends soon after confronting Myshkin about the redemptive power of beauty. I will turn to this in a moment.

But before doing so, we must discuss another woman in the novel to whom Myshkin is attracted and finds beautiful, and to whose fate his own is tragically bound up. The woman is Nastasya Filippovna Barashkov. An uncorrupted Nature might have left her beauty untouched by anything ugly. Nastasya, however, is a wounded and scarred being, an afflicted soul, tormented and driven “mad” by the sexual abuse she endured as a child at the hands of the conscienceless Afanasy Ivanovich Totsky, whose paramour she becomes in her adult years as she enters society.

Myshkin happens upon a photograph of Nastaysa in the office of General Epanchin’s secretary, Ganya Ivolgin; and the Prince cannot take his eyes off of it. Ganya asks him “So you are attracted to such a woman, Prince?” And Myshkin replies: “An astonishing face! . . . It’s a gay face, but she has suffered terribly, eh. It speaks in her eyes . . . It’s a proud face, terribly proud, and I don’t know whether she’s kind or not. Ah, if only she were kind! Everything would be saved” (p. 36).

Later that day, Myshkin encounters the portrait again. On this occasion, the narrator leads the reader into the Prince’s inner thoughts.

It was as if he wanted to unriddle something hidden in that face which had also struck him earlier. The earlier impression had scarcely left him, and now it was as if he were hastening to verify something. That face, extraordinary for its beauty, and for something else, now struck him still more. There seemed to be a boundless pride and contempt, almost hatred, in that face, and at the same time something trusting, something surprisingly simple-hearted; the contrast even seemed to awaken some sort of compassion as one looked at those features. That dazzling beauty was unbearable, the beauty of the pale face, the nearly hollow cheeks and burning eyes — strange beauty. (pp. 79-80)

We are given to understand that Myshkin’s own affliction — his epilepsy – has made him a kindred soul to Natalya. Only he among the principal characters of the novel is able to see into and appreciate the complex mixture of beauty and ugliness in this fascinating woman’s face, that “strange beauty.” And as the story unfolds, the reader starts to realize that Myshkin and Nastasya both yearn for a place and a time out of time and place where all the agony and ugliness is gone and only peace and beauty remain. In this yearning lays their singular nobility and also the seeds of their mutual tragedy, as such a yearning runs up against the hard realities of a decadent Petersburg society.

With the help of her muse St. Gregory of Nyssa, Natalie Carnes explores and tries to make sense of how beauty in this world is inevitably mixed with ugliness. By ugliness I take her to mean not merely that which is physically unattractive, but even more important, the inner wounds and torments that cruelty, violence, and deprivation bring upon human beings and a fallen creation. “Beauty is rarely found far from ugliness,” Carnes writes, “and any search for an ugly-free beauty on this side of eternity bristles with the danger of self-deception and class-enclosure” (p. 130). She explains further:

It is not that finding beauty apart from ugliness is impossible (perhaps one can imagine our exquisitely functional cup), but that the greater and the more profound the beauty, the greater the ugliness in which it is implicated, for the profoundest beauties participate in the eschatological Beauty, which is to say, the One who is Beauty Crucified. (Carnes, p. 162)

It seems to me that a similar insight prompted Dostoevsky to write The Idiot. Or, perhaps, more accurate, the outcome of his effort to depict the “perfectly beautiful man” ran up against the hard truth that no such man, or woman” is possible – or believable – either in real life or, for that matter, in fiction; only the Crucified One is perfectly beautiful. Yet without knowledge of or belief in the Resurrection, the image of the dying man on the cross or in the grave is ugly and terrifying. As St. Cyril of Jerusalem (whose dates are almost identical with St. Gregory) wrote: “I confess the Cross because I know of the Resurrection.” Carnes says something similar when she submits: “The Cross is beautiful because Jesus rose from the dead. It is beautiful as the first fruits of the resurrection.. . . The Cross absent the resurrection – the cross Mary and John saw – is nothing but horrifying” (251).

In a sinful and fallen world, even the sweetest and most beautiful peach or pear has rot. Beauty is indeed inevitably mixed with ugliness. When early in the novel, Myshkin announces that beauty is a riddle, he hardly knows what he is saying. Nevertheless, he is hovering over this truth and honing in on it. And he runs right into the riddle when he sees for the first time the portrait of the strangely beautiful Nastasya Filippovna Barashkov, and later meets her in the flesh.

There is another picture that belongs to the novel that is related to the discussion above. During a brief stop in Basel, on their way to Geneva during August of 1867, Dostoevsky and his wife Anna Grigoryevna visited the city’s art museum in which Hans Holbein the Younger’s Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521) was displayed. Anna Grigoryevna left two accounts of this visit that suggest the purposes Dostoevsky may have had in mind for including the painting in his novel. She reports that Dostoevsky was so gripped by the painting that he perched on a chair, and stared at it for a long time, much to her distress, as she feared her husband would be caught and fined. Dead Christ in the Tomb depicts a newly deceased Christ laid out in a casket. The painting is life-size, nearly six feet long and just ten inches high. Christ’s body is emaciated, blue and swollen, riddled with the bloody wounds that were inflicted upon the man. His eyes are partially open, but they show death and not life in their glassy and lusterless appearance. It is everything a traditional Byzantine or Russian icon of Christ is not. And by all evidence that fact struck deeply at Dostoevsky’s religious imagination.

In the novel, a copy of the painting hangs over a doorway in the dark and eerily morbid family home of Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin, Nastasya’s suitor who in the end murders her with a knife. What if Jesus remained the corpse in Holbein’s picture, much as in the last scene of the novel Nastasya’s body lays, beginning to rot, in Rogozhin’s bed, the smell of the decay only camouflaged by bottles of disinfectant? Or, in other words, what if there were no divinity in Christ and there was no Resurrection? That terrifying hypothesis surely lies just beneath the surface of Myshkin’s response to Rogozhin, “I like looking at that painting.” Rogozhin announces. “At that painting!” Myshkin answers. “ A man could even lose his faith from that painting” (p.218). According to Anna Grigoryevna, these are the exact words Dostoevsky uttered when he first set eyes on the Holbein

Ippolit describes his own reaction to the Holbein in his speech mentioned above. The embittered young rebel who protests the absurdity of life and his own imminent death, demonstrates far greater insight into the Christian faith than virtually anyone else in the novel, excepting, perhaps, Myshkin himself. Ippolit is undoubtedly aware of the rules of iconographic art and the theology that supports those rules. And this is perfectly plausible for a Russian of the mid-nineteenth century. In spite of his rebellion and incipient nihilism, in traditional fashion, Ippolit keeps an icon in his room lighted with a lamp.

What strikes Ippolit most about the painting is that it does not convey in any perceptible way the reality of the Resurrection or the divinity in Christ. And for that reason, there is no beauty in it. “It seems to me,” he comments to his audience, “that painters are usually in the habit of portraying Christ, both on the cross or taken down from the cross, as still having a shade of extraordinary beauty in his face; they seek to preserve this beauty for him even in his most horrible suffering . . . I know that in the first centuries the Christian Church already established that Christ suffered not in appearance but in reality and that on the cross his body, therefore, was fully and completely subject to the laws of nature. . . . But, strangely, when you look at the corpse of this tortured man, one cannot help asking oneself . . . [that had] those who believed in him . . . seen a corpse like that (and it was bound to be exactly like that), how could they believe, looking at such a corpse, that this sufferer would resurrect” (p. 407)?

Ironically, for all the presumed realism (or naturalism) of the Holbein painting, the photograph of the real Nastasya is nearer to the truth of existence. The twistedness and ugliness that cruelty has engendered in her cannot hide beneath her physical beauty. Nor can the ugliness cover up her beauty, both inner and outer. The Holbein, however, which would be true to life, deceives by the absence within it of a vision of the Resurrection and the divine glory. In Ippolit the painting arouses dreadful dreams and hallucinations of a monstrous Nature that consumes life and all its beauty. In Rogozhin it arouses the murderous will to destroy a beauty that he cannot possess.

CARNES STATES THAT ONE of the most important features of the terms “fittingness” and “gratuity” is their elasticity (xii). This however, has the potential to leave beauty vulnerable to oppression, even violence, yet it also positively leaves “room for catechesis into alternate descriptions of beauty” (xiii). In order to engage Gregory’s perception of beauty, which challenges assimilations to cruelty and sloth, Carnes notes that a lifelong process of training is required to engage every sense of our body and spirit. Beauty itself “requires cultivating relationships of love with our neighbor, and that includes our membership in a community named the church” (xiii). This already gives beauty the identity of a form of resistance, namely against sin, and towards the cultivation of virtue.

Carnes approaches the practical application of beauty perceived in the modern age first through a discussion of a ‘theological rehabilitation of beauty.’ While this subtitle is used within the publication, I believe it also encompasses the entirety of Carnes’ efforts.

As Carnes approaches each of the issues within her chapters, fittingness and gratitude, poverty, and subjectivity, she also specifically focuses the theological rehabilitation of beauty in the most recent century through Jacques Maritain’s ‘object’ of the image of beauty, and Hans Urs von Balthasar’s ‘form’ of the image. She also considers the contemporary work of David Bentley Hart surrounding the notion of ‘ordered beauty.’ In this section, Carnes emphasizes that “beauty is the transcendental that manifests being” (40) and that “‘Art’ is the result of the mystery of being” (39). Yet to understand the practicalities of the application and harvesting of beauty within the arts, Carnes cites Wendy Steiner who directs the need to re-establish a vision almost “oracular.” The rehabilitation of beauty, then, demands an awareness “different from that of a critic, an art historian, and aesthetician, or an arts practitioner”1 (36). Beauty today requires the anticipation of a deeper revelation: one on a truly human level. Carnes believes this theological rehabilitation through object, form, and order is the best-endeavored route toward beauty, and her considerations for each chapter pair beautifully with this study.

In the first, it is prescribed that each object must be considered for its own fittingness and gratuity as it relates ontologically and through the height of creation: humanity and Christ. Carnes’ study of poverty relates fittingly with form, particularly focused on the poverty of the human form taken on by Christ at the Incarnation. Then, subjectivity, through the study of fittingness and gratuity of an object, is ordered toward beauty.

Fittingness and gratuity: Object

Carnes presents the significance of beauty in fittingness and gratuity by reframing it inside of Gregory’s doctrine of God. As the internal relation of beauty’s fittingness and gratuity becomes like a ladder in the individual person, Carnes makes use of Gregory’s language of ‘ladder’ that describes the mutual ascent to Beauty and to God, still in mind that “no created thing can claim to be fitting for God” (xiii).

Considering the object of artistic works in measurable terms of fittingness and gratuity, Carnes supports the notion from Maritain and Nichols that “crafts” do not possess the same intelligibility as fine arts. This intelligibility (of fine arts), as Nichols says, have “an intelligibility which exceeds that of a mere thing”2 (37) and its intelligibility comes from the artist’s creative intuition that animates the making – making fine arts a “more important – kind of beauty than crafts” (37). Yet in both fine arts and in crafts, “beauty” is similarly carried through both by the artists “careful attention to the object that he makes” (37).

Carnes emphasizes Maritain’s notion of the fine arts attending to representations of beauty that is finite, which “entails the much more human activity of attending carefully to the object right in front of one’s eyes” (38). Yet, considering the representation or non-representation of an object, philosopher Etienne Gilson considers the notion of ‘imitation of beauty’ by noting that, “painting is abstract by nature, for it abstracts from one of the dimensions of our space; and in another aspect it is inevitably conventional in the sense that, if its aim is imitation, only lines, curves and colors are at its disposal for the representation of solids.”3

Such a notion as the inherent abstraction within the creative arts further opens considerations of the object to further qualifications of ‘fittingness and gratuity.’ Rather than an object physically present before the artist, and replicated in artistic form, in his artistic career William Congdon became most concerned with the ‘object of the image’ that rises up and is transforms within the artist. This is similar to the aesthetic of painter Georges Rouault, after whom Maritain was inspired to write Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. Both Congdon and Rouault believed in the need for the artist’s sincerity, specifically to the image inside of themselves. For them, the aim of painting was first for it to became an ‘image of the artist,’ or rather, the transforming object inside of the artist as person.

From Maritain, as Carnes says, understanding beauty comes from understanding the right relationship between art and craft. In such a way, there remains a superiority of intelligibility in fine art; superior by its revelation of imaginative, intellectual and invisible realities. This superior revelation was further enhanced in Congdon’s thought by an artist’s integration into the life of Christ, which incorporated a ‘new dimension of beauty’ by incorporating the transfigurative image of Christ within the work.

Congdon’s aesthetic did not focus only on that object physically in the artist’s vision, but also that which is not in front of his sight. Such invisible realities, once again, would open a further analysis into Carnes’ categories of fittingness and gratuity, and a ladder progression, specifically through an orientation concerning Christ. In collaboration with Carnes’ collective thought on fittingness and gratuity, I believe this specific approach to the ‘object’ of beauty in art opens a way for a deeper level of truly human encounter.

Poverty: Form

Carnes then uses the subject of Christology to “consider beauty and poverty in light of the one who emptied himself of glory to take on the form of a bondservant” (xiv). Here, she also combats the notion of beauty as bourgeois: a notion that she claims has kept beauty in academic exile for much of the 20^th century. Beauty, however, has still been within the conversation of modern art and philosophy through realities like horror and ugliness. But the difficulties of reality are also where Gregory’s beauty and theological language was formed. As Carnes says, “it is a beauty that, while not reducible to ugliness or horror, cannot be found apart from them” (xiv).

Carnes then uses Balthasar’s notion of ‘form’ that contains parallels from Aquinas’ aesthetic criteria. The true, the good, and the beautiful are revealed through Christ, who is the form of God. And, she cites, “through form [that] the lightning-bolt of eternal beauty flash[es]”4 (38). Yet Christ, who assumes poverty and the human form, is also the boundless, undefinable Godhead. Considering the deeper level of truly human encounter in art, first in the relationship between the artist and Christ, it is ‘through the form of the human (person’s) body that the lightning-bolt of eternal beauty flashes.’ Through the artist’s human form, beauty is able to flourish, and flourish through their creative expressions. For artist William Congdon, the incorporation of Christ within his works led to an ordered but boundless sense within his aesthetic, and Rodolfo Balzarotti labeled such a venture as a ‘metaphysic of seeing.’5 This is similar to Carnes’ emphasis through Wendy Steiner, in establishing a vision or way of seeing that is grounded in prayer or anticipates enigmatic, authoritative weight.

Particularly, by establishing the nature of “gift” at the foundation of the person and the human body, one’s ability to see beauty rightly becomes both ordered and boundless.

Subjectivity: Ordered Beauty

The ability for a person to perceive beauty rightly, as Carnes writes, is Gregory’s question of “how the Holy Spirit makes us the kind of people who can see beauty rightly” (xiv). Beauty, and thus the perception for it, incorporates hidden dimensions beyond immediate visibility. Here, Carnes also makes clear that bourgeois training is not the right way to draw near to beauty, namely because of the love and significance of woundedness and self-knowledge necessary in developing perception of beauty. Carnes follows Gregory’s study to locate the “organ of beauty’s perception,” and sourcing it beyond the imagination or artistic training, finds the answer in “the entire anthropology of the human” (xiv).

The order of beauty, then, must be found through the truly human, and further trained through virtuous experiences in attentive love to neighbor, the afflicted, and in the liturgy of the church (xiv). This also requires a re-examination of the origins of perception, which Carnes explores through a pneumatological approach, and also requires a recovery of the origins of humanity. Both of these approaches to recovering an adequate perception of beauty are given their foundation in Christ, ordering the telos of beauty while focusing on the entire anthropology of the human.

In recovering an adequate perception of beauty, a theological rehabilitation of beauty, Carnes notes the need for a continued refinement of perception. Beauty reveals the importance of the beauty of theology and the theology of beauty, it bridges ancient and modern, the practical and theoretical, secular and religious, universally. Because from its foundation it takes-on many forms, it is the vision within the person that must be changed.

The question at stake is conducting a perception of beauty founded in Christ. David L. Schindler questions if Christology can be concerned with aesthetics.6 As Christians, the transformative effects of the Person of Christ not only open the way to Salvation, but offer a transfigured perception of all of reality. Dr. Natalie Carnes brilliantly describes the re-orientation of such human perception not only to beauty, but through the Beautiful One.

She states that, “our problem with perception is not just a problem of sorrow and sin; it is a problem at the very heart of life itself” (138). At the very heart of life, then, it appears critical to understand the effects of the Incarnate within the overall conversation of beauty and aesthetics.

If Christ brings with himself the key for our phenomenological memory to recall the invisible and eternal nature of humankind, what could this possibly mean to a whole realm of criticism concerning “visual” and ephemeral aesthetics? As a theologian and artist, I seek to understand beauty through a creativity of “gift” and a vision of “mercy.” Carnes pertinently asks what I have found to be the most satisfying question in this pursuit: “what would it mean to see radical gratuity?” (249)

What Natalie Carnes instigates and delivers here is a profound direction of “hope.” She radically proposes that neither proportion, unity, and clarity, nor woundedness wholly determine beauty. Rather, it is the crucified and resurrected Christ in whom the measure of beauty goes beyond both creation and fall. Taking-up both the creation and fall within himself, the glory of Christ measures the appropriate outpouring.7 Carnes asserts that this “eschatological orientation” is imperative to perceiving beauty, the glorified Christ, and ourselves. While proportion and harmony participate in the revelation of God, Carnes also believes that beauties which disclose the woundedness of Christ are “especially profound beauties” (252), though our ability to perceive their “fittingness and gratuity” will not be possible until we assume our resurrected bodies.

Until then, we are left with the task of finding the beauty of the image of God within the sufferings of humankind – assured of the glory of the invisible. Carnes echoes Gregory in saying that the best theologian assembles the shadow of Truth. Here and now, she proclaims, there is a reality that does not fully yield to sight – we are in waiting for the shadowless world.

This eternal beauty, given to the world in the reality of the Cross, “testifies to the unyielding creative depths of a Love that will not be thwarted by death, torture, malice, envy, indifference, or fear” (251). Yet, understandably, apart from the resurrection, the Cross itself is foreboding. As Carnes notes, however, the ultimate location of Beauty is the boundless, outpouring gift of the eschatologically glorified Christ.