The Beauty of the Infinite : The Aesthetics of Christian Truth
The Aesthetics of Christian Truth
Paperback | 1 October 2004
At a Glance
448 Pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.5
Paperback
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Industry Reviews
"David Bentley Hart has written one of the most thrilling works of Christian reflection to come along in years. . . This is theology as high adventure, and the excitement continues after the last page is turned."
William C. Placher in The Christian Century
"I can think of no more brilliant work by an American theologian in the past ten years."
R. R. Reno
"An elegant, erudite treatment of basic themes in Christian theology, metaphysics, and contemporary cultural criticism. David Bentley Hart has written a book that is both radical and orthodox. The Beauty of the Infinite sets the standard for postmodern theology."
Paul J. Griffiths
"David Bentley Hart's book shows great patristic and philosophical learning. That is rare enough. Still more rare is the book's compellingly complete theology of beauty. Hart shows that the sublime aesthetic of the market -- this age's chief principality -- can be disrupted by (and perhaps only by) the gospel's radiant beauty. This book makes a major contribution to bringing that disruption about."
Reinhard H?tter
"Drawing from deep Eastern Orthodox wells, The Beauty of the Infinite achieves an extraordinary theological analysis and transformation of the postmodern condition. A work of breathtaking scope, David Bentley Hart's book combines an impressive mastery of the Christian theological tradition, East and West, with a subtle yet rigorous critique of the philosophical zeitgeist, culminating in a constructive systematic theology of stunning scope. By way of a trinitarian theology of beauty, Hart succeeds in composing a dogmatica minora that radically revises the metaphysical horizon of postmodernity. This book is Christian theology and metaphysics of a high order, an extremely rewarding tour de force."
R. Trent Pomplun
"David Bentley Hart -- like Soloviev and Florensky before him -- stands in the finest tradition of virile Eastern alternatives to modern Western philosophy and theology. A startling rejoinder to modernity and postmodernity alike, Hart's book will be judged by future historians as a fresh start for Orthodox theology done in the United States."
Geoffrey Wainwright in First Things
"A remarkable work. . . This magnificent and demanding volume should establish David Bentley Hart, around the world no less than in North America, as one of his generation's leading theologians."
John Milbank
"David Hart is already the best living American systematic theologian. The Beauty of the Infinite is his first major work."
Janet Martin Soskice in Times Literary Supplement
"A splendid book. . . Hart's prose is trenchant but often beautiful. There are penetrating, and frequently amusing, critiques of Foucault, Bultmann, and Deleuze, among others. . . The Beauty of the Infinite shows the vigor and power of theology, ancient and modern."
Nova et Vetera
"Despite the relative youth of its author, The Beauty of the Infinite merits consideration as one of the most ambitious and theologically insightful contributions to the field in the past decade. David Hart's fluid prose, sweeping grasp of theology and continental philosophy, and creativity enables him to ferry the reader from eastern patristic theology to French postmodernism, from Greek Attic tragedy to Nietzsche and Heidegger. His work deserves a careful reading by all serious students of theology."
The Journal of Religion
"On every page of The Beauty of the Infinite are provocative and original readings. Hart debunks many unexamined pieties nascent in the postmodern idiom and, at the same time, displays his own genius for rhetorical invention. Hyperarticulate and a great phrasemaker, Hart will please the logophile as well as the philologist; his erudition . . . and his eloquence . .
Introduction | p. 1 |
The Question | p. 1 |
Terms Employed | p. 5 |
Beauty | p. 15 |
Final Remarks | p. 29 |
Dionysus against the Crucified: The Violence of Metaphysics and the Metaphysics of Violence | p. 35 |
The City and the Wastes | p. 35 |
The Veil of the Sublime | p. 43 |
The Will to Power | p. 93 |
The Covenant of Light | p. 125 |
The Beauty of the Infinite: A Dogmatica Minora | p. 153 |
Trinity | p. 155 |
The Christian understanding of beauty emerges not only naturally, but necessarily, from the Christian understanding of God as a perichoresis of love, a dynamic coinherence of the three divine persons, whose life is eternally one of shared regard, delight, fellowship, feasting, and joy | p. 155 |
Divine Apatheia | p. 155 |
Divine Fellowship | p. 168 |
Divine Joy | p. 175 |
The Christian understanding of difference and distance is shaped by the doctrine of the Trinity, where theology finds that the true form of difference is peace, of distance beauty | p. 178 |
Divine Difference | p. 179 |
Divine Perfection | p. 183 |
In the Christian God, the infinite is seen to be beautiful and so capable of being traversed by way of the beautiful | p. 187 |
Desire's Flight | p. 188 |
Changeless Beauty | p. 192 |
The Mirror of the Infinite | p. 201 |
Infinite Peace | p. 207 |
The infinite is beautiful because God is Trinity; and because all being belongs to God's infinity, a Christian ontology appears and properly belongs within a theological aesthetics | p. 211 |
God and Being | p. 212 |
God beyond Being | p. 229 |
Analogia Entis | p. 241 |
Creation | p. 249 |
God's gracious action in creation belongs from the first to that delight, pleasure, and regard that the Trinity enjoys from eternity, as an outward and unnecessary expression of that love; and thus creation must be received before all else as gift and as beauty | p. 249 |
Analogia Delectationis | p. 250 |
The Gift | p. 260 |
Desire's Power | p. 269 |
As God is Trinity, in whom all difference is possessed as perfect peace and unity, the divine life might be described as infinite music, and creation too might be described as a music whose intervals, transitions, and phrases are embraced within God's eternal, triune polyphony | p. 274 |
The Divine Theme | p. 275 |
Divine Counterpoint | p. 282 |
As God utters himself eternally in his Word, and possesses all the fullness of address and response, and as creation belongs to God's utterance of himself (as a further articulation, at an analogical remove, of the abundant "eloquence" of divine love), creation may be grasped by theology as language | p. 289 |
Divine Expression | p. 291 |
Divine Rhetoric | p. 295 |
Analogia Verbi | p. 300 |
Salvation | p. 318 |
Salvation occurs by way of recapitulation, the restoration of the human image in Christ, the eternal image of the Father after whom humanity was created in the beginning; thus salvation consists in the recovery of a concrete form, and in the restoration of an original beauty | p. 318 |
The Form of Distance | p. 320 |
Christ the Sign | p. 327 |
"What Is Truth?" | p. 331 |
The Practice of the Form | p. 338 |
In Christ, totality's economy of violence is overcome by the infinity of God's peace, inasmuch as one order of sacrifice is overcome by another: sacrifice as the immolation of the beautiful is displaced by a sacrifice whose offering is one of infinite beauty | p. 344 |
The Economy of Violence | p. 346 |
A Gift Exceeding Every Debt | p. 360 |
The Consolations of Tragedy, the Terrors of Easter | p. 373 |
Eschaton | p. 395 |
Christian eschatology affirms the goodness of created difference, reveals divine truth to be inseparable from beauty, and exposes the totality as false and marked with a damnable finitude | p. 395 |
Time's Surface, Eternity's Light | p. 396 |
The Last Adam | p. 402 |
Rhetoric without Reserve: Persuasion, the Tyranny of Twilight, and the Language of Peace | p. 413 |
The War of Persuasions | p. 413 |
The Violence of Hermeneutics | p. 417 |
The Optics of the Market | p. 431 |
The Gift of Martyrs | p. 439 |
Index | p. 445 |
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved. |
ISBN: 9780802829214
ISBN-10: 080282921X
Published: 1st October 2004
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Number of Pages: 448
Audience: General Adult
Publisher: Eerdmans Publishing
Country of Publication: US
Dimensions (cm): 23.5 x 15.9 x 2.5
Weight (kg): 0.65
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