[1] The \u201creappraisal\u201d promised in the subtitle of this book is most obviously a reappraisal of Luther\u2019s views concerning beauty.\u00a0 Mark Mattes intends to establish that Luther is neither a \u201cgreat foe of beauty\u201d (1) nor the architect of the \u201cdisenchantment\u201d of material reality (13).\u00a0 The author\u2019s larger objective, however, is to deploy Luther\u2019s theology of beauty in a broader reassessment that offers \u201ca new perspective on Luther, one that gives cosmic, historical, and social breadth as a counterweight or balance to the \u2018existential\u2019 depth that earlier generations of scholars have so ably described\u201d (4).<\/p>\n
[2] Beauty is a notoriously contested construct.\u00a0 Accordingly, Mattes\u2019 first task is to identify what notion of beauty will anchor his effort to piece together Luther\u2019s \u201ctheology of beauty\u201d in the absence of any systematic development of the topic in Luther\u2019s own writings.<\/p>\n
[3] The first chapter grants that Luther\u2019s distinctively theological aesthetics centers on\u00a0\u201cstrange beauty\u201d\u00a0<\/em>(14, italics original; also 163, 181, 204)\u2014hidden beauty, \u201cconcealed to human eyes and grasped only by faith\u201d (71).\u00a0 It is most clearly typified by the paradoxical beauty in the ugliness of the cross.\u00a0 \u201cChrist alone is beauty\u201d (85).\u00a0 Beauty just is Christ, in his death and resurrection, as the love and mercy of God\u2014or again beauty is the faithfulness, the \u201cbeauty-in-giving,\u201d of God (7; cf. 204: \u201cGod\u2019s righteousness is God\u2019s beauty\u201d).\u00a0 Thus, rather than presenting Luther as a figure who develops a distinctive theology from a shared sense of sensory or created beauty, Mattes argues, inversely, that Luther derives from his biblical theology an aesthetics that owes nothing to the senses \u2014nor does it borrow from the understanding of beauty (and its place in Christian life and faith) prominent in scholastic theology.<\/p>\n [4] Indeed, Mattes argues that Luther actively and deliberately \u201cundermines\u201d the theology of beauty and desire that dominates his era (and ours), breaking the hold of Greek philosophy on theological aesthetics.\u00a0 Medieval philosophers had adopted \u201cthe \u2018analogy of being\u2019 as the best description of the relation between beings and Being or between good works and the Good\u201d (10)\u2014and, by extension, between inferior degrees of beauty in created things and perfect beauty in God.\u00a0 Within this medieval framework, human desire and the appeal of the beautiful had come to\u00a0be seen as\u00a0the means by which the human heart is drawn from lower forms of beauty to higher ones, and from inferior to superior goods.\u00a0 Luther\u2019s predecessors considered beauty to have a metaphysical basis; beauty (like Being, oneness, truth, and goodness) had been regarded as a \u201ctranscendental,\u201d that is, a feature of \u201cthe structure of being as such\u201d (10).\u00a0 Luther rejects metaphysics because \u201cthe project of metaphysics\u201d pretends\u2014and fails\u2014to achieve certain knowledge of \u201cGod\u2019s being independently of God\u2019s self-giving in Jesus Christ\u201d (104).\u00a0 A metaphysics of divine goodness and beauty wrongly assumes a continuum between God\u2019s beauty and created beauty, thus domesticating transcendence and masking the self-will by which humans seek to establish parity with the deity (80).\u00a0 For Luther, \u201cinsofar as beauty is tied to goodness, it too will only be established through the gospel and not through metaphysics\u201d (67).\u00a0 According to Mattes, the apprehension of \u201cgospel beauty\u201d is additionally complicated because it can only be disclosed via the unattractive and shattering experience of the hidden God\u2019s alien work of destruction.\u00a0 Giving particular attention to the contrast between the theology of glory and the theology of the cross prominent in Luther\u2019s early works, especially the 1518\u00a0Heidelberg Disputation,<\/em>\u00a0Mattes binds Luther\u2019s theology of beauty to his theology of the cross and, by this means, to forensic justification: \u201cThe article of justification by grace alone through faith alone is not something other than or different from beauty, but instead articulates the core of what beauty most truly is, and even more importantly frees and so beautifies sinners and reveals this good earth as beautiful\u201d (204).<\/p>\n [5]\u00a0Martin Luther\u2019s Theology of Beauty<\/em>\u00a0thus offers a rich and complicated (if also in places repetitious) argument that reaches across the disciplines of history, aesthetics, philosophy, and theology\u2014and engages a tangle of medieval and modern adversaries.\u00a0 After the initial chapter framing the argument, there follow four sets of paired chapters.\u00a0 Chapters 2 and 3 set Luther\u2019s work in its historical context, the first examining Luther in relation to Aristotle and Plato, nominalism, and humanism, and the second placing Luther\u2019s teaching on goodness in relation to medieval views in order to argue that the Reformation can validly be approached as \u201ca debate over the nature of goodness\u201d (48).\u00a0 Chapters 4 and 5 (rightly described by Mattes as \u201cthe heart of this book\u201d [11]) lay out Luther\u2019s early and mature (1530s) considerations of beauty, emphasizing consistency throughout but tracing what Mattes interprets as Luther\u2019s increasing reluctance to affirm the view that some degree of beauty inheres in all things.\u00a0 Chapters 6 and 7, consolidating other recent work, consider Luther\u2019s treatments of (respectively) music and the visual arts.\u00a0 Chapters 8 and 9 represent Mattes\u2019 assessment of the \u201cimplications of Luther\u2019s view of beauty for contemporary theology\u201d (13).\u00a0 In chapter 8 the author contrasts Luther\u2019s theological aesthetics with those of Hans\u00a0Urs\u00a0von Balthasar and David Bentley Hart (both assimilated to the Medieval paradigm), arguing that Luther offers \u201ca path more faithful to the gospel\u201d (157).\u00a0 In chapter 9, he criticizes Rudolf Bultmann\u2019s \u201cmisreading\u201d of beauty as something that \u201clies beyond this life\u201d (quoted on 184), before proceeding to concluding remarks that provide both a reprise and a map for future contributions.\u00a0 Mattes has also assembled an extremely helpful bibliography of both primary and secondary sources, with the latter identifying abundant resources for readers interested in theological aesthetics, Luther\u2019s engagement with music and the visual arts, or recent studies of Luther\u2019s theology.[i]<\/a><\/p>\n [6] The path of argument is made challenging by the fondness of both Luther and Mattes for the logic of paradox.\u00a0 Three pivotal paradoxes offer opportunities for pursuing what Mattes has demonstrated is a long overdue conversation.<\/p>\n [7]\u00a0The aesthetic paradox: Things that are beautiful are ugly, and things that are ugly are beautiful.<\/em>\u00a0 Often Mattes\u2019 observations in this vein are less paradoxes than provocative ways of capturing shifting points of view.\u00a0 What qualifies as beauty is different from the point of view of God, the unjustified sinner, or the justified faithful believer.\u00a0 While not involving paradox, such perceptual discrepancies do leave the author with the problem of differentiating and ranking various individuals\u2019 apprehensions of the beautiful.\u00a0 The author sometimes suggests that there are two different kinds of genuine beauty, gospel beauty and creation beauty (e.g.,\u00a0111)–only the first of which is theologically interesting to Luther.\u00a0 At other points, he adopts a distinction between false and true beauty (e.g., 95)\u2014that is, between untrustworthy, merely apparent \u201cbeauty\u201d by which the worldly are deceived and beauty in or before God, which is actual, though hidden, beauty.\u00a0 Mattes\u2019 management of these shifting aesthetic assessments does pass into genuine paradox in two ways: (1) That humans and God assess beauty differently is not always a simple matter of warped or partial human points of view.\u00a0 In his discussions of God\u2019s \u201calien\u201d work, Mattes relies on Luther\u2019s notion that the blessings of God are concealed in or under events (like the execution of Jesus or dehumanizing personal suffering) that, from all points of view, are ugly in their pain and destruction.\u00a0 Yet paradoxically, these very events are also at the same time beautiful in that the alien and the proper work of God are folded inextricably together in them.\u00a0 (2) Relying on thesis 28 of\u00a0The Heidelberg Disputation,\u00a0<\/em>Mattes argues that God creates beauty out of\u00a0nothing<\/em>\u00a0(11) and imputes it (94, 111) to the ugly (but repentant) sinner, with the result that the (repentant) sinner is apparently simultaneously both beautiful and still ugly in the eyes of God, just as the (repentant) sinner can be both clothed in alien righteousness and still sinful (80\u201383).<\/p>\n [8] In this context, however, what do the words \u201cbeauty\u201d and \u201cbeautiful\u201d\u00a0actually add?\u00a0 Or what does \u201caesthetics\u201d add when, in his final chapter, Mattes contrasts a \u201ctheological aesthetics of perfectibility\u201d (identified by Mattes with the theology of glory) against Luther\u2019s own \u201ctheological aesthetics of freedom\u201d (187).\u00a0\u00a0 Once the construct of beauty is completely broken apart from the sensory, the affective, or the intuitively attractive\u2014when it is severed from materiality\u2014it threatens to lose its distinctive meaning, operating by metaphorical extension and becoming simply a term of validation for moral goodness, divine activity, any instantiation of a high-level value\u2014or whatever an author wishes to bless with highest approbation.\u00a0\u00a0All of\u00a0these things\u2014virtues, values, right relationship with God, the promise at the heart of a theology, the gift of life, justification itself (94)\u2014can be spoken about, perhaps more clearly, without invoking \u201cbeauty\u201d or \u201caesthetics.\u201d\u00a0 What, then, is gained, for either Luther or Mattes, by calling them beautiful?\u00a0 Is it to insist on affective response rather than cognitive belief?\u00a0 Is it to shift the fundamental vector of the life of faith from sacrifice to delight?\u00a0 Is it to rehabilitate human desire (rather than extinguishing it) by establishing desire\u2019s proper subject and by affirming the human capacity responsively to recognize right relationship with God as profoundly attractive?\u00a0 This issue lies at the heart of the book, for Mattes writes, \u201cnot only can one not understand Luther\u2019s view of beauty apart from his doctrine of justification as God\u2019s imputed righteousness to believers . . . one also cannot fully understand God\u2019s justification apart from beauty\u201d (110).<\/p>\n [9]\u00a0The theological paradox: \u201cGod kills precisely in order to make alive.\u00a0 God\u2019s \u2018alien work\u2019 of wrath exists for his \u2018proper work\u2019 of mercy\u201d (60).\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>While the theology of the cross provides a binary alternative to what Mattes characterizes as the scholastic theology of glory, the theology of the cross itself incorporates the paradoxical simultaneity of law and gospel, sin and salvation, the alien and proper work of God, wrath and consolation.\u00a0\u00a0 By the both\u2013and logic of paradox, Luther holds together in dialectical interplay these elements that, broken apart, would create a false dichotomy or misleading hierarchy.<\/p>\n [10] There is room to wonder whether Mattes treats these dialectical partners as more of a temporal sequence than paradox entirely authorizes.\u00a0 It sometimes sounds as if God\u2019s alien work\u00a0has to\u00a0be completed, over and done with, before the sinner is made new.\u00a0 Out of his strong condemnation of theologies of glory, Mattes emphasizes the law which \u201chounds\u201d and \u201ccrushes,\u201d the killing wrath of the left hand of God, accusation, disempowerment, the alien work of affliction and \u201cbitter experience\u201d\u2014all arrayed to batter self-confidence, subvert natural love and reason, defeat self-sufficiency, overthrow self-esteem, subjugate pride, humiliate the ego, \u201cexpose human emptiness,\u201d and bring the sinner through utter despair to worthlessness and finally to nothingness.\u00a0\u00a0 All of this, Mattes assures the reader, is \u201cso that\u201d God can \u201creestablish\u201d sinners \u201cas new creations through faith\u201d (70).\u00a0 This violent breakage is affirmed as the\u00a0sine qua non<\/em>\u00a0of human receptiveness to the Gospel promise of new life and the merciful love of God whereby God cloaks the sinner in alien beauty.\u00a0 Yet the effect (mitigated somewhat by chapter 3, \u201cLuther on Goodness\u201d) can be dispiriting, even repellant.\u00a0 In a seminary class, one might pair the book with an essay like\u00a0Veli-Matti\u00a0K\u00e4rkk\u00e4inen\u2019s\u00a0\u201c\u2019Evil, Love and the Left Hand of God,\u2019\u201d which provides a valuable exploration of Luther\u2019s implicit theodicy.[ii]<\/a>\u00a0 Reading the two together does two things: (1) Both authors, employing different vocabularies within the Lutheran framework, struggle to get from a darkly negative treatment of humanity and religious violence to beauty and hope.\u00a0 (2)\u00a0The conjunction of the two different approaches creates a space in which to question whether the left hand of God is actually the best starting point for addressing, in our times, those grace starved people of conflicted Christian faith or no identifiably religious faith at all.\u00a0 In aligning the theology of the cross with an implicit theodicy,\u00a0K\u00e4rkk\u00e4inen\u00a0suggests rather that it is the appropriate study for those of firm and established faith who, in some version of the soul\u2019s dark nights, are struggling to reconcile the world\u2019s felt or observed evil with their faith in and trust of the love of God\u2014a faith and trust that the ruin of the good threatens to destabilize.<\/p>\n [11]\u00a0The paradox in the structure of the argument: The beauty of creation that Mattes completely discredits as a self-disclosure of God is restored to the justified as a gift of God and possibly even as God\u2019s self-disclosure.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>Mattes aligns Christian attention to the material beauty of creation (in which medieval theology and the exemplars of the\u00a0nouvelle\u00a0th\u00e9ologie<\/em>\u00a0treated in chapter 8\u2014and, we might add, John Calvin\u2014find a revelation of God that is attractive and alluring) with what Luther identifies in those early works as the theology of glory.\u00a0 Having collapsed them into one, Mattes argues that Luther, in condemning the theology of glory, thereby denies that material beauty discloses anything about God.\u00a0 Nonetheless, Mattes does, in a turn of argument, restore created, sensory, material beauty to the justified for whom \u201cGod opens our senses to delight in the wonder that he has built into the fabric of creation\u201d (193).\u00a0 After the alien work of God has been accomplished and the humiliated sinner, brought to Christ at last, receives God\u2019s abundant love and mercy, the (repentant) sinner, clothed in the beauty of righteousness, will in that freedom discover the beauty of creation and appraise it rightly.\u00a0 This comes to pass\u00a0through\u00a0 \u201crenovation of the heart\u201d that \u201cleads to a \u2018renewal of the senses\u2019\u201d (131).\u00a0 This restoration is critical to Mattes\u2019 treatment of Luther\u2019s embrace of music and the visual arts, and it anchors his defense of Luther against detractors who blame the reformer for \u201cdisenchanting\u201d the world.\u00a0 Yet there are obscurities here.<\/p>\n [12] When Christians whose theologies differ from Luther\u2019s speak of created beauty, can they always properly be assumed to be in thrall to some program of self-perfection?\u00a0 Does rejecting material beauty as a means of self-perfection necessarily require rejecting out of hand the view that \u201cto one degree or another, all creatures are beautiful since they are either vestiges (nonhuman creatures) or images (human creatures) of God, who is beauty itself\u201d (70).\u00a0 Mattes himself grants, in his criticism of Bultmann, that \u201cbeauty is of God\u2019s making\u201d (184) and further that \u201cGod speaks not only in the Scriptures . . . but also in all creation\u201d (60).<\/p>\n [13] Must the faithful Lutheran consider all apprehensions of material beauty by those outside our circle of faith to be false or distorted?\u00a0 If, as Mattes argues, it is only through justification that a person receives created beauty as a gift of God, how is that person\u2019s apprehension of created or material beauty different from the apprehension of material beauty among the unjustified?\u00a0\u00a0 The author seems, at different points, to consider three possibilities:<\/p>\n Although the argument seems to waver among these accounts, it may be possible to harmonize them by making careful distinctions among natural beauty, human beauty, expressive artistic works, and the entire realm of\u00a0techn\u0113\u00a0(artifacts such as fur coats, Eames chairs, BMWs, the Golden Gate Bridge,\u00a0iphones, lawn flamingos, and so on).<\/p>\n [14] Clearly Mattes has given us much to consider by exploring this neglected dimension of Luther\u2019s theology.\u00a0 His contribution is notable in combining heritage studies with a vital concern for the outreach of faith in our own place and time.\u00a0 His exposition of Luther\u2019s distinctive treatment of beauty, positioning it as he does in relation to both medieval theology and prominent contemporary figures, is forceful, detailed, and engaging.\u00a0 The volume is thus a valuable, challenging, and durable addition to the rapidly developing field of theological aesthetics.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Notes:<\/p>\n\n