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A Broken BeAuty
Cultural Trajectories in Barth’s Theology of Divine Beauty
Professor Amy Plantinga Pauw reflects theologically on an exhibit of contemporary art
entitled A Broken Beauty. She finds that Karl Barth’s understanding of the beauty of the
incarnate Christ can lead us beyond the air-brushed images of beauty that dominate contemporary
western popular culture.
By Amy Plantinga Pauw
“I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a
fallen world,” writes the novelist Annie
Dillard, “and I am getting along…. I am
not washed and beautiful, in control of a
shining world in which everything fits,
but instead am wandering awed about on
a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for,
whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air,
whose bloodied and scarred creatures are
my dearest companions, and whose beauty
beats and shines not in its imperfections but
overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the
wind-rent clouds, upstream and down.” 1
Annie Dillard may seem like a strange
entrée point to Karl Barth’s theology of
divine beauty. But the point of Barth’s
1 Mosaic Spring 2007
dramatic recasting of divine attributes in
Church Dogmatics II/1 2 is that the doctrine
of God cannot be considered in abstraction
from God’s revelation to us and our response
to it. This means that the contours of divine
beauty receive their shape from God’s work
of redemption: we contemplate divine
beauty in light of God’s concrete claim on
this “splintered wreck” of a world.
Barth roots divine beauty in the Trini-
tarian glory of God that finds visible form
in the incarnate Christ. So any account of
God’s beauty must wrestle with Christ’s
human physicality in all its glory and
brokenness. Moreover, beauty is the radiant
form of God’s glory that elicits human joy
and delight. The beautiful God “acts,” Barth
says, “as the One who gives pleasure, creates
desire and rewards with enjoyment” (CD
II/1, 651). So human affective responses
are integral to Barth’s understanding of
divine beauty, and in his theology of God’s
trinitarian beauty we can chart a path to
understanding beauty in other forms of
human existence and artistic production.
Barth cautions, however, that in “all
other questions in the doctrine of God
we must be careful not to start from any
preconceived ideas, especially in this case a
preconceived idea of the beautiful…. On the
contrary, …[God] is the basis and standard
of everything that is beautiful and of all
ideas of the beautiful…. Our creaturely
conceptions of the beautiful, formed from
what has been created, may rediscover or
fail to rediscover themselves in the divine
being.” (CD II/1, 656).
On one hand, we can take this as a
salutary warning not to expect our
cultural understandings of beauty to
fit comfortably within the framework
of God’s revelation in Christ. Under-
standings of beauty in contemporary
western culture have been deformed
by sexist, racist, and commercial
interests, and we should be wary
of importing these understandings
uncritically into theologies of divine
beauty. On the other hand, it is futile
and self-deceiving to attempt to banish
from theology all cultural understand-
ings of beauty. Even theologians like
Barth who claim to make God “the
basis and standard of everything that
is beautiful and of all ideas of the
beautiful” still rely on cultural un-
derstandings of beauty. In fact, Barth’s
cultural assumptions have all the
more weight in his theology because
there is so little methodological room
for acknowledging them.
An example of these cultural
assumptions is found in Barth’s theol-
ogy of male-female relationality. He
assumes classical understandings of
beauty that revolve around harmony
and peaceful equilibrium. Barth takes
for granted that stable order and
unchanging complementarity are
beautiful and that these notions define
what it is to be a man or a woman. In
particular, he asserts that beauty in
human relationships requires that
“man is the head of woman and not vice
versa” (CD III/2, 287). For Barth, woman’s
subordination to man is a non-negotiable
element in the beautiful harmony of human
existence that forms an analogy to God’s ra-
diant beauty. Clearly, there are some cultural
assumptions about men and women at work
in Barth’s theology of beauty!
While maintaining Barth’s insistence
on staying close to Christian narratives of
God’s creative and redemptive presence in
the world, I chart an alternative trajectory
that centers on the beauty of the triune
embrace of a broken creation. The world is
created out of God’s freedom and delight
to reflect divine beauty and goodness, to
be a “theater of divine glory.” In the context
of creaturely sin and brokenness, God
enters into the ugliness and deprivation of
human existence, making it God’s own in
Jesus Christ. In “the glory of the mediator”
(CD IV/3) we see what divine beauty looks
like within the limits and vulnerabilities of
creaturely existence. The life and death of
the incarnate Christ reveal a broken beauty,
through which the glory of God’s grace
shines. The risen Christ sends the Spirit to
oppose all that is distorted and in bondage,
and to restore to us the freedom and joy of
God’s beloved creatures. Human creatures
are called to image God not as representa-
tives of an essentialized group (e.g. women
or men), but as agents who, in all their
cultural particularity, create parables of
God’s beauty that do not flinch from the
material and social realities of human
existence.
Artists exhibit in an intensified
way the gratuitous element in all hu-
man creativity, the deliberate choice
of material forms for the purpose of
making meaning. Artistic choices
are enacted in particular cultural
and communal contexts as fitting,
imaginative responses to what has been
both divinely and humanly given. The
integral role of cultural understandings
in artistic production means that art is
not simply the untrammeled expres-
sion of an inner selfhood. Yet inherited
cultural understandings of beauty do
not dictate artistic content; artists retain
freedom to resist and negotiate with
their cultural legacy.
In the contemporary art exhibit
A Broken Beauty, fifteen post-modern
North American artists reflect, resist,
and negotiate with western under-
standings of beauty, including female
beauty. By adopting figurative modes of
art they are also able to engage Chris-
tian traditions of religious devotion,
martyrdom, and discipleship in explicit
and provocative ways. The name of the
exhibit is borrowed from the theologian
Simone Weil, and reflects her convic-
tion that beauty and affliction coexist
in human life, and her confidence that the
image and presence of God are mysteri-
ously found in this nexus. In their deliberate
evocations of the realities of human violence,
disability, and pain, the artists in this exhibit
refuse to distance themselves from the suf-
fering and ambiguities of embodied life. Yet
even here they find images of beauty that,
in Simone Weil’s words, “anticipate grace”
even as “they struggle with gravity.” 3 Like
Spring 2007 Mosaic 1