A classical Christian aesthetics measures any instance of the beautiful against faith’s affirmation that God is consummate beauty itself. Christian aesthetical judgment, however, is always exercised in the midst of the created conditions of existence where experiences of beauty offer imaginative entry to transcendent beauty. Thus, in faith, created beauty is judged to be so because it participates in the divine beauty. Even more pointedly, qualities that faith ascribes to the divine nature will be qualities judged to be beautiful in God’s creation. Divine qualities like mercy and love can be found in the realm of human virtue where they may be judged beautiful not only because they are emotionally poignant and relationally redemptive but also because human mercy and love share finitely in the beauty of these qualities as divine attributes. The divine attribute of goodness behaves like the moral attributes of mercy and love, not only in the sense that it admits of analogical construal but also to the degree that faith finds goodness beautiful, a judgment affirmed most strikingly by both Pseudo-Dionysius (fl. c. 500) and Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) who agree that goodness and beauty are the same.
Not all divine qualities, however, admit of this analogical translation as readily as others, and, as a consequence, resonate less aesthetically in the Christian imagination. God’s power and presence are examples of attributes that resist analogical construal and so Christian appreciation as the beautiful. Medieval Christian theology held that all created being possesses the transcendental qualities of oneness, truth, goodness, and beauty since these are qualities of the Creator. All being as being is beautiful, as are the conditions under which being appears, such as its power or presence. Yet, power and presence are not moral qualities like mercy, love, and goodness. The power and presence of finite being stand less easily in analogical relationship to the utterly divine qualities of omnipotence and omnipresence, even to the point that Christian discourse would be disinclined to speak specifically of creaturely power and presence as beautiful.
At first glance, it would seem that much the same could be said of the divine attribute of immutability. Like omnipotence and omnipresence, divine immutability does not easily admit of analogical translation to creaturely existence which is enmeshed in time and change. Nevertheless, it is this divine attribute more than any other that epitomizes God’s beauty in the Christian imagination. God’s immutability offers no homology to the created conditions of temporality and marks the divine transcendence with the absolute perfection that changelessness and timelessness logically require. True analogy may fail between the beauty of eternal perfection and the vagaries of created time, and yet classical Christian definitions of beauty readily imagine the qualities of beauty against the backdrop of divine immutability. Aquinas, for example, lists three qualities of beauty: “right proportion or harmony,” “brightness,” since “we call things bright in color beautiful,” and “integrity or perfection” (integritas, sive perfectio).” The perfection or completeness he ascribes to finite beauty, though, cannot approach the perfection of the immutable God, and conveys much more an aesthetical sense of the “wholeness” of what is judged beautiful. Too distant a comparison to be judged analogy in any strict sense, the aesthetical quality of perfectio dimly hints at the divine quality most attractive to Christian aesthetical judgment. However much some divine attributes susceptible to analogical construal encourage the believer to find some limited coherence between finite and infinite beauty, the attribute of immutability captures the Christian imagination with a divine beauty marked by its utter difference from all that is worldly.
Having offered such judgments about the attribute of immutability, we need to make a qualification that has some bearing on our present topic. As we have seen, Catholic belief maintains that tradition, along with scripture, is a mode of divine revelation, the means by which God has chosen to communicate the sublime and saving truth of the Christ event to the world. In a classical aesthetics of tradition, the doctrines and practices that make up tradition possess a definitiveness that defies time, since they are imagined to be – in the words of the fifth-century monk Vincent of Lérins – what has been believed “everywhere, always, by all.” It is Vincent’s “always” that carries the banner of immutability onto the field of tradition. Tradition, of course, is in time and, as the very process of “handing down” the faith, is characterized by change. Yet, a classical aesthetics of tradition finds the beauty of tradition in its abiding truth as divine revelation. The teachings and practices of tradition identified as the apostolic heritage are seen in this sensibility as fixed. The words of the Nicene Creed, for example, are as permanent as the truths about the nature of God and the saving drama that they express. The practice of the Eucharistic Real Presence is timelessly repeated in the communicant’s reception of the sacrament. Papal infallibility ensures the certainty of those dimensions of tradition which are not subject to change and so, in the judgment of the Church’s teaching authority, worthy of the entire Church’s appreciation as the timeless truth of revelation. Since revelation, and thus tradition as revelation, communicates God’s providential plan to save the world, and since that plan issues from God’s eternal love and unchanging will, tradition, of all that dwells in the creaturely realm, can be represented in faith as a finite reflection of the divine immutability. Its beauty, like God’s, lies in its difference from the ordinary conditions of temporality which, in this Catholic sensibility, are saturated with relativity and doubt.
