Gregory J. Zuschlag
INTRODUCTION: THE CHALLENGE OF INCULTURATION AND THE PROBLEM OF THE DIVORCE OF THE TRANSCENDENTALS
One can interpret the recent interest in culture and “aesthetics” in U.S. Hispanic/Latino theological circles as a deliberate meditation upon the following question: how should the inculturated dimensions of faith be genuinely comprehended within the discipline of academic theology? Roberto Goizueta and Alejandro García-Rivera, in particular, have framed the question of inculturation in terms of the “Beautiful,” one of the three transcendentals expounded in the classical philosophical tradition in the West. Along with the “True” and the “Good,” the “Beautiful” rounds out those three qualities which can be predicated of any and all reality.
A question that comes immediately to mind is, “How can such an appeal to the Beautiful, part of an ancient trichotomy, provide a key to solving the issues of theologically interpreting inculturation? Goizueta provides a partial answer when he observes, “If Tridentine Western theology stressed the fact that God is known in the form of the True (Doctrine), and liberation theology that God is known in the form of the Good (Justice), U.S. Hispanic/Latino theology stresses that God is known in the form of the Beautiful.”[1] Besides highlighting the motive for such an appeal, Goizueta’s comment also suggests that the transcendentals, once united in the classical period, have been divorced from each other since the advent of the modern era.
This paper will more fully investigate the motives and suggestiveness of this appeal to the Beautiful by undertaking a twofold task. First, I will situate the current “aesthetic turn” in U.S. Hispanic/Latino theologies within the broader context of the twentieth century as it relates to the divorce of the transcendentals in the modern era. Second, I will compare and contrast the recent work of Robert Goizueta and Alejandro García-Rivera, two U.S. Hispanic/Latino theologians whose turn to aesthetics can be understood as a strategy for challenging the status quo of the divorce and offering an opportunity for remarrying them in our (post)modern context.
THE TRANSCENDENTALS IN 20TH CENTURY THEOLOGY AND THE THREE “TURNS”
I propose that one can situate the appeal to aesthetics in recent U.S. Hispanic/Latino theology within the overall development of 20th century theology itself. To do so, I will utilize a classificatory scheme that paints in “large brushstrokes” three distinct developmental or evolutionary “turns” in Christian theology during the twentieth century, each of which struggles with the theological significance of one of the three transcendentals (i.e. Truth, Goodness, or Beauty) in the wake of the modern legacy of separation. In other words, each theological turn can be seen as primarily focusing on either the Truthfulness, the Goodness, or the Beautiful aspects of the Christian faith. By developmental or evolutionary, I mean that to a large degree, the first historically gave rise to the second and the second to the third in like manner. While at first glance this may seem facile or artificial and the brushstrokes may appear to be too broad, the following explanation should clarify things.
The First Turn: Orthodoxy and the Issue of the Believing Subject
The years 1914-1965 and can be classified as a period fundamentally wrestling with the problem of belief within a Western European milieu increasingly either indifferent or antagonistic to religious faith itself and its accompanying revelatory claims. The theology of this turn focuses on the question of right thinking, or orthodoxy, and considers the question, “How is the True represented in the Christian faith?”
During this fifty-year period one perceives in Protestant circles a strong reaction against the dominant “liberal” theological paradigm of the nineteenth century whose origins derive from the post-Kantian legacy of the “turn to the subject” theology from Friedrich Schleiermacher to Ludwig Feuerbach. During this era a few predominantly German-speaking university Protestant pastor-theologians, such as Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, sought to overturn the so-called “natural theology” of liberal Protestantism. These theologians accused the dominant Protestant theology of the nineteenth century of making humanity, either in its capacity to know or feel, as opposed to God, “the measure of all things,” thus seriously eroding the “transcendent” dimensions of faith. A handful of Western European Catholic theologian-priests, such as Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Bernard Lonergan, Joseph Ratzinger, and Hans Küng, endeavored to offer significant alternatives to regnant forms of proof-texting Neo-Scholastic Thomism and its “extrinsicist” formulations of the nature-grace questions. Remarkably, even though these priest-theologians worked primarily in largely academic settings and at times were in conflict with ecclesiastical authorities, the tenor of their thought is reflected in the documents of Vatican II, especially the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes).
These theologians evidence a preoccupation similar to that of their theological opponents, the question of “orthodoxy,” or right belief. Thus, despite the divergent confessional stances as well as the diverse theological perspectives of this handful of individuals, they all share one common task: that of making the case for the overall reasonableness (or unreasonableness) of the modern believing subject to both their fellow religious believers and to those belonging to the secular realm. Regardless of their respective attitudes about rationality per se (e.g. Lonergan’s bias for; Barth’s bias against) and their more or less “systematic” approach to theology (e.g. Tillich and Rahner as more; Küng and Bonhoeffer as less), the works of these theologians operate within the framework of contentious issues of doctrine and concern themselves with questions over the “conditions for the possibility” of religious belief in an increasingly irreligious and unbelieving world.
The period of the first turn proved a monumental one for theology. The resolution it brought, for a while, seemed hopeful. It was an era dominated by a few eminent European or European-style academics, many of whom left a legacy of voluminous and dense “systematic” treatises that could fill many bookcases. They inspired and continue to inspire many theologians today. Yet, despite the longevity and legacy of these men, by the late sixties something new from non-European lands was about to appear on the theological (and continental) horizon that they probably could not have foreseen in their time.
The Second Turn: Orthopraxis and the Issue of the Nonpersons
From the late sixties on, theologates and seminaries around the world have devoted great energy to digesting the “modern” theologies described above. Though appeals to the individual thinking subject have remained vital to theology,[2] from the late sixties to the early eighties a novel approach to doing theology was being born along the “margins” of mainstream theology in the guise of “liberation” and “feminist” theologies. A short list of this the first generation of the influential theologians and the theological movements they helped found includes: Mary Daly and Rosemary Radford Ruether in feminist theology, J. Deotis Roberts and James Cone in black liberation theology, and Gustavo Guitérrez and José Miguez Bonino in Latin American liberation theology.
Coming of age in a time of great socio-political turmoil and unrest all around the world (especially in the United States and in Latin America), the advent of the projects of this very diverse group of theologians marks the beginning of the second major turn in twentieth-century theology, a turn from the problem of the believing subject to the problem of the oppressed person, the “nonperson.” This turn signaled a shift of attention away from orthodoxy to orthopraxis. It asked the question: “How is the Good represented in the Christian faith?”
These “fresh” theological eyes saw through the shortcomings of these earlier twentieth-century theologies. In the previous theologies’ overemphasis on rational belief, other areas central to the Christian faith had been eclipsed, namely Jesus’ concern for the anawim of his day and his call to “liberate” those held “captive” by systematic social injustices. This blind spot had caused the theologians of the first turn to be not only insufficiently critical of the more public “sins of the world” (i.e. classism, racism, sexism, and colonialism) inherent in the values and practices of the secular society at large but also those same “isms” endemic to Christianity and its churches as well. In noticing that the “cries of the poor” and faith of the oppressed had been relegated to a place outside of the hegemonic ivory tower of academic theology, this new group of theologians spoke out in a prophetic voice for those people in the larger, mostly non-European world, for whom belief was not a matter of choice but rather an integral part of day-to-day survival.
While the theologians of this turn did not totally abandon questions regarding the intellectual viability of the Christian faith, the turn to praxis primarily stressed Christian faith capacity for “directed activity.”[3] In this vein, Christian praxis concerns itself with the activity of liberating people from oppression and bringing about a just social and ecclesiastical order in light of the Gospel. Paraphrasing Gustavo Guitérrez’s definition, theology reflects critically on liberating action, or Christian praxis.[4]
Affirming the rational legitimacy of faith by appealing to the “experience” of the oppressed allowed the theologians of the second turn to place greater stress on action – as conceived under the term praxis – over contemplation or speculation – as conceived under the term theoria – in their theological enterprise. This did not mean that ethics replaces doctrine or that an “anti-intellectual” bias reigns in these theologies. Rather, in terms of methodology, theology, in the turn to praxis, should both emulate Marx’s[5] demand – that philosophy should not merely “interpret” the world but change it – and echo Paul’s charge in Romans to “not conform yourself” to the world but be “transformed” so that “you may discern what is the will of God.” If theology is not fundamentally about the practical lived consequences of Christian faith, then it is neither truly reasonable, nor about the Gospel.
Despite the challenging tenor of the rhetoric, the critical nature of the ideas put forth, and the tumultuous debate that ensued, these theologies distinguished themselves as valid approaches within mainstream theology on the grounds that they were turning the Christian community’s collective attention to the question which had been traditionally neglected, the question of the Good. While the praxis-based theologians “revolutionized” theology (perhaps in more ways than one!) both in focus and method, in doing so they planted the seeds for a third turn in twentieth-century theology, the turn to the Beautiful.
The Third Turn: Orthoaesthesis and the Issue of Inculturation
Making social location/context central alerted theologians to the importance of culture in the lives of particular faith communities they sought to liberate. Over the last twenty-five years, the focus on culture has been of immense value to theologians in regions like Africa and India and those countries comprising the Asian-Pacific rim. Despite the distinctiveness of the cultures of each of these countries, theologians from these lands resemble their North and South American counterparts in that they are reflecting on the struggles and emancipatory concerns of oppressed peoples. Their engagement in a “post-missionary era” of issues surrounding Western colonialism and the positive and negative effects it has had on their particular people’s indigenous religion recommended “culture” as a better category for analysis.[6]
Back in the Americas, concern for the inculturated aspects of Christian faith has developed into a distinctive offshoot movement from the trunk of the praxis-oriented theologies. In its accentuation of culture, this offshoot movement either implicitly or explicitly challenges the hegemony of neo-Marxist political-economic analysis. It has done so not because of its association with radical or leftist political agendas per se, but rather its tendency to overlook the valuational aspects of human life (i.e. the religious sensibilities manifested in rite, ritual, and symbol). This oversight comes as a result of its near exclusive attention to the instrumental norms and aims of human agency (i.e., action in the political-economic sphere).
Moreover, inculturated theologies probe the cultural dimension of religious faith, especially as manifest in “popular religiosity.” They do this not at the expense of the political and economic dimensions of Christian faith, but rather as the element of Christian faith that encapsulates the other dimensions. It is important to stress here that the approaches adopted by inculturated theologies have no direct links to reactionary conservative circles who want to promote “otherworldly” forms of religious piety and devotion, often as a means of suppressing initiatives for radical social change. The clarion call, “praxis is not enough!”, issued by contextually sensitive theologians, has more to do with the critique of earlier liberation theology as falling victim to an uncritical reliance on the distinctively “secular” or “modern” academic disciplines (e.g. sociology, psychology, cultural anthropology, and economics). Such disciplines often retain built-in reductionistic and materialistic presuppositions about religion. [7]
Expanding theological reflection to include cultural realities empowers theologians to amplify the praxiological value of a people of faith struggling against the “isms” of the world, especially that of colonialism. It also significantly expands praxis-oriented theology’s focus by taking into account the more intangible, nonquantifiable, and distinctive qualities of a group’s social location that often eludes the methods and practices of straightforward sociological analyses. To these ends, theologians committed to genuine liberation of marginalized peoples who concurrently pay special attention to the cultural/ethnographic contexts of these people signals a third turn in twentieth century theology by raising the question about the Transcendental of Beauty: “How is the Beautiful represented in the Christian faith?” Put differently, the joint call to culture and challenge to certain conceptions of praxis opens the way to what was described in the introduction, the turn to aesthetics or the shift from orthopraxis to what I creatively term, “orthoaesthesis” – correct appreciation or valuation.
Creating and employing a term like “orthoaesthesis” and speaking about the intrinsic value of culture under the designation “aesthetics” may sound strange and/or unfamiliar at first. However, articulating inculturation in “aesthetic” terminology accords with the threefold typology of the transcendentals which I have put forth as a way of situating the current interest in aesthetics in contemporary U.S. Hispanic/Latino theology within the larger and developing context of twentieth century theology. To this interest, especially as it is reflected in the recent work of Robert Goizueta and Alejandro García-Rivera, I want to examine in more detail in the second section. Reviewing their work will allow me to indicate the aesthetic turn’s fruitfulness for inculturated theology along with the potential therein for reunifying reflection about the three transcendentals in contemporary theology.
AESTHETICS IN U.S. HISPANIC/LATINO THEOLOGY: GOIZUETA AND GARCÍA-RIVERA
The conversation in U.S. Hispanic/Latino theology about popular religion and Hispanic/Latino spirituality presently includes numerous voices: Justo Gonzaléz, Allan Figueroa Deck, Ada María Isasi-Diaz, Orlando Espín, Jeanette Rodríguez, Sixto García, Robert Lasalle-Klein, Peter Casarella, and Virgilio Elizondo, the chief initiator and inspirator of the discussion. Over the last ten years, Cuban-American theologians Robert Goizueta and Alejandro García-Rivera have played a major role in the conversation. Besides several articles, each has written major monographs concentrating on the cultural dimension of faith. They also attend to the aesthetics dimension of popular religiosity.[8] Their respective theological “aesthetics” deserves close examination.
Two Motives: Advance Elizondo Philosophically and Reconcile the Trichotomy of the Transcendentals
Goizueta and García-Rivera’s recent endeavors to conceive of the cultural dimensions of Christian faith under the term of “aesthetics” evince, I contend, two inter-related motives. The first involves the pioneering work of U.S. Mexican-American Catholic priest and theologian, Virgilio Elizondo and his seminal insights into the interface between religion and culture.[9] Similar to fellow U.S. theologian James Cone, Elizondo’s “deep regard” for the spirituality and religious practices of a particular group of people (in Elizondo’s case Tejanos, or Mexican-American Texans) “allowed for an invaluable contribution to theological method by taking culture seriously.”[10] Inspired and nourished by Elizondo’s almost thirty years of tireless pastoral and theological work in the area of inculturation, Goizueta and García-Rivera both search for a more adequate theoretical framework for developing Elizondo’s theological insights.[11]
Both turn toward the western philosophical tradition for their theoretical frameworks as opposed to the contemporary academic disciplines of sociology and cultural anthropology. Their tendency to eschew methods and categories drawn from both the disciplines of sociology and cultural anthropology might indicate a lack of confidence in such modern or “secular” disciplines to account for those realities they wish to examine from a theological perspective (i.e. popular religion). This suspicion may be grounded in these disciplines’ history of exhibiting a certain built-in reductionistic and anti-religious/metaphysical bias. On the other hand, philosophy, over the course of its history, has manifested pro-, anti-, and relatively neutral religious/metaphysical biases. Philosophy’s track record on religion, while not spotless, would appear to be a “sounder” discipline on the whole to engage. “Aesthetics,” then, understood as a classical philosophical term instead of as one borrowed from literary/art criticism, empowers Goizueta and García-Rivera to reframe Elizondo’s insights about inculturation into a discipline more accommodating not only to the topic of religion but to the “stickier” theological subject of popular religion and piety.
Second, both Goizueta and García-Rivera seek to interrelate the True, the Good, and the Beautiful in a satisfactory theological manner. Goizueta discusses them under the rubric of rationality, praxis, and aesthetics.[12] García-Rivera speaks of them as constituting communities; the community of the True, of the Good, and of the Beautiful.[13] While the more explicitly theological typology employed in this paper of orthodoxy, orthopraxis, and (the more “unorthodox” term) orthoaesthesis endeavors to complement and account for the contributions of Goizueta and García-Rivera, all three triads point to a common task: that of returning considerations of “Beauty” to theological discourse as the means of breaking down the post-Kantian trichotomy between theoria or pure reason, praxis or practical reason, and aesthesis or esthetic judgment. Theologians of the first turn often struggle with resolving the dichotomous tension between the rational and non-rational, or affective dimensions of faith. Theologians of the second turn focus their attention on closing the dipolar hermeneutical circle of theory and practice. Theologians of the third turn, especially Goizueta and García-Rivera, appear to have tacitly recognized that the problem is not that of reconciling a dichotomy, but rather a trichotomy. Despite the different terminology employed, Goizueta and García-Rivera’s compatible projects supply inculturated theology with stronger philosophical moorings by rooting it within discussion of aesthetics as well as within a larger conversation about the interrelatedness of the three transcendentals. This presents itself not only as a novel enterprise for U.S. Hispanic/Latino theology, but as a much needed contribution to contemporary theology at large. I turn to their reuniting of the transcendentals in the next two sub-sections.
The Aesthetics of Vasconcelos and von Balthasar: Taking Cues and Giving Criticism
As mentioned before, both Goizueta and García-Rivera adopt aesthetics as a way of overcoming the methodological limitations of the second turn preoccupation with orthopraxis.[14] They draw on the aesthetic insights of two different thinkers. Goizueta uses José Vasconcelos, the “Romantic” intellectual from the Mexican revolutionary period, while García-Rivera turns to Hans Urs von Balthasar, the mid-twentieth century Swiss Catholic theologian.
Goizueta lauds Vasconcelos for his insistence on the intrinsic value of human action against the instrumentalist notions being espoused by the then current Comtean-type positivism. Goizueta finds a parallel between positivism and Marxism instrumentalist notions of human action. Thus, he faults liberation theology for its use of Marxism’s tendency to reduce human action or praxis (here understood as “interpersonal relationships” or activity which is “its own reward”) to poiesis (“economic production” or activity whose value lies in “its results”).[15] Goizueta commends Vasconcelos’ promotion of “human interpersonal action” (relationality) as being primarily aesthetic; what Vasconcelos refers to as “empathic fusion.”[16] As understood by Vasconcelos, empathic fusion involves a type of interpenetrating knowing that can be achieved only through emotions, or empathy, which moral or rational reason cannot achieve. In this, Goizueta locates an important insight and point of departure for a sounder understanding of Hispanic/Latino popular religiosity, especially in his principle example of the elaborate and dramatic Holy Week celebrations that take place in the predominately Tejano community at San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio, Texas. Through these liturgical reenactments of the Passion of Jesus Christ, which often take place outside of the church sanctuary in “civic space,” the congregation empathically fuses, in the words of Vasconcelos, with the pain and suffering, joy and exhalation of Mary and Jesus in the journey to Good Friday and Easter Sunday.[17] Valuing the aesthetic and empathic dimension of collectively walking with Jesus (“Caminemos con Jesús”) permits one to see a real, sacramental, and truly transformative fusion transpiring between the faithful, on the one hand, and Jesus and Mary, on the other. In this aesthetic human action, the people come to affectively “know” Jesus and Mary’s Triduum experience at the very same time the people also know that through these events, Jesus and Mary affectively and effectively “know” the Triduum experience of their day-to-day lives as well.
However, in placing feelings (e.g. empathy or love) above and beyond both morality and rationality, Goizueta correctly detects that Vasconcelos continues to maintain the separation between the three transcendentals. Because of this, he critiques Vasconcelos for “understanding aesthetics as a leap beyond ethics, and (by) identifying aesthetics with the world of feelings.” This move, Goizueta argues, makes Vasconcelos “not sufficiently attentive to the intrinsically ethical-political and economic dimensions of aesthetic action.”[18] In cutting human ethical (political and economic) action off from the cultural or aesthetics dimension, Vasconcelos risks not only running onto the shores of complacency in the areas of politics and economic but “undermining his own struggle against ethnocentrism and racism.”[19] In taking up Vasconcelos’ aesthetic notion of empathic fusion, Goizueta insists that real fusion “is mediated, not only by feeling but also by action, and not only by our physical bodies (an assertion critical for Vasconcelos’ case for the superiority of the Mexican mestizaje as La Raza Cosmíca), but also by the political, economic, and social structures in which we participate.”[20]
García-Rivera enters the dialogue of aesthetics with Hans Urs von Balthasar, a theologian known for his comprehensive erudition and his singular effort to put forth a systematic theological aesthetics in contemporary theology. García-Rivera endorses von Balthasar’s careful elaboration of a Pseudo-Dionysian inspired understanding of anagogy which complements – in what has come to be known in common theological parlance, courtesy of David Tracy, as the “analogical imagination.” As a type of “uplifting,” anagogy affirms the importance of the asymmetry between the created and the Creator as a condition for coming to know the infinite. Our necessity of being “lifted up” by God endows the analogy of being with an important dynamism. Von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics of anagogy and “seeing the form” empowers theological reflection to be respectfully receptive to “seeing the form(al)” “difference” or the “dissimilar similarity” of both others and the Other (i.e. God).[21] By affirming the real (ontological) objective (epistemological) difference of the O/other in aesthetic terms, von Balthasar contributes a newfound conceptual capacity to Hispanic/Latino theology for articulating the second of its two “driving issues” which go hand in hand: the first “redemptive liberation”; and the second, “aesthetic inculturation.”[22] Liberation theologians, or theologians of the second turn, have addressed redemptive liberation adequately in García-Rivera’s mind. However, like Goizueta, he believes that in their pursuit of justice by focusing on the “practical-theological centers” of thought, they have been insufficiently attentive to inculturation, or the “cultural-symbolic centers” of thought.[23] With regards to this second issue, García-Rivera finds von Balthasar’s aesthetic insights truly inspirational for Hispanic/Latino theology, especially for understanding the centrality and the cosmic significance of the uniquely Hispanic/Latino devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Von Balthasar’s aesthetics of difference allows one to (conceptually) “re-cognize” the Beauty and the salvific nature of the “Guadalupean event” in a contemporary world too often indifferent to and nihilistic about both Beauty and redemption.[24]
However, at the same time, García-Rivera claims that “such inspiration leads to frustration” because von Balthasar remained unclear as to how his theological aesthetics actually “works.”[25] As suggested in my typology of the three turns, theologians of the first turn were given to excessively abstract and theoretical speculation in their task of dealing with the issue of belief. For this they were taken to task by the praxis-oriented theologians of the second turn. García-Rivera practically faults von Balthasar precisely on this score when he note the lack of concreteness in von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics. Moreover, García-Rivera asserts that the philosophy of being (ontology) undergirding von Balthasar’s project falls victim to the temptation of “retrenchment” to “onto-theology”; an accusation linked to Heidegger’s all-encompassing critique of Western metaphysics.[26] Von Balthasar’s ontology, García-Rivera attests, “takes us to theology rather quickly.” I take this to mean that von Balthasar emphasizes the “vertical” dimensionality of Being at the expense of the “horizontal” – the crucial dimension for doing inculturated theology.[27]
Goizueta and García-Rivera each affirm some aesthetic insights of the figures each studies; and both critique those same figures for removing aesthetics from more concrete, practical, and worldly concerns. While the thought of Vasconcelos and of von Balthasar supports the importance of aesthetics and the transcendentals themselves, both, for vastly different reasons, fail to relate adequately Beauty, Goodness, and Truth in the minds of their respective admirers. Vasconcelos, like the great German Romantics of the nineteenth century, gets lost in the overgrown forest of romanticism while trying to escape the callous city of rationalism and utilitarianism. Similarly, Von Balthasar’s onto-theology of Being is better suited for display in a museum of thought than its use in the “everyday streets” of struggle and change. I turn next to how Goizueta and García-Rivera fair in their own enterprise of interrelating the three transcendentals.
Reuniting the Transcendentals: “Theopoetic Praxis” and “Theological Aesthetics”
So far my examination of Goizueta and García-Rivera shows that they possess similar goals, motives, resources, approaches, and strategies. Notwithstanding significant differences in style – Caminemos con Jesús comes across as candid, biographical, rousing, and didactic while The Community of the Beautiful, equally personal, evinces more of an enigmatic, literary, suggestive, and contemplative style – the two theological projects appear to be traveling on parallel tracts until one compares how each charts a solution for actually reuniting the transcendentals. Their distinctiveness lies not only in their unique solutions but more so in the different philosophical resources and frameworks upon which they rely for devising their solutions.
In the effort to move beyond Vasconcelos’ excessive aestheticism, Goizueta wants to reintegrate empathic fusion with a wider notion of praxis that includes poiesis but is not reduced to it. In Caminemos con Jesús, he describes his extended notion of praxis as “aesthetic praxis” and elsewhere, as a “theopoetics” of acompañamiento (accompaniment).[28] In the future, I shall designate his position as “theopoetic praxis.” The method of theopoetic praxis allows one to articulate a “domestic, urban theology of accompaniment” that accounts for both the artistic-ritualistic, affective, organic, and relational dimension of empathic fusion associated with a “cultural-symbolic” approach to theology while upholding “the preferential option for the poor” required by the “practical-theological” approach of classic liberation theology.[29] In the clearest delineation of his position I was able to find, Goizueta writes:
All three – imagination, reason, and ethics – have a single common and unifying ground: human praxis. More precisely, the affective, aesthetic imagination, the rational intellect, and ethical-political commitment are all intrinsic dimensions of human praxis. (Too often, praxis has been simply reduced to ethics, with the inevitable consequence that praxis has been divorced from both theory, or critical reflection, and aesthetics, or affective, imaginative cognition. I am suggesting that praxis grounds aesthetics, theory, and ethics). Therefore, praxis is inherently aesthetic, involving an affective engagement with another, and ethical-political action, oriented toward the liberation of the other qua other, without which there can be no genuine relationship or community. Praxis is nothing other than human intersubjective action – that is, the relationship among whole human persons in community – as an end in itself.[30]
Goizueta deems that this wide, integrated understanding of praxis avoids the three pitfalls of aestheticism, legalism, and rationalism by uniting the three under theopoetic praxis. In keeping with the theme of this paper, this would appear to be not just a novel but a vital method. An important question remains: “How does Goizueta hold them together?” Goizueta does not adopt a singular philosophical method or explicitly defend any particular philosophical system in articulating his theopoetic praxis; but a close reading of his preface and the first chapter of Caminemos reveals that Goizueta draws primarily upon two streams of thought: Latin American philosophers deeply influenced by neo-Marxist thought, like Enrique Dussel and Kostas Axelos, and the theologians schooled in Bernard Lonergan’s epistemology, like Hugo Meynell, Matthew Lamb, David Tracy, and Steven Happel. Goizueta combines these two seemingly unrelated schools of modern thought to construct a loose philosophical backdrop for his theopoetic praxis. The backdrop blends an Aristotelian or classical expansion of Marxist notions of praxis and the transcendental (i.e. neo-Kantian) Thomistic notions of “interpretative horizon,” “intersubjectivity,” and “cognitive self-transcendence.”[31] This combination, Goizueta believes, allows him to fend off both the ills of modern liberal individualism and “post-modern” deconstructionist thought. Yet, Goizueta relegates most of his advocacy and defense of his philosophical ideas to the footnotes in order to maintain the more crucial task of depicting concrete examples of theopoetic praxis evident in popular Catholicism, like the Triduum celebrations and the devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe. In the end, Goizueta promotes a theology of accompaniment, hacia una theología de acompañamiento, which is also the title of his last chapter.
Like Goizueta, García-Rivera wants to employ his major aesthetic thinker as a springboard from which to launch his project of reuniting the transcendentals; however, García-Rivera retains more of von Balthasar’s original thinking than Goizueta does of Vasconcelos’.[32] Throughout the Community of the Beautiful, von Balthasar’s dual theological insights – the objective (as opposed to a subjective) “form” of the transcendentals and Beauty as the necessary “linchpin” of the three – exercise great influence.[33] Without the objective recognition of Beauty in the world, García-Rivera contends, the horrors of Auschwitz, Vietnam, El Mozote, Rwanda, and Bosnia can be more easily justified ethically and rationally. In his reading of von Balthasar, the prevailing nihilism today stems more from an inability to re-cognize the beautiful in an-other than in a lack of belief in the power of reason. True “difference” is affirmed only when the Beauty of something/someone has been re-cognized. García-Rivera sees parallel forms of a “different Beauty” – the title his second chapter – in the Incarnation and in that of the Hispanic/Latino religious and culture experience over the last five hundred years of European conquest-colonialization and the U.S. political-economic domination that must be re-cognized. For García-Rivera, the question which needs to be asked of both Hispanic/Latino theology, as well as for human reflection in general, is “What moves the human heart?” [34] This question about intrinsic value needs to be asked today more than ever and even prior to the questions, “What is good?” and “What is true?” The task of asking this question belongs, in García-Rivera’s terminology, to “theological aesthetics.” Earlier on, he explains the importance of his approach:
Theological aesthetics attempts to make clear once again the connection between Beauty and the beautiful, between Beauty’s divine origins and its appropriation by the human heart. In doing so, theological aesthetics discloses the importance of restoring the connection between Beauty and the beautiful, which in our day, has been severed. Human life has a worth and a dignity which only Beauty can reveal through the beautiful. Without the language and experience of Beauty and the beautiful, the Church will find difficult the expression of her faith, much less her conviction of the dignity of the human person, and even less, be a sacrament to the world.”[35]
The living ecclesial tradition of the Hispanic/Latino has always maintained a close connection between Beauty and the beautiful in its worship and imagination. As a member of this tradition, García-Rivera wants to affirm its theoretical dimension and engage it with a discussion of the other two transcendentals, the Good and the True. Consequently, “theological aesthetics attempts to recover a belief in the reality of the beautiful and thus, all of the transcendentals.”[36]
García-Rivera finds the epistemology and ontology undergirding von Balthasar’s “seeing the Form” untenable for making the kind of “clear” connections between the transcendentals and their expressions that Hispanic/Latino theology and theological aesthetics require. He turns to the modern field of semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, as the best means for bridging the gap. García-Rivera differs from most contemporary thinkers interested in semiotics today (i.e. structuralist and post- or deconstructionist thinkers), who tend to draw from the “French” semiotic tradition founded by the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand Saussure (1857-1913), and his “dyadic” theory of “conventional” signs.[37] Instead, García-Rivera appeals to the “triadic” semiotic insights of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), U.S. philosopher, logician, and all around polymath commonly considered “the father of American pragmatism,” and one of Peirce’s fellow compatriots, the Harvard philosopher, Josiah Royce (1855-1916).[38] García-Rivera augments Peirce’s “triadic” theory of signs with key insights into the aesthetics of fine art taken from the functional structuralist thought of Czech semiotician Jan Mukarvosky (1891-1975). By blending the semiotic insights of these three thinkers, García-Rivera creates a semiotic foundation for his theological aesthetics.
Articulating a theological aesthetics with the aid of semiotics proves crucial for comprehending the relationship between the invisible, the “forms” of von Balthasar, and the visible, the ritual-symbolic of Hispanic/Latino practice, aspects of reality. However, if one wants to assert that such a semiotic connection is “real” and not just imaginary or a matter of taste, social convention, or dogmatic assertion, then one needs to rely upon a larger theory of the whole, a metaphysics with a realistic epistemology and ontology. García-Rivera sees the semiotics of Peirce and Royce fall within such an expansive philosophical framework. Unfortunately, the scope and purpose of this paper does not permit a complete examination of Peircean-Roycean semiotics and its metaphysical underpinnings as relied upon by García-Rivera. At the same time, briefly highlighting one piece of the Peircean-Roycean “larger theory of the whole” as appropriated by García-Rivera, in this case Peirce’s own Esthetics (aesthetics without the a), should prove helpful in assessing the difference between García-Rivera and Goizueta’s philosophical takes on the relationship between the transcendentals.
Esthetics, according to Peirce, cannot be understood apart from Ethics and Logic (together they form what Peirce calls the “Normative Sciences,” i.e. philosophical reflection on what “ought” to be).[39] Esthetics, understood as reflection upon the summun bonum or that/those good/s which should be pursued without end, provides the ground for Ethics and subsequently Logic. Ethics, which Peirce understands as reflection upon the “hows” one should go about pursuing Esthetics conclusions regarding the summun bonum, in turn grounds Logic, understood here as reflection upon how reason or thought – under the rubric of semiotics in Peirce’s rather anti-analytical notion of reason – ought best to be ordered so as best to think reasonably about Ethics’ conclusions. In short, I suggest that one can almost immediately see Peirce’s rather unique rethinking and reordering of the transcendentals under the rubric of his theory of the Normative Sciences, i.e. the Esthetics-Ethics-Logic triad, as providing the type of corrective strategy beneficial for overcoming the post-Kantian trichotomy of the transcendentals and reuniting them in a manner wherein aesthetics plays the key role. For the purposes of this paper, allow such a conclusion to retain its suggestive-only character for the purpose here of positing that in Peirce’s original formulation and Royce’s indirect appropriation, we have an attempt to overcome the trichotomy that may prove more beneficial to García-Rivera’s own theological project than that solution proposed by Goizueta.
CONCLUSION: THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS AND THE PROMISE OF ESTHETICS
This paper began by recognizing the turn to aesthetics in U.S. Latino/Hispanic theology, especially as articulated by Goizueta and García-Rivera, as representing a further conceptual and methodological clarification of the now regnant inculturated approach to theology. Moreover, in light of my conjecture about the post-Kantian divorce of the transcendentals – the Good, the True, and the Beautiful – and my treatment of the three turns in 20th century theology, the “aesthetic” grounded projects of Goizueta and García-Rivera appear as both a natural evolution of twentieth-century theology and a serious challenge to the theological status quo. They both want theology to reconsider how it fundamentally looks at the reality of faith. For them, the initial point of contact between God of Jesus Christ and Christian believers occurs primarily not in the mind or gut but in the heart. Divine Beauty overtakes us before that of Divine Truth or Divine Goodness. We are first moved by the incarnated excellence of Jesus. While logic and ethics have a role to play, aesthetics gets to the heart of the reality of faith. Because of this, popular religiosity counts as an important locus theologicus.
Moreover, I have suggested in this paper that Goizueta’s and García-Rivera’s partaking in the common mission of returning considerations of “Beauty” to theological discourse also serves as the means of breaking down the post-Kantian trichotomy between pure, practical, and aesthetic reason. Yet, their strategies for carrying out this mission contrast. On the one hand, Goizueta does an excellent job of raising the questions regarding expanded notions of praxis and the importance of aesthetics. However, he raises more questions than he answers and perhaps remains largely uncritical of some of the philosophical resources he deploys, most of which, I would argue, suffer from the ill effects of the Kantian divorce. García-Rivera’s approach, on the other hand, because of his extensive reliance upon Peirce, especially Peirce’s own larger project of reordering and reintegrating the Beautiful, the Good, and the True in his Normative Sciences, perhaps recommends itself as a far sounder strategy for constructively answering those questions. If Peirce’s esthetics does offer the type of corrective strategy beneficial for overcoming the post-Kantian trichotomy of the transcendentals and reuniting them in a manner wherein aesthetics plays the key role, then Peirce’s esthetics allows one to better get the heart of inculturated theology. As a recent example of this, García-Rivera’s approach to theological aesthetics may not only be considered a sound strategy for Hispanic/Latino theology, but for all theologies committed to the three “well-ordered” theological traits of orthodoxy, orthopraxis, and orthoaesthesis.
Dr. Gregory J. Zuschlag is an assistant professor of systematic theology at Oblate School of Theology and director of the Master of Arts (Theology) program.