Abstract
In The Father of Lights: A Theology of Beauty, Junius Johnson provides a sustained theological reflection on beauty as it is subjectively experienced within the finitude of creation, stipulating that this creaturely beauty participates in and ultimately reflects divine glory.
The style of the book is initially surprising on two counts: first, J. provides an absolute minimum of citations, which he says is because he is “trying to express this view on its own merits without saddling it with an undue anxiety of influence” (13 n.4). Given that his main argument is that “an experience of beauty is a theologically anamnetic moment” (21), we might wonder whether anamnesis here should not only include the memory of God and the economy of salvation, but also the memory of other thinkers who have contemplated beauty beforehand, and who are present within the text, even if rarely named (and the main figures are clearly Augustine, Bonaventure, and Hans Urs von Balthasar). Second, the text is not written primarily in a poetic style, nor even with particularly lush prose, although J. is a good stylist and there is delightful prose throughout. Instead, J. opts for a more analytic style, which allows him to make careful distinctions and to provide important definitions.
The clarity of his argument allows J. to bring speculative rigor to the question of beauty and to develop a vocabulary for this discussion that can be more widely adopted. For instance, J. nicely employs the notion of “contuition,” or “co-seeing” to describe a form of “spiritual vision” in which the beauty of creation is seen along with God. For J., creaturely beauty functions as a sign of God (“the original function of creatures is in fact to be signs,” 133), but a sign that does not evaporate before that which it signifies: “Each creature, when it becomes an occasion for contuition, opens up a space within itself, or better, allows itself to become translucent, so that while one continues to see it, one sees also that which it images” (57).
The text is subtle, and with a certain analogical metaphysics employed throughout the book (most explicitly on pp. 80–83), J. is able to argue both that all finite beauty points toward an infinite source and end and that any and all genuine experience of earthly beauty is ennobling, even if that transcendent end is not explicitly recognized. Relatedly, J. generously and subtly handles the issue of competing aesthetic sensibilities (de gustibus non est disputandum) without dismissing either the variability or the objectivity of beauty: “that we find different things beautiful is not primarily a result of the fall; it is part of the way in which we have all been created to teach one another about our common Lord” (31).
J. devotes two chapters to questions in the philosophy of language and ultimately favors a position that honors what is best in both a “linguistic relativism” and “realism.” These chapters, particularly the one on the nature of metaphor, do set the stage for what is likely the most theologically productive portion of the text, but it is not immediately clear that their length and detail were ultimately necessary. Nevertheless, chapters 7 and 8 on sacraments and icons, respectively, bring greater depth to the question of how creation can and does function in the mode of a sign. These chapters show J. as an ecumenical thinker (for example, he himself prefers something like consubstantiation over transubstantiation, but states that the latter is still allowed by his theory), and one who is able to mine the riches of theological tradition in ways that will be broadly appealing.
That said, there are several claims throughout the book that will surely not be met with universal approval, such as his rather precipitous assertion that an eternal hell is “necessary” for the final beauty of the universe (37). Likewise, there is a tendency in the book to locate ugliness principally if not exclusively in the human will, thus downplaying if not denying altogether the existence of natural or even biological forms of ugliness. One is thus left wondering if our normal experience of attraction to this and not that is somehow a corrupt impulse: “So the fact that I find one person beautiful and another person not beautiful reveals a failure to understand God” (59). But coming to contentious conclusions is the price that one must pay when one wants to speak in depth and with precision. J. does precisely that in this welcome volume. Readers will be challenged to love beauty all the more by loving it as a sign and a remembrance of divine glory.