Lecture 15 Outline

Faith and Justice:  Alex Nava's "On Tragic Beauty"

1. Three transcendentals: beauty, goodness, truth. Critique of much modern theology (Hans Urs von Balthasar and others) is a too narrow focus on proving the truth rather than enticing readers to embrace beauty of God and the transformation to which embracing beauty beckons us.
2. Theological aesthetics: goal is to be overtaken by beauty. Example: beauty in nature, literature, film, everyday life can overtake us and impel us to live in a new way.
3. But, how do we define and understand beauty? More specifically, where is the cross in this aesthetic vision? For Christians, ultimately beauty is somehow mysteriously tied up to the cross. A Christian aesthetic sees beauty in paradox: what is most ugly in human history (the cross) for us has ultimate beauty. How do we train ourselves to perceive this? What are the consequences of the “beauty of the cross” for Christian theology and living?
4. This is the question Nava addresses in his exploration of the oxymoron “tragic beauty.”  By “tragedy” he refers not to the suffering which has a clear cause, e.g. punishment I receive as a consequence of my actions, but the undeserved suffering of the innocent.  Like Simone Weil, Nava looks at tragedy in the sense of classical Greek drama and asks how this sense of tragedy illuminates our understanding of Christian faith, the cross, and the tragedies of history, including in our own day.
5. Nava draws on David Tracy’s work about the hiddenness of God. Tracy sees “Hiddenness I” as God’s unexpected presence among the marginalized of this world. God is the great surprise, present in the most unexpected of places and circumstances. But there is also a deeper hiddenness of God, “Hiddenness II,” which Tracy describe as our inability to see God in the inexplicable of our world. This is not a perception of God’s presence which we can train ourselves to notice (as is the case with Hiddenness I), but a presence of God we can only see with the eyes of faith.

U.S. Latino popular religion mediates a vision of tragic beauty in its attraction to painful human realities (especially the suffering of the innocent) and simultaneous proclamation of a truth the poor are often the first to see: there is a hidden but undeniable divine will and presence which is larger than life’s tragedies. To be a Christian means knowing a gracious God not just in the midst of our blessings and victories, but also (and more fundamentally) in the midst of life’s most inexplicable sorrows. Those who live in hope in these situations are the deepest sign of the love of God expressed in the cross of Christ.