The Necessity of Aesthetic Metanoia

Abstract

Put in the situation of needing to sum up what I wanted to say about disability without reducing it to something less complex than it is, I reached for a range of aesthetic themes, supremely, the category of wonder. Wonder is not solely an aesthetic category (Klink, 2020; McFarland, 2020), but does have stronger aesthetic aspects than I realized, which is no doubt why it attracted me as more capacious than the traditional doctrinal term it is expressing, revelation. I am extremely grateful that Stephen Wright has educated me as to precisely how my argument relies on aesthetic claims. It helps me understand what I am seeing when something appears strange or uncanny, prompting me to slow down and attempt to describe what I have seen in order to better appreciate what just happened. Wright also helped me to link up another set of inchoate impressions. One occurred during a visit to the supposed resting place of Paul’s bones in Rome, the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls. Before the door of the church stands a huge statue of Paul brandishing a long sword. Inside, the sanctuary is lined with rows of giant white marble statues labeled on their plinths as biblical saints. The bodies of these saints are indistinguishable from the statues of Greek gods. I have never imagined Paul as a physical Adonis (2 Corinthians 10:10), nor Jesus for that matter, who at his crucifixion fit the prophet’s description of the messiah as one who appalled onlookers, “so disfigured did he look that he seemed no longer human” (Is. 52:14, NJB; Matthew 27:30). I could not help thinking how jarring it would seem if one of the disabled saints that I know were carved in marble and placed in this lineup. The aesthetics dominating the space would position their bodies as embarrassingly disproportionate (an insight recently explored in secular sculpture, Brock, 2005). Wright explains that the problem is the Greek aesthetics of proportionality, insinuated into Christianity through the Neoplatonism of Pseudo Dionysius. This insight gives me language to articulate why it seemed intuitively important in Wondrously Wounded to draw out Augustine’s insistence that the link https://doi.org/10.1080/23312521.2022.2051678