Wonder’s Call: Anti-Theodical Aesthetic Judgment in Brian Brock’s Theology of Disability

Abstract

The standard theological treatments of theodicy deal in privation, measuring out the fallen creature’s diminution from an ideal. The same concept belongs to an older tradition of aesthetics, which measures beauty according to ideals of formal proportion, with ugliness lying at a distance from the ideal. The grammar of “wonder” Brian Brock adopts in his theology of disability troubles both theodicies of diminution and the aesthetics of declension. The author proposes that such accounts of beauty and its declensions have regularly been problematized by the cross of Jesus Christ, requiring theology to revise its concepts. Beauty measured by form opens up questions of irregularity and deformity. The author argues that the form proper to beauty lies not within the constituent part of any particular being, but rather within the relation of the creature to God.

Keywords:

• Adams
• Marilyn McCord
• beauty
• Brock
• Brian
• privation
• theodicy

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Medi Ann Volpe for her excellent editorial guidance in the composition of this piece.

Notes

1 One difficulty for theological engagement with disability has been the language. The very designation, “disability,” carries within it the logic of privation. The positive indication of the term functions according to a lexical absence. Semantically, “disability” names a distance, an alienation from a putatively desirable form of life. Etymological roots do not, however, provide necessary determinations of meaning, and the language of disability has been subverted and redeployed positively in quite widespread ways, so that it remains the most acceptable language used to describe certain minority patterns of human life. Following Brock, I continue to use the language of disability while also acknowledging its referential ambiguity and weakness throughout.

2 Brock finds this language in the Catholic University of America Press translation by Walsh and Monahan.

3 For a compilation of thinking about the ugly, see Umberto Eco’s (2007) volume.

4 The ugly irony for modern readers, of course, is that Diotima’s argument for ascending through stages of beauty is predicated on Socrates’ regard for the bodies of young boys.

5 We find examples of physiognomy in ancient Mesopotamian literature, though the name itself comes from the later Greek works, such as pseudo-Aristotle’s Phusiognōmonika. Examples of physiognomic reasoning are also found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, as outlined in Popvić (2006). Thanks to Dwight Swanson for bringing this to my attention.

6 Thomas here reflects on Dionysius’ view that the good and the beautiful are to be identified.

7 Beauty also appears to function as a divine name for Thomas, and this phrase should not overdetermine one’s understanding of his aesthetics.

8 Apologies to Miguel Romero, who no doubt will disagree strongly with this negative assessment of Thomas’ usefulness for a theology of disability. See his essay and selections from Thomas (Romero, 2012).

9 First defined in an earlier essay (Adams, 1988).

10 And indeed, Brock’s reading seems truer to Augustine’s arguments. Tallon overlooks Augustine’s concluding affirmation of the divine design implicit in all these marvels. Far from lacking the form proper to humanity, Augustine affirms their full humanity as members of the race of Adam (Augustine of Hippo, 2013, XVI.8).

11 To give him his fare due, Tallon treats the more fantastic of Augustine’s list and understands them to be beyond belief—humans with the heads of dogs or who subsist only by scent rather than food.

12 One cannot help but note the formal similarity between this question and Brock’s concern that the modern West never properly gets beyond the imbalance of the question “What should we do about them?” (Brock, 2019, p. 36).

13 Kilby’s critique of Weinandy’s attempt comes to mind: “What is missing . . . is any sense of bafflement before suffering, of being silenced by it, brought to the end of what can be explained” (Kilby, 2020, p. 95).

14 Kilby does not think that such observations gets one out of needing to attend to theodicy, but instead proposes that one must live a compromised theology, unable to render a finally coherent theodicy.

15 I do not wish to overdetermine the concept of attention, but here use it as the relation of openness of persons, one to another.

16 This wordplay was common, and can be found in Plato and Pseudo-Dionysius.

17 Jenson’s doctrine of creation is that God calls creatures to existence out of nothingness, and that they obediently rise into existence in response (Jenson, 1999).

18 What we have here, then, is an aesthetics of prayer. In prayer one opens oneself up to something beyond the cloistered ratio, housed within its shell of flesh. Prayer presupposes a world, a reality that transcends the ego, and moreover, prayer attempts to connect one to that reality. In prayer, one is situated within a field of relations and surrenders all claim to pure interiority and mastery. Thomas Merton reflects on the unstable and interruptive character of prayer: “Prayer is an earthquake which rends the rocks on which the substance of my being is built, and I do not know where it is going or what it is doing: sometimes it raises the dead, but only to assuage my terror. And sometimes it throws me to the living, the way the early Christians were thrown to the lions.” In prayer, one brushes up against something that exceeds the self, a someone who beckons us outward. Jenson invites us to broaden our understanding of prayer beyond the merely linguistic. Prayer can never be simply a matter of speaking particular words, but it becomes visible in bodies through gesture and ritual. The destabilising word of God arrives, evoking prayerful response (Merton, 2014, p. 13).

19 Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.”