Theology as Architecture: On Avoiding Some of the Temptations of Systems

My friend Christopher Benson recently posted some thoughts about the nature of systems in theology (and philosophy) and the temptation to believe that a system can actually be comprehensive and truly account for everything. The problem lies less with systems themselves and more with systematizers who believe they have accounted for everything and then dismiss all evidence to the contrary.

As a student of systematic theology, I share these same concerns. In my own doctoral work, I have apprenticed myself to a theologian who was famously wary of systems in theology, Hans Urs von Balthasar. While insisting on wholeness and the integrity of form, Balthasar also insisted that no one theology is the theology. He often spoke of theology in symphonic terms where many voices/instruments sound together to suggest the whole. Any given theologian or theology, however helpful, however illuminating, is still only a part of the whole. The first violin is important, perhaps even crucial to the orchestra, but the first violin can never be the whole orchestra.

How then to avoid the temptation of totalizing systems? Benson says stories are one check against the hubris of the systematizer. Stories, he says, resist systems, or at least, systems that insist on being absolute. In that vein, I want to offer here two other possible checks on a system becoming absolute—thinking of theology in aesthetic terms, particularly architecture, and thinking of theology as a map.

But first a word in defense of systematic theology as a discipline. In The Architecture of Theology A.N. Williams argues that theology is inherently systematic. Why? Because theology describes revelation in terms of relationships and systems describe relationships through the right use of reason. By reason I mean in a holistic sense that is both ratio and intellectus, both discursive and intuitive. I mean it in the sense Josef Pieper describes in Leisure the Basis of Culture. I mean reason in the sense that thinkers like Irenaeus or Augustine would use the word, and not in the Enlightenment sense. In any case, Williams says that trying to say anything about the two subjects of theology, God and all things as they relate to God, must involve both reason and relationship and therefore are, in terms of Williams argument, inherently systematic.

To my own broader point about thinking of theology in aesthetic terms, Williams uses the metaphor of theology as architecture to make these points. A wonderful building requires the systematic construction of different materials that are rightly related to each other (read reasonably and pleasingly related to each other). Both Dante’s Divine Comedy and Thomas’s Summa Theologica are often described as the literary equivalents to the great gothic cathedrals because both are works in which every piece proportionally relates to every other piece, and taken together there is unity and radiance, in word they are beautiful.

Thinking of theology in architectural terms is not entirely dissimilar to the case Balthasar makes for beginning theology with beauty. By beginning with beauty, Balthasar makes a case for wholeness and integrity in theology on the basis that a work of art can be complete in and of itself and yet make no claim to totality. A work of art with clarity, integrity, and harmony, means and means deeply, but no one would therefore describe it as the only work of art. Theology likewise need not be comprehensive (and can never be given God as its subject) in order to be beautiful (that is have radiance and integrity) or meaningful.

The other image is that of theology as a map. And I want to take up that image in another post.

Beholding God or How People Change

The air was growing brighter and brighter about us; as if something had set it on fire. Each breath I drew let into me new terror, joy, overpowering sweetness. I was pierced through and through with the arrows of it. I was being unmade. I was no one. But that’s little to say; rather, Psyche herself was, in a manner, no one. I loved her as I would once have thought it impossible to love, would have died any death for her. And yet, it was not, not now, she that really counted. Or if she counted (and oh, gloriously she did) it was for another’s sake. The earth and stars and sun, all that was or will be, existed for his sake. And he was coming. The most dreadful, the most beautiful, the only dread and beauty there is, was coming. The pillars on the far side of the pool flushed with his approach. I cast down my eyes.” C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

Looking back over my posts over the last couple of months, it’s clear to me that I’ve really spent the summer thinking about one question—What does it mean to encounter the divine?  Till We Have Faces is in many ways a book length answer to that question. And in reading the novel, I realized that encountering God can never be an end in itself. Rather, it is about transformation, or as we Christians call it, sanctification. In fact, as Christians, our own ongoing transformation actually depends on our beholding God.

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:18).

In Exodus when Moses asked to gaze on the glory of the Lord, simply seeing the passing glory of the Lord made his face shine with a resplendent glory so radiant that the people of Israel asked him to wear a veil. And in reflecting on that encounter in light of Christ, Paul makes an astonishing claim–our relation to God through Christ is even greater than Moses’ because we come to God with unveiled faces by the power of the Spirit, and in beholding him we become like him. In Christ we are able to gaze on God, a reality that sparkles and cuts like a diamond because to gaze on the divine is to encounter both terror and beauty, both dread and joy.

Terror and dread because who we are and what we desire is finally exposed. Just as Orual is finally able to see how sickly her love for Psyche is in the presence of the divine, we too are exposed, laid bare, disintegrated in God’s presence. One reason I believe people don’t really seek God, don’t really read their Bibles or pray with any real earnestness is because deep down they know to do so is to risk exposure, to have their desires revealed as petty, to have their loves exposed as anemic. The sound of the Lord comes to the garden like a storm, and we hide ourselves because we know that we are naked.

But it is not just terror and dread. It is beauty and joy too. God is not simply beautiful—he is the source of beauty. As Augustine says, God is, “The beauty of all things beautiful.” This means that the rush of joy we experience in the presence of earthly beauty, in faces and sunsets, in symphonies and meals, in laughter and mountains, finds its source and fullness in the face of God. To gaze on him is to experience the fullness of beauty which is itself the fullness of joy. But it is more than that. To gaze on God is to be realigned with and by the source of beauty itself, a beauty that actually changes us into the fullness of beauty itself-the face of Christ.

Love and Beauty in Till We Have Faces

Till We Have Faces is C.S. Lewis’s imaginative reworking of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. It is a meditation on the nature of beauty and ugliness and of love and hate, and because gods and goddesses encounter men and women throughout, it is also a novel about the nature of the divine, of revelation and epiphany. Told from the perspective of Psyche’s older sister, Orual, as she wrestles with the loss of Psyche, it is a beautifully complex and moving novel, and Lewis considered it his most accomplished work of fiction. I don’t want to give much of the plot away because I hope that you will read the novel for yourself. But I do want to reflect on some of the novel’s themes as a way of processing some of the thoughts from the previous posts on epiphany and the nature of revelation. In this post I want to look at the intertwined themes of beauty and love in the novel.

Orual is the first-born daughter of the King of Glome, a violent madman who desires nothing more than to sire a son. But his second marriage only produces a third daughter, Psyche, an exceptionally beautiful child, whom Orual takes under her care. But Orual’s love for Psyche is a devouring sort of love, an all-consuming obsession, even from the beginning. She alone wants to possess Psyche and her affections.  And this devotion is perhaps primarily motivated by Psyche’s beauty, which Orual describes as one might describe a god’s, saying, “Her beauty, which most of them had never seen, worked on them as a terror might work.” Indeed, the subjects of Glome are convinced that Psyche must be a goddess. Because she is ugly herself, Orual, it seems, wants to become beautiful by being in Psyche’s presence. As Orual says, “She made beauty all around her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When picked up a toad—she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes—the toad became beautiful.” Orual is the toad in a certain sense. She desires to become beautiful, to have a face, by possessing Psyche for herself, and as the novel progresses this hunger only makes her more ugly.

Later in the novel, Psyche is offered as an appeasing sacrifice to the Mountain Brute.  After the sacrifice Orual decides to go and gather the remains of her sister, only to find that Psyche is still alive. As she relates what has happened to her, Psyche believes she has married the god of the Mountain, who she believes is no brute at all, while Orual believes that this so-called husband who refuses to show his face is either the mountain-brute or an opportunistic mountain dweller who has tricked her. Because Orual cannot believe Psyche’s happiness is real, she demands that Psyche expose the face of her husband. And as Orual makes these demands, Psyche realizes that Orual’s consuming, possessive love is a kind of hate, saying, “You are indeed teaching me about kinds of love I did not know. It is like looking into a deep pit. I am not sure whether I like your kind better than hatred.”

In other words, Orual’s ugliness is not primarily physical. Rather her devouring love for Psyche makes her ugly. Psyche by contrast is not just physically beautiful—her love is beautiful as well. She doesn’t wish to go against her husband’s wishes because she trusts him. Earlier in the novel she goes among the plagued people because they believe her touch can heal. She is willing to give of herself in hopes of helping others. Love and beauty are contrasted with hate and ugliness, and so the novel, read a certain way, is a study in sanctification, in Orual’s love becoming more beautiful, of her gaining a face. So in the next post, we will turn to the themes of faces and epiphany.