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Introductory Remarks
In this episode, I continue our discussion from last week on the uglification of the Church. I received many DMs and texts about that episode—some encouraging, some challenging. I welcome it all.
The point of these reflections on our protestant Christian worship spaces is not naked critique. It is to reassess what I feel we have uncritically allowed our worship spaces to become. I hope this spirit comes through in the discussion.
As I interact with more and more people on this topic, it’s become evident to me that the Christian community approaches aesthetic judgment from a postmodern perspective—we allow for subjectivism and approach aesthetics from the “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” standpoint. I’ll be talking more about this in the coming episodes.
Links to Resources Mentioned in the Episode
The Beauty Chasers: Recapturing the Wonder of the Divine, by Timothy D. Willard
The Aesthetics of Architecture, by Roger Scruton
The Aesthetic Understanding, by Roger Scruton
Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, by Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton, “Why I Became a Conservative | The New Criterion,” February 1, 2003, https://newcriterion.com/article/why-i-became-a-conservative/.
Blaine Eldredge’s post on re-enchantment:
My former podcast, in which I discuss more of Jonathan Hales's thoughts on architecture:
Roger Scruton on beauty and belonging:
Excerpt referenced in The Abolition of Man:
In their second chapter Gaius and Titius quote the well-known story of Coleridge at the waterfall. You remember that there were two tourists present: that one called it 'sublime' and the other 'pretty'; and that Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgement and rejected the second with disgust. Gaius and Titius comment as follows: 'When the man said This is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall... Actually ... he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word "Sublime", or shortly, I have sublime feelings' Here are a good many deep questions settled in a pretty summary fashion. But the authors are not yet finished. They add: 'This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.'1
Before considering the issues really raised by this momentous little paragraph (designed, you will remember, for 'the upper forms of schools') we must eliminate one mere confusion into which Gaius and Titius have fallen. Even on their own view—on any conceivable view—the man who says This is sublime cannot mean I have sublime feelings. Even if it were granted that such qualities as sublimity were simply and solely projected into things from our own emotions, yet the emotions which prompt the projection are the correlatives, and therefore almost the opposites, of the qualities projected. The feelings which make a man call an object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of veneration. If This is sublime is to be reduced at all to a statement about the speaker's feelings, the proper translation would be I have humble feelings. If the view held by Gaius and Titius were consistently applied it would lead to obvious absurdities. It would force them to maintain that You are contemptible means I have contemptible feelings', in fact that Your feelings are contemptible means My feelings are contemptible. But we need not delay over this which is the very pons asinorum of our subject. It would be unjust to Gaius and Titius themselves to emphasize what was doubtless a mere inadvertence.1
Lewis, C. S. (2009). The Abolition of Man (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. In this episode, I am blending Lewis’s “critique of the philosophical presuppositions that govern many modern beliefs about beauty, goodness, and truth. Are things beautiful, good, and true just for us as individuals, or can we speak and feel about them in ways that take us beyond our isolated perspectives into a shared discourse of objective value?” Scruton’s notion is that we must exercise aesthetic judgment as we engage with our world, especially in the arts—architecture being included in the arts. See Michael Ward, After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (Park Ridge, IL: Word on Fire Academic, 2021), 14.
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