think. (So ‘look and see’ would be the rightadvice—the only thing relevant is in plain view.)

Including a chapter on these Wittgensteinianswould have required a re-think from the begin-ning: for them, the problem of the nature ofphilosophy would not be addressed via the ‘essen-tial definition approach’. But it may be helpfulto have that approach in mind (and grasp it inways this text might aid) if one is to go beyond it.This is a topic for wider discussion, and not onethat need impair the usefulness of this text for itsintended audience.

In summary, then, this book might readilybe used very successfully as an introduction: itis clear, and always helpful and informative onits range of topic, with that range offering anappropriate entry point to the philosophy of art(and, through it, analytical philosophy moregenerally). But the argument takes us, by stages,some way into the complexities of aesthetics; andin an accessible style. To return to the ‘blurb’ (andPeter Lamarque): ‘This is analytical philosophy atits best: thorough, rigorous, even-handed, emin-ently readable throughout . . .’ Exactly!

GRAHAM McFEE

University of Brighton

Theological Aesthetics: God in Imagination, Beauty,and Art. By RICHARD VILADESAU. Oxford U.P.1999. pp. xvi + 294. £32.50.

RICHARD VILADESAU’S Theological Aesthetics is in nodoubt about its religious grounding or its com-mitment. These are in Catholic Christianity, andthe book generously outlines and quotes from theaesthetic–religious thinking of theologians fromAugustine to Lonergan, Balthasar, and Rahner.It is not theologically narrow, however, as isintimated by its Prologue, taken from Karl Barthon ‘Mozart’s Place in Theology’. A theologicalaesthetics, as Viladesau ponders it in Chapter 1,will treat such topics as metaphor and analogy inrelation to knowledge of God, ‘the nature of thebeautiful in relationship to God’, beauty as a‘quality of revelation’, how the arts can ‘mediaterevelation and conversion’ (pp. 23–24). He willapply the ‘insights of a “transcendental” theol-

ogy . . . to the question of the relation of thedivine to human imagination, to beauty, and toart’ (p. 38).

Chapter 2 begins, arrestingly, with an accountof Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron—as the ‘clearestand deepest expression’ of the conflict between‘the idea of a . . . transcendent God, beyond allthought and imagination, and the religious needfor images’ and for anthropomorphic thinking.Image-making seems both indispensable andnecessarily distorting. Moses ‘attempts to com-municate the ungraspable God through themedium of the word’. But art too, for Schoenberg,‘is intrinsically oriented to the expression of whatis conceptually ungraspable’ (pp. 50–51). Had notAugustine memorably claimed ‘si enim compre-hendis, non est deus’ (p. 57)? If you can get yourmind round it, it is not God. The knowledge wedo have of God indicates that knowing is ‘enter-ing into the presence of the “mystery” of being’.‘God’s incomprehensibility is not the limit, butthe substance of our bliss and love’ (Karl Rahner,p. 58).

There follow brief accounts of how Kant,Hegel, Strauss, Feuerbach, Dewey, and Santayanahandled problems of religious imagination,feeling, and reason (pp. 60–64). The questionis raised how to respond to ‘the relegation ofpositive religion to the sphere of myth andimagination’ (p. 63). This may aspire to a high-poetic complementing of the objective and therational (p. 63). Or it may leave us with only an‘aesthetic humanism’, ‘disconnected from theintellectual apprehension of reality’ (p. 64). Aftera discussion of ‘The Historical Jesus and theImages of Christ’, Viladesau considers how wemay ‘react theologically’ to the issues raised(pp. 68ff.). (My reaction here is that these pagesare being overloaded with ‘issues raised’, that thematerial is being too briefly summarized foradequate understanding, and is receiving insuf-ficient critical examination in depth.)

If the concept of God—Viladesau continues—offers no foothold for philosophical, metaphysicalthought, then are we to build afresh on Jesus asour incarnational base (p. 69)? Or could we stillwork towards, for instance, a mystical, icono-clastic theology; or, yet again, should we accept

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many images, all as approximating to what isindeed ultimately unimageable?

A ‘fundamental theological aesthetic’,Viladesau claims, will attempt, through ‘tran-scendental deduction’, to discover the ‘conditionsof possibility’ of (i) ‘knowing God through amind intrinsically tied to sensibility’, involvingour ‘openness . . . to the transcendent’—whichViladesau glosses as the ‘doctrine of the humanperson as “image” of God’ (p. 70); (ii) under-standing how history can embody revelation;and (iii) using words, analogies, and images tocommunicate knowledge of God and revelation(p. 71).

Accordingly, Chapter 3 concerns ‘DivineRevelation and Human Perception’: ‘The struc-ture of the mind is open to and reflects the divine’(p. 90). Access to God ‘is always mediated by theworld’ and we relate to the world always ‘withinthe horizon of a dynamism toward God’; and itis only through this duality that ‘events, persons,thoughts, words and images are able to serve asGod’s revelation’. The ‘transcendent mystery’cannot be ‘conceptually delimited, because it isitself the condition of possibility for all delimit-ation’. It is identified with God ‘only by subse-quent reflection on religious experience’ (p. 92).

Chapter 4 (‘God and the Beautiful: Beauty as aWay to God’) asks more broadly how ‘sensibleobjects’ can directly evoke the transcendent, andhow the aesthetic is related to religion—indeedis founded on God as ‘transcendent Beauty’.Viladesau takes his reader through the history ofthe ascent of the mind to God from the beautyencountered in the physical world, and followsthe ‘Neoplatonic current’ (Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius) to the medievals to whom the worldwas ‘a vast work of art’ showing forth God’sbeauty (p. 108). ‘How’, Bonaventure asked, ‘couldour intellect know that this being is defective andincomplete, unless it had a knowledge of a beingwithout any defect?’ (p. 112). So we implicitlyknow ‘an absolute norm of being’. Viladesauacknowledges that to the ‘modern mind’ it is not‘obvious that “more” and “less” demand theexistence of a “most” ’ (p. 116). Rightly, he pointsto the loss of belief in an ‘ordered “hierarchy”of being’, and therefore in the ‘approach to Godfrom the beautiful’ (p. 117). Viladesau will look

for help to the ‘transcendental method of Coreth,Lotz, Rahner and Lonergan’ (p. 120).

He finds his own version of the argument frombeauty in an account of the beautiful as ‘the orderof reason in things, their truth and goodness . . .intelligibility, their accord with the dynamism ofthe human person towards being and being-well’(p. 131). Beauty is ‘goodness or value . . . when itslovability becomes evident’ (p. 132). To callbeauty a ‘transcendental notion’ is to claim thateverything is in some measure ‘lovable’. So that,to Viladesau, the ‘condition of possibility’ ofbeauty is the affirming of ‘ultimate Beauty’, toapprehend which would be ‘unlimited joy inexistence’ and in God as ‘infinite Bliss’ (p. 138).The chapter closes with a half page acknowledg-ing that claims about God as Beauty, Intelligi-bility, and Goodness are ‘thrown into question’(p. 140) by ‘irrationality, evil, and pain’. Indeedthey are. Viladesau invokes an eschatological hopeof disclosure and confirmation, appeal to mysteryagain, and the arguments of natural theology as‘explications of hope’. These remedial sentenceswill hardly reassure any who are not alreadyfellow believers with their author.

Chapter 5 considers ‘ways in which art medi-ates the value of the sacred’ (p. 143). Viladesau’sdiscussion has two parts: (i) art can expressencounters with transcendence or the sacred ingeneral; and (ii) art can express the specificallyChristian tradition (p. 147). I can readily agreewith Viladesau that ‘beauty at least raises thequestion of a transcendent human goal’ (p. 150):from his committed theistic position, however,he goes much further: to experience beauty is toexperience ‘a deep-seated “yes” to being’, possibleonly if being is grounded in ‘the reality that wecall God’ (p. 149). Viladesau writes interest-ingly—and with some well-chosen examples—about the power of art to evoke ‘inchoate desire,or joy, or longing’ (p. 153), a sense of ‘the wonderof existence itself ’ (p. 154). He turns then,secondly, to ‘explicitly religious art’ (p. 162).Viladesau acknowledges disparities betweenartistic quality and the evocation of powerfulreligious feelings: ‘religious kitsch’ often enoughevoking the latter, and a superficial, sentimentalreligiosity can be given embodiment in great art

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(p. 163). He goes on to discuss ‘more concretely’the ways in which serious art mediates the sacred.

Finally, Chapter 6 (‘The Beautiful and theGood’) first considers tensions between the artsand their ‘religious message’, tensions that arise,in part, because art and beauty may claim thestatus of ‘ends in themselves’ (p. 184); religiousvalues, however, are ‘ultimate’ and unconditional,so that idolatry may well be seen in that claim.Viladesau asks whether there is a danger of takingbeauty and art as a ‘substitute for the reality of theGod who speaks to us in the cross of Christ?’ Thecross, grim though it is, stands as ‘the symbol ofa beautiful act’—Jesus’ self-giving and God theFather’s raising him again (p. 197). The Christianstance, however, does require a measure of ascet-icism, and opposes a contemplative posture thatcan weaken the practical love of one’s neighbour(pp. 198–200).

Although such tensions between beautiful andgood cannot be eliminated (p. 204), Viladesausums up the Christian position vis-à-vis ‘feelingand imagination, art, and the quest for beauty’ inthe claim that these are ‘transformed and deep-ened by the encounter with the transcendentvalues of God’s kingdom’ (p. 204). The book’sfinal pages elaborate this claim. It involveslearning from God ‘what is ultimately beautifuland desirable, what is our real fulfilment aspersons’ (pp. 205–206)—surely a bold but prob-lematic view, with difficulties parallel to thosefaced by a ‘divine command’ model of morality.

On the last page but one comes a reference toour responsibility for the environment (and forone another) and the relevance of art in pro-ducing a vision of the good that will sensitize usto these responsibilities. Close-packed thoughit is, this book does not linger in the fields ofenvironmental aesthetics nor aesthetic appreci-ation of nature. Space for these might have beenliberated by allowing much less profuse quotationfrom other theological writers throughout thebook.

Between this reviewer and the author is thegulf between a sympathetic agnosticism and anassured Christian belief. To me, the ‘mystery ofbeing’ is not at all certainly a divine, holy mystery;openness to the transcendent, and the aestheticdiscontent that is ever in search of greater and

more ultimate beauty, can go along with theabsence in fact of any divine transcendent andsupremely beautiful Reality. But Viladesau’s studyis not primarily concerned to overcome thedifficulties of bridging that gulf. Those who arealready closer to his viewpoint will find a schol-arly resource and a careful aesthetic–religioussynthesis.

The book is well-produced and set up, apartfrom a few type slips in Greek quotations.

RONALD HEPBURN

Edinburgh

Paradoxes of Emotion and Fiction. ROBERT J. YANAL.Pennsylvania State U.P. 1999. pp. xi + 164.$35.00 (hbk). $17.95 (pbk).

NANCY MITFORD’S mother once tried to converther husband, Lord Redesdale, to literature byreading Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ‘a story Farvefound so moving that he began to weep. “Don’tbe so sad”, said Muv. “It’s only a story.” “What!not the truth!” shouted Farve. “The damned fellerinvented all that!” and he never looked at anotherwork of fiction again—until his daughter beganto write it . . .’ Then he would have encountered,in The Pursuit of Love, the description of UncleMatthew being taken to see Romeo and Juliet,weeping copiously, and raging on the way home,‘All the fault of that damned padre. . . . That fella,what’s ’is name, Romeo, might have known ablasted papist would mess up the whole thing.’I imagine the second account was based on theoccurrence described in Selina Hastings’s biog-raphy of Nancy Mitford. The reactions differ in aphilosophically interesting way, of course.

I doubt whether any reader of this journal isnot thoroughly familiar with the problems onwhich Yanal writes, problems brought to ourattention by Colin Radford a quarter of a centuryago. Why are we moved by the fate of fictionalcharacters when we know they do not exist?Yanal, in this comprehensive and careful survey,is excellent in dealing with the proposed reso-lutions of other philosophers but, perhaps unsur-prisingly, his own offering is less convincing thanhis criticisms of others. Yanal offers a variety of

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