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Towards an Incarnational Aesthetic

March 3rd, 2008 | 3 min read

By Anodos

The Sword and the Shaving Brush

Towards a Biblical understanding of fashion

by Timothy Bartel

Part VI - Towards a Christian Aesthetic

Now that this first principle of Christian aesthetics has been reached, it will be helpful to turn to two 20th century Christian theorists whose work in aesthetics is both indispensable and largely overlooked. The first of these theorists is Dorothy Sayers, whose fame as a detective novelist has, perhaps, unfairly eclipsed her excellence as an essayist and aesthetic theorist. In her dazzling little essay “Toward a Christian Aesthetic,” Sayers bemoans the fact that Christians have never successfully articulated a thoroughly Christian philosophy of art. “I will go so far as to maintain,” she writes, “ that the extraordinary confusion of our minds about the nature and function of Art is principally due to the fact that for nearly 2,000 years we have been trying to reconcile a pagan, or at any rate a Unitarian, aesthetic with a Christian—that is, a Trinitarian and Incarnational—theology.”

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