“Indeed, God's affirmations of the goodness of his creation in the first chapter of Genesis can be taken as indicating first and foremost an aesthetic evaluation rather than a simply moral one; it is only with sin that the goodness of creation must be conceptually separated into solitary transcendental categories, and only with sin that creation is seen to possess a distinct ethical axis. One might almost say that the separable category of the moral is an intrusion upon the aesthetic joy that is the upwelling source of creaturely existence, as is a separate category of truth once the paradisal experience of divine love in the blameless beauty of creation is lost.”
-David Bentley Hart. The Beauty of the Infinite. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman's, 2003. (253)
In this section, Hart often draws on Augustine, with whom I (as a Protestant) am more familiar than I am with Hart's other sources. And Augustine's story of love, delight, and ordered desire does seem to be a wonderful paradigm for approaching theological aesthetics. The perfect Christian “morality” would be to love as God loves, and truth would be to see things through that love, undistorted.
(“When the last days come, we will see visions more vivid than sunsets and brighter than stars. We will recognize each other, and see ourselves for the first time, the way we really are.” - John Darnielle)
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