Hart on God

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The Triune God is Beauty and Beautiful.The most elementary statement of theological aesthetics is that God is beautiful: not only that God is beauty or the essence and archetype of beauty, nor even only that God is the highest beauty, but that, as Gregory the Theologian says, God is beauty and also beautiful, whose radiance shines upon and is reflected in his creatures. As Dionysius insists, we should not distinguish between God as beauty and as infinitely beautiful, the splendor that gathers all things toward and into itself (De divinis. The beauty of God is not simply ‘ideal’: it is not remote, cold, characterless, or abstract, nor merely absolute, unitary, and formless God’s beauty is delight and the object of elight, the shared gaze of love that belongs to the persons of the Trinity; it is what God beholds, what the Father sees and rejoices in the Son, in the sweetness of the Spirit, what son Son and Spirit find delightful in one another, because as Son and Spirit of the Father they share his knowledge and love as persons..True beauty is not the idea of the beautiful,a static archetype in the ‘mind’ of God, but s an infinite ‘music,’ drama, art, completed in -but never ‘bounded’ by - the termless dynamism of the Trinity’s life; God is boundless,and so is never a boundary, his music possesses the richness of every transition, interval, measure and variation - all dancing and delight