| The central premise of a theological aesthetics of nature is that the experience of natural beauty is a source of religious insight into the need and way of salvation. It offers a view of redeemed life as participation in the ecological, beloved community of the beautiful. And it offers a view of redeemed life that includes both the human and the natural world.;This dissertation first traces the history of theological reflection on natural beauty and relevant trends in philosophical aesthetics. Natural beauty in that history has played many roles in Christian life, even when developments in philosophical aesthetics made it increasingly difficult to consider beauty as somehow divine, transcendent, or revelatory.;For a theory of interpretation of aesthetic experience, the argument draws upon the philosophy of Josiah Royce. In developing his aesthetic theory, we can see that natural beauty is a source of religious insight into the need and way of salvation. Such experience draws us redemptively into community, into his Beloved Community now understood as an ecological beloved community dedicated to the cause of ecological redemption. Rooted in ecological theology, this is an interpretation of what Alejandro Garcia-Rivera named the community of the beautiful.;To help cultivate a sense of beauty, we turn to the artist---particularly within the land art movement, represented here by Andy Goldsworthy---who offers an experience of the beautiful that can be shared, and who questions fundamental dualisms in how we understand humanity in relation to nature. The artist demonstrates the connection between human and divine creativity. And by helping the viewer to see natural beauty with a loving eye, the land artist clarifies a revelatory aspect of natural beauty as transient, and as that which we both crave and destroy.;The cultivation of a sense of beauty comes through aesthetic, religious, and sacramental experience. When all three types of experience intersect in the experience of natural beauty, there is new hope for ecological redemption. For in the experience of the beautiful, we are able to see what Royce called the three marks of religious insight: breadth of range, unity of view, and the closeness of personal touch. |
