Carolina QuotesCreation's being is God's pleasure, creation's beauty God's glory; beauty reveals the shining of an uncreated light. … Creation is only a splendor that hangs upon that life of love and knowledge, and only by grace; it is first and foremost a surface, a shining fabric of glory, whose inmost truth is its aesthetic correspondence to the beauty of divine love. … It is delight that constitutes creation, and so only delight can comprehend it, see it aright, understand its grammar. Only in loving creation's beauty—only in seeing that creation truly is beauty—does one apprehend what creation is.
David Bentley Hart Connected to the Carolinas
Source
p. 252
- work
- The Beauty of the Infinite (2003)
- year
- 2003
- locator
- p. 252
Cite this record
“Creation's being is God's pleasure, creation's beauty God's …” David Bentley Hart. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-F5696DEECC. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/f5696deecc
More from David Bentley Hart
There is a sense in which Ivan's love of that little girl [in The Brothers Karamazov] is always in danger of becoming a kind of demonic compassion: a desire that she not exist at all, a conviction that it were better she had never been summoned into the wounded freedom of cosmic time or called into rational union with God than she suffer the wrongs done her at the hands of fallen creatures.
Unless the world is truly set apart from God and possesses a dependent but real liberty of its own analogous to the freedom of God, everything is merely a fragment of divine volition, and God is simply the totality of all that is and all that happens; there is no creation, but only an oddly pantheistic expression of God's unadulterated power.
Beauty crosses every boundary, traverses every series, and so manifests the God who transcends every division.