<i>Ugly</i>: Part 2, Spirituality as aesthetics

It is one of the most puzzling facts of life that intelligent people can so often disagree on important issues.

For instance, I think there are great minds who are Democrats and who are Republicans. And the issues dividing them will not boil down to either IQ or quality of argument. In spite of intelligence and sound reasoning differences and disagreements will persist.

Having reflected on these kinds of disagreements I've reached the tentative conclusion that much of life simply boils down to aesthetics. We find ourselves attracted and drawn to some things while being repelled and revolted by other things.
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Let me apply this formulation to some religious and theological cases.

i. Liturgy.
I have some good friends, raised as Protestants, who find the Catholic mass to be ugly. The candles, the incense, the robes, the ritual. It just strikes them as baroque and overwrought. As so much silly and superstitious filigree. Smells and bells.

Yet I find the mass beautiful, profound and moving.

Like with politics, the difference between my friends and I isn't a difference of IQ or sound theology. Further, no amount of argument is going to change these felt experiences. The issue is one of aesthetics. They don't like it, I do, and that's about where is going to stay.

ii. Sin Judgments.
From smoking to homosexuality to abortion to saving the rain forests, people know the rightness or wrongness of these issues before any argument begins. Moral wrongness is felt in the bones. And if you don't feel it, little can make you get worked up about it. When people are arguing about homosexuality they are, at root, sharing their aesthetic judgments. Some find it ugly and repugnant and others do not. Again, the IQs of the conversation partners are not the issue. They are simply discovering that their felt judgments, their aesthetics, are incommensurate.

iii. Theology and hermeneutics.
We all feel that the bible, theology and religion can be used in ugly or beautiful ways. We are drawn to the theologians or preachers who play the melodies we like. And at the end of the day, despite all the arguments I can deploy, I don't think I can claim my biblical or theological positions to be the Truth. All the verbal pyrotechnics of theological, religious, and biblical disputation is simply the expression of this simple formula: I am attracted to this kind of God and repelled by that kind of God.
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This model of aesthetics has also come to color my view of human volition and agency. Specifically, I don't see humans making choices that create their selfhood (i.e., my choice creates who I am). Rather, I see human choice as an act of self-expression. More properly, there is no choice, only self-expression. To choose is to express, to reveal, to discover, and to declare. Given this perspective, each moment of life is an aesthetic experience: What am I drawn to right now? We don't create a life, we don't choose a life. We express one.

Now the issue will quickly be raised, if choice is non-existant and simply the final stage of self-expression, can I change who I am?

My answer is this: Yes, but it is very hard to change.

If life is an act of aesthetic judgment then changing oneself becomes a very deep challenge. It is going to involve the wholesale change--emotional and cognitive--of my entire being. I must seek to change my felt experiences in the face of life circumstances. Concretely, I am going to have to get control of, change, and sanctify all those snap judgments that guide me, moment by moment, through life. This is a labor-intensive task. And it requires exposure to different life experiences. For example, the only real hope of dislodging racism from your heart is to find healing and humane experiences with the very people you fear or find offensive. Our aesthetics of life can and do change, but they mainly change in the face of emotionally corrective life experiences.
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It was this "spirituality as aesthetics" framework that attracted me to ugly as a theological category. Because if this framework has any viability then it suggests that my spiritual failings, opportunities, and calling are currently found under the category of "ugly."

For the most part, the things I move into with love--the beautiful--do not represent for me my most pressing theological challenges. These are the places in life I already recognize as Holy Ground. Yes, these places should be preserved and protected, but since these beautiful things are already owned by me they ask nothing of me, spiritually speaking.

But the ugly is a different story. Under that umbrella are all the people and situations I find myself more than happy to avoid, ignore, or hate. But somewhere in all that ugliness is my calling. God is in there, somewhere. The weird person at work. The homeless. The person who votes differently from me. The morally unclean. I'm not drawn naturally to these people or situations. Yet I'm called into what I feel to be "ugly."
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Let me conclude with why I think the ugly/beautiful frame is better than a more traditional good/bad or righteous/unrighteous frame.

If we frame life as good/right vs. bad/wrong we are easily tricked into thinking our current stance is True and in no need of correction. I mean, if you are right and they are wrong why listen to them? But ugly/beautiful builds in some slack. I'm not expressing the Truth, I'm expressing how things appear to me. And you are expressing yourself. I think this starts the conversation off on a better foot. We are more likely to tolerate our disagreements and work to appreciate the perspective--an aesthetic term--of the Other. Rather than arguing with people we begin, as we do with all aesthetic learning, with issues of appreciation. The good/bad and the right/wrong frames are zerosum conversations. But ugly/beautiful allows me to start with the aesthetic question: Can you appreciate where I am coming from? The ugly/beautiful frame calls us into perseptcive-taking and empathy in a way other categories cannot.
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Much of this is likely to be overstated and problematic. It is primarily offered as a sketch.