ABSTRACT
This chapter then demonstrates that in Church Dogmatics §31.3, his most extensive account of beauty, Barth develops these three rudiments into an analogia pulchritudinis for the first time. Barth proposes that beauty is the form – both the ‘shape’ and ‘method’ – of God’s glory. By doing so, he now claims that God’s glory evokes creaturely glorification not by sheer power as Reformed accounts of effectual call have traditionally implied but by awakening desire and filling with joy. Barth eschews a philosophical in favour of a theological proof of this claim that the form of God’s glory is beautiful. By surveying the previous sections of his theology, he demonstrates that the Trinity has a beautiful, unified and distinct form of unity and distinction or simplicity and multiplicity as one God and three persons and that this is reflected in the form of both the perfect divine being and the incarnation. It is true that this passage therefore does not directly elaborate an analogy of beauty. However, when it is read in its literary context of Barth’s account of God’s glory, it implies one. Barth’s claim that beauty is the form of God’s glory, taken together with his analogia gloriae, implies that not only do the glory of the eternal and incarnate Son of God have a beautiful, unified and distinct form but that when the Church glorifies God it has a comparably beautiful form and may recognise similar forms and concepts of beauty in the world around it which also glorify God. Far from this being just another unrealised implication of his theology, brief allusions throughout the account imply that this is what Barth himself actually assumes. In the course of the passage, Barth briefly reaffirms his earlier belief that the content of theology should have beauty that mirrors that of its object and admits that philosophical understandings of beauty may become witnesses to the beauty of God’s revealed glory.
