| Many American theologians in the nineteenth century took an active interest in aesthetic matters. Before George Santayana published The Sense of Beauty in 1896, theologians such as John Bascom, John Steinfort Kedney, James Moffat, Henry Noble Day, Charles Carroll Everett, Jospeh Torrey, and George Samson, published studies on the nature of beauty. The religious thinkers attempted to deal with the experience of beauty in a more sophisticated manner than most of their non-religious contemporaries. While always affirming the centrality of God, these theologians accepted the assumption that any inquiry into the nature of beauty must also be an inquiry into the nature and operation of the human mind. As such, their inquiries were both psychological and theological. Moreover, while presenting differing conclusions on the nature of beauty, these theologians agreed that such an inquiry was a legitimate, if not necessary, intellectual enterprise.;Convinced of the fact of overruling Providence and that the psychological orientation was the most fruitful in intellectual investigations, these theological aestheticians, with a few exceptions, endeavored to proffer the reconciliation between what was visible and what was invisible, between matter and spirit. As such, the American theological aesthetic tradition in the nineteenth century was a fusion of realism and idealism and could not be labelled as Realist, Associationist, Idealist, or Transcendentalist. While always suggesting that aesthetics could not be divorced from psychology, these thinkers also believed that aesthetics could not be separated from theology. Beauty, for these thinkers, was certain testimony of the importance of both God and man, and the explication of beauty was merely another means by which these theologians pursued their chosen vocation.;In the execution of their individual investigations, those nineteenth century American theologians interested in explicating the nature of beauty assumed the rationality and knowability of God, nature, and the human mind. Whether or not they believed that beauty could be explained independent of the emotion of pleasure or whether or not beauty was a subjective experience, theological aestheticians attempted to delineate the architectonics of the human experience. |
