Theological underpinnings to № 556 The Theology of Aesthetics

Modernism introduced a dualism between physical and spiritual, then minimized and eventually discarded the spiritual.

In The Idiot, Prince Myshkyn sees the painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb and says it could shake a man's faith.

Theists must contemplate the Pandora's box of doubt opened by modernism. This is what Nietche meant by "God is dead".

What is the center of the universe? Of history? Nothing and chaos? Or truth and meaning?

Theists can't retreat to pre-modernism.

Orthodoxy as both classical orthodoxy (religion) and archetypal orthodoxy, like Jordan Peterson recognizing a transcendent reality without committing to belief in God.

Postmodernism rejects the transcendent. Leads to either a "truth is relative" Soviet Union marxism on one extreme, or to an ultra-traditional Nazi nationalism.

In our postmodern age, both the theist and atheist are forced to deeply contemplate the question of God.

What does the theist contemplate? Seeing the face of God might not be what you expect: Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly.

What does the atheist contemplate? The terror of nothing: Béla Tarr's Sátántangó.

Both sides offered by American politics have the same destructive root.