Beauty in front of me, beauty behind me, beauty below me, beauty above me

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South Africa’s need to develop a new spirit of nationhood is compared to that of France in World War II, and the key concepts of fraternité and ubuntu are introduced. This leads, via a brief description of the nation-building quality of the Australian arts scene, to a discussion of the meaning of the word beauty – a word used variously in the physical, moral, spiritual and intellectual realms and broadened here to become an organizing idea for a ‘theology of reconstruction’. It is suggested that the adoption of such a beauty-based theology and its associated moral imperative could help to release the religions to play their full part together in the building of compassionate nationhood.

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What approach is needed in South Africa’s highly diverse society if its members are to become more effective in their task of living and working and creating together? And how is a new ‘spirit of the nation’ to be awakened for such a task?

In his classic essay on Tolstoy’s view of history, The Hedgehog and the Fox, the late British philosopher Isaiah Berlin invoked the contrast between ‘foxes’ – people who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things – and ‘hedgehogs’, who relate everything to a central all-embracing idea or system. This is an image that lends itself to many contexts. For example, it is claimed that the South African economy desperately needs ‘foxes’ – those with sharp entrepreneurial minds who can perceive a variety of openings for small-business enterprises. On the other hand, what is essential, says Xolile Mangcu, Director of the Steve Biko Foundation, is that South Africa should turn from a technocratic to a spiritual conception of nation-building – a remark that suggests the need for an all-embracing vision to underpin the nation’s social, economic and political agendas.

In these early years of new nationhood Nelson Mandela has expressed a dream of building a single nation of many races and colours, languages and religions. Similarly, Desmond Tutu has spoken of South Africa as a ‘rainbow nation’ – one that can become the caring, sharing, compassionate society it is called to be. No doubt such a hope has driven much of the nation’s vibrant and often passionate discourse of the past few years, and it is backed up by a fairly recent opinion survey which found that the great majority of the younger generation are optimistic about the future of the country’s race relations – a key element in any realization of the dream. It seems, though, that a tough task of national transformation lies ahead; one that is multi-dimensional, embracing both outer socio-political and inner cultural/religious aspects.

In this paper we shall be concerned largely with the inner aspect, especially with the idea of a national spirit that is yet to emerge. My main aims are, first, to discuss the repeated call to the citizens of South Africa, in the face of its diversity and daunting array of problems, to commit themselves to the task of nation-building and, second, to suggest that the concept of beauty, conceived in a sufficiently broad way, constitutes a theological source that is relevant to this task. From the perspective of Christian theology, beauty lies at the very heart of the being of God and hence in the ongoing divine work of creation (creatio continua). It is to be encountered in a wide variety of areas – physical, moral, spiritual, intellectual – and it is intimately linked to theological thought about the meaning and purpose of the created order.

The paper thus sets forth ‘beauty’ as a key theological idea in terms of which the Christian people of South Africa may be urged to adopt a far more welcoming and inclusivist stance vis-à-vis those who are ‘other’, especially in their religious traditions. Without that particular commitment to inclusiveness on the part of the religious majority, a genuinely uniting vision seems hardly conceivable.

During April 2003 thirty-three religious leaders were invited to confer with President Thabo Mbeki on the question of collaboration between the government and religious communities to promote the moral and spiritual health of the nation. Both Mbeki and Mvume Dandala (then Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church) stressed the need for healing and reconciliation, a process that will involve the rank and file of ordinary South Africans in cross-cultural interaction.

The task ahead for South Africa has been well described, for example, in a detailed survey by George Ellis (of the University of Cape Town) who makes the following points. On the credit side lies the rich array of cultures and religions, coexisting in relative harmony after a miraculously peaceful transfer of political authority in 1994 – a harmony that is greatly aided by the overall magnanimity of the black people, together with the country’s wealth of natural resources and natural beauty. On the debit side, apart from the huge HIV/AIDS crisis, there is a massive degree of poverty amidst comparative wealth, and the associated unemployment and lack of basic needs such as housing, health-care and education. It is a country that needs the development of managerial skills at all levels and an agreed set of core moral values. Earlier, in a letter to the press in 1998, Ellis called for the building of the community through developing a culture of delivery; for the provision of quality education at all levels through the valuing and cherishing of good teachers; and for the creation of a new social contract and campaign to get all to work together for the common good instead of simply looking after themselves. He suggested that a National Transformation Forum be created, supported by all sectors of the community and by all levels of government – one that would guide the process and search for creative solutions.

This was a heartfelt appeal for a new ethical spirit to support the task of nation-building – the inner and outer aspects of national life complementing each other. Here it is worth noting that projects for political and social development or reconstruction often seem to be treated simply as exercises in the application of socio-political techniques. For example, the authors of an authoritative book about the recent governance of Johannesburg write:

They go on to suggest that the political transition in Johannesburg over the past decade has provided ‘an extraordinary opportunity to unite one of the world’s most divided cities’, but that ‘it has not yet successfully created a transformative dispensation that is able to tackle the structural problems facing the city’. But what may be needed in the first place is the development of a public spirit that is collaborative and can thus facilitate transformative action. In line with their academic norms, no doubt, the authors have treated the topic in terms of political, economic, social and demographic processes without taking into account the considerable influence of cultural and religious factors in the city’s social dynamics.

The tendency to neglect the inward mental and spiritual aspects is highlighted by American philosopher Ken Wilber in his advocacy of an integrative vision of human society. As an example he mentions the organization UNICEF: its own consultants concluded that the sustainability of its projects and of other enterprises of the United Nations often requires a deeper understanding and involvement of the interior realms of consciousness and culture than is usually evident.

With the concern of Mbeki and Dandala in mind, we turn to the phrase ‘spirit of the nation’, a key theme in a high-level workshop that took place in Cape Town during March 1999 – Multi-Event ‘99 (ME99). This was addressed by an impressive array of speakers, mostly South African, on the theme of ‘Religion in Public Life’, and it carried the working title, ‘Transforming Public Life in the New Millenium: Religion in the making of Cultural Values and Public Policy’.

One of the key speakers, Ramphela Mamphele (then Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town) remarked:

Other ME99 speakers pointed in different ways to this fundamental challenge. The Archbishop of Cape Town, Njongonkulu Ndungane, spoke of South Africa as a broken society in need of healing. ‘We are at a formative stage of our nascent democracy,’ he added. ‘We need to share a vision as ordained by God and to cooperate with one another in its realization. We need to search for common human values that bind us…. (and) for creative ways of living together across our differences’. Bishop Mvume Dandala referred to this deep inner task of renewing our society as ‘harnessing the spirit of the nation’ (the title of his keynote address) and Professor Jakes Gerwel, special adviser in the Office of the President, called for ‘an RDP of the soul’ as he considered the role of the churches and other religious bodies.

Writing two years later, Charles Villa-Vicencio, Director of the Institute for Justice & Reconciliation (Cape Town), saw this as a problem of how to facilitate genuine debate and how to allow for the collision of values that such debate will highlight, given the contrast between communal and individualist approaches to human living. Nation-building is about enabling the individuals and groups ‘to engage one another in pursuit of a South Africanism not yet born’ – one that pursues its own set of values, especially an attitude of inclusiveness. ‘A culture of tolerance, empathetic listening and consensus building has yet to be acquired’, he said, ‘and the battle of the soul of the nation is yet to be won’.

Since the transfer of political power in 1994 a certain degree of black economic empowerment has taken place, but in the social and cultural areas there has been less change. Furthermore, many of the nation’s white citizens seem reluctant to play their full part in the task of ‘transforming public life in the new millenium’. How then is the road ahead to be conceived? What needs to be done in the way of encouraging a common vision of social transformation and new nationhood, and what theological insights can help to form such a vision, aided perhaps by the astonishing world-picture of the sciences?

Another ME99 speaker, Muslim cleric Rashied Omar, expressed the need to move on from the ‘theology of resistance’ of the apartheid era to a ‘theology of reconstruction’. Indeed, the latter is a theme that various theologians in Africa have addressed during the past decade, mainly in the socio-political area. This paper, too, is concerned with the question of a theological approach to ‘reconstruction’, especially in the preliminary task of facilitating inter-religious understanding and collaboration. And whereas these recent African theologies have tended to take their lead from Scripture, especially from the account of the post-exilic restoration of Jerusalem during the sixth century BCE, outlined in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, we opt here for a distinctly metaphysical approach, in which a widely inclusivist model of the nature and purposes of God is assumed.

We shall explore briefly the axiomatic theological idea that the meaning and divine purpose of the universe (in its cosmic, biological and cultural processes) is to show forth and share widely the quality of beauty. As an introduction to this theological approach we consider briefly two key unlinked ideas of the young French philosopher and mystic of the early 20th century, Simone Weil (1909-1943). These are concerned with the ‘inspiration’ of a nation and the significance of ‘beauty’. She applied the first to the plight of France as a conquered nation in World War II, and she developed a distinctive metaphysic of beauty in nature as a manifestation of God. We shall note how she viewed the rehabilitating of her country and then proceed to the question of how her idea about beauty might be broadened for use in a theology of reconstruction, one that concerns especially the Christian church as it seeks to play its part in raising the spiritual health of the nation.

One of Weil’s key observations was that in order to recover her prestige in the world France had to become ‘an inspiration’ before she could become again a nation – a prerequisite that would be extremely difficult to achieve if it were delayed until after the war when independent nationhood and power were restored. Spiritual transformation, she claimed, had to be well separated from the power play that so often predominates in peace-time politics. And so it was to the leadership of the Free French that she looked to articulate the inner longings of her people for a restored nationhood. There was something of a spiritual power about that movement which gave it the right ‘freely to use the most exalted words in the language’. The true voice of France would not be based on ideas of national glory and power but on those of liberté, egalité, fraternité – a spiritual tradition graven in the hearts of all peoples. Weil claimed for the resistance movement a double mission: first, to help France discover in the depths of her misfortune an inspiration in keeping with her genius and with the needs of mankind in distress and, second, to spread this inspiration throughout the world.

Although the South African situation is different from that of wartime France, it seems clear that the highest priority ought to be given to finding the right touch to continue the process of national healing that has begun briefly, while the country is still in the early stages of transformation and nation-building. Appropriate words and images need to be found to evoke a common ideal of nationhood. In the case of France, Weil went on to list four obstacles to achieving that ideal: a false conception of greatness; the degradation of the sentiment of justice; the idolization of money; and a lack of religious inspiration. She names the first of these as the most serious. Inevitably we must ask what is to be made of the notion of true national greatness, and how are we to think of it in the case of South Africa? Following Weil, greatness surely does not lie in any dominant role to be played in the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) or the African Renaissance, important though these may be, but rather in fulfilling the Mandela/Tutu rainbow-nation dream. As Jürgen Moltmann writes at the end of his Revolution, Religion & the Future, the covenant of free and equal men and women, drawn from all the different nations, cultures and religions, can ‘complete’ the French Revolution, because it will fulfill its hope. He adds:

At least some of the groundwork for any such politico-theological vision must come from the religious life of the nation. For the churches in South Africa this will mean showing afresh that the Christian gospel both offers and demands an inspiration of acceptance of otherness – one that begins to show the possibilities of fraternité in the face of extreme diversity.

Addressing ME99 on ‘The Politics of Grace and the Pain of Difference’, British theologian Ann Loades pointed to the tendency in inter-faith discussion to keep to the level of ethics, through perhaps a lack of conviction among the participants that ‘there are resources beyond them, generously and abundantly given in response to their efforts’. She asked if it is the pain of religious differences that inclines such discussion towards ethics rather than theological doctrine, and she questioned whether the full extent of these differences is always appreciated. Her final point was that an enhanced awareness of the actual differences is one of the gifts that the religions can make to public life.

Other writers, too, have made the general point that ‘different religions represent different paths to different goals. The goal aimed at is as tradition-specific as the path taken. The goal is constituted as goal by the path chosen.’ And even at the level of ethics, let alone theological exploration, the effort to resolve practical issues brings into play the radically different anthropologies of different cultures and religions. These give rise to different attitudes to illness, authority, work, school, family, the outsider, those in need, and so on. Associated with cultural and religious diversity is the stark fact of extreme otherness, even if this constitutes a potentially creative resource for developing the spirit of the nation.

Although the underlying anthropologies of the religions may be different, the best of human qualities will find wide-ranging respect and acceptance. For example, the Zulu word ubuntu (and its synonyms throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa) expresses in a richly nuanced way the key African concept of human personhood. It is a word that refers to a fullness of personhood-in-relationship. It is bound up with a strongly felt relatedness and neighbourly obligation to all the members of a person’s society or clan and a sense of corporate identity rooted in the clan. And allied to this sense of corporate identity is the distinctively African view of right and wrong focused upon the supreme value of social harmony.

Thus, if fraternité is the moral watchword for the inspiration of France, the corresponding role in South Africa must go to the word ubuntu. Expressing a certain communal sadness, Desmond Tutu has remarked that ‘we in the black community have lost our sense of ubuntu – our humaneness, caring, hospitality, our sense of connectedness, our sense that my humanity is bound up in your humanity’. It should be noted that this African sense of neighbourly relationship and obligation sometimes seems to be limited to the members of a person’s immediate society or clan, whereas Tutu has in mind a much wider horizon when he appeals for South Africa to become a caring, sharing, compassionate rainbow nation. He thinks of its global context and claims that ‘the world needs a South Africa that has succeeded’.

Thirty years previously Australia was culturally oriented towards England and the USA. ‘Now it has become a truly multi-cultural society of which it is proud,’ she said, ‘and has achieved a remarkable sense of nationhood’. In the early 1970s a Labour Government held office briefly and, as it had pledged, immediately established the Australian Council of the Arts, a body committed to the principle of peer assessment and to placing control in the hands of the artists and their supporters. Seven boards were set up – to deal with literature, music, theatre, visual arts, crafts, aboriginal arts, and community arts – and there soon developed the recognition that everyone had something to offer that was of cultural value. There developed a tremendous respect for difference, for the tapestry of human society, and a newly confident sense of being Australian. She remarked that people had never cherished and embraced the landscape, but that ‘our artists have now made us extraordinarily environmentally conscious. We found confidence in dancing, because of a new awareness of the wide-open spaces’.

Andrea Hull’s picture of national arts-driven harmony may seem idyllic. However, it does suggest that whereas the sharing of the experience of beauty often forms a powerful bond between individual human beings, a similar effect can occur between different cultural or racial groups wherever there is a genuine affirmation of the aesthetic sense and creativity of ‘the other’ – making not only for social justice but also creating the quality of ubuntu at the inter-group level, both of which are crucial for the well-being of a pluralist society.

Indeed, philosopher Charles Taylor in a notable lecture on ‘The Politics of Recognition’ refers to the need of people and groups for recognition – for that affirmation by others that enhances their understanding of who they are, of their fundamental defining characteristics as persons or peoples. He discusses the idea expressed by the German Romantic philosopher J G von Herder that each human being has an original way of being human (an understanding of individual identity that was new in European thought when it emerged at the end of the 18th century) and that this uniqueness of identity applies not only to persons but also to a culture-bearing people among other peoples. Just like individuals, a volk should be true to itself but, as Andrea Hull would add, it can only achieve its true fullness through creative interaction with other peoples and their cultures. And if this is true of cultures, why not of religions?

We have touched on the beauty exhibited in human creativity, especially that which is found in the arts or in caring communal life. But for many people beauty is associated primarily with the world of nature – a key factor, for example, in the theological thought of Simone Weil. As philosopher-theologian Patrick Sherry explains, she considered beauty in nature to be a manifestation of the beauty of God, holding a revelatory view of natural beauty as ‘the attribute of God under which we see and experience him’, whether or not we acknowledge his existence. Weil wrote that

She goes on to criticize Christianity for having so little to say about this powerful transcendental quality. Theologians have tended to discuss it, writes Sherry, simply in terms of the moral and spiritual beauty of Christ and the beauty of the Gospel. He adds that

From this high view of beauty it seems reasonable to suggest that projects in cross-cultural, inter-racial and inter-religious understanding are more likely to succeed if they are promoted not only through intellectual discourse but also through a search for ‘the beautiful’ – that powerful incentive that is present in all the preoccupations of secular life. Here, surely, is a key task for South Africa and all other strongly pluralist societies: to seek beauty in the life of the nation and its artistic endeavours, through what Andrea Hull called ‘a tremendous respect for difference, for the tapestry of human society’. Such a theme runs through John de Gruchy’s recent book, Christianity, Art and Transformation, in which he explores the significance of the arts in both church and society.

But the appeal to beauty raises the question of the meaning of the word and why it has seemed so problematic a concept. It is often said that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder and that it is not open to objective evaluation, nor easily defined, given its wide range of associations. For example, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was frequently irritated by the inane lack of meaning with which the word is bandied about and he demanded to know what a beautiful pair of eyes had in common with a beautiful Gothic church. However, the imprecision of the word may point to the fact that there is something ultimately mysterious in our human perception of beauty and the kind of truth it conveys – and, indeed, in its power to move us in the depths of our being.

In order to begin to elaborate the concept of beauty we now compare two very different examples in which this term is associated with the quality of ‘fittingness’. This is one way in which to broaden the meaning of the word (beyond its common association with aesthetic enjoyment of a visual or aural nature), so that it may become an organizing idea that forms the basis of a wide framework for understanding the world. It can then constitute a theological source that, as suggested earlier, is relevant to the task of nation-building.

Turning first to the discipline of physics, one finds that the quality of beauty is an important criterion in the development of the theories of physics, where rightness and fittingness are key aspects. Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg compares it to that of a spare, perfectly structured Greek tragedy – ‘the beauty of everything fitting together, of nothing changeable, of logical rigidity.’ He illustrates this with the remark that a horse trainer might make, ‘That is a beautiful horse’, meaning primarily that, to the expert eye, the horse looks exactly right for its task of winning races. He then compares Newton’s theory of Universal Gravitation and Einstein’s more comprehensive theory of General Relativity and judges Einstein’s to be the more beautiful, both for the strong sense of logical rigidity and rightness (or fittingness) that it conveys and for the simplicity of its underlying idea. Newton’s theory has a much simpler mathematical formulation but Einstein’s is based on the strangely simple but brilliant idea that inertial mass and gravitational mass are equivalent. As Francis Bacon remarked about four centuries ago, ’there is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion’ – a strangeness that excites surprise and wonder.

Our second example of beauty as fittingness is to be found within the rich meaning of the Greek word kalon – the good, the beautiful, the fitting. Hans Urs von Balthasar has enlarged on its meaning thus:

This word appears in its adjectival form in the refrain of the opening chapter of the Hebrew Bible, Genesis 1: ‘And God saw that it was kala’ – a suggestion, perhaps, of a universe that is beautifully arranged, for ‘God saw all that he had made, and it was very kala’. In other words, only insofar as the created order is seen to be ‘the right, the fitting, the good …’ is it seen to be ‘the beautiful’ in all the fullness of that term.

We invoke this broad meaning of beauty as an organizing idea not only because it enables us to find an analogical link between two such widely diverse examples, but also because it seems eminently suitable to be used in theology, as a key idea in any theory of the nature and purposes of the Creator. John Haught, for example, proposes that there is a divine principle at work in the creation that may be summed up as ‘the maximization of beauty’. Indeed, we shall assume that beauty/kalon is what the entire cosmic drama is about, that is, the creating and sharing of beauty on every scale of its wide variety of expressions. Perhaps beauty is the single most apt word to apply to the creation itself.

A potentially fruitful approach to forming such a theological theory seems to lie in the exploration of the concept of Irenaeus of Lyon (about the year 180 CE) that the Spirit of God acts to beautify and to perfect the creation – working constantly to create beauty in nature and to inspire beauty in human creativity. Although the link between Spirit and beauty has been made comparatively seldom over the centuries, it was taken seriously by the 18th century New England writer Jonathan Edwards and again, in the 20th century, by Catholic theologian Balthasar and various Eastern Orthodox theologians, notably Sergius Bulgakov. It has been given detailed treatment recently by Patrick Sherry in his book Spirit and Beauty.

Of special note here is the idea that the Spirit not only adorns the creation but also inspires human beings as creators and perceivers of beauty. Sherry writes:

Sherry thus sets forth a major theme of his book, set in Trinitarian terms: that the Spirit creates beauty and that this is a foreshadowing of the world to come. Later, he discusses the Spirit’s inspiration not only in the case of artistic beauty but more generally in the deeper awakenings of human imagination, that active mental power that brings ideas together and seeks a deeper truth in our experience. With Samuel Taylor Coleridge and George Eliot he regards the imagination as a unifying agent – as the whole mind working in a certain way, involving perception, reasoning, and feeling. He suggests, too, that there exists in our moral and social life something that might be called ‘inspiration of the heart’ or ‘moral inspiration’ – that which exercises the imagination in coming to understand others and in cultivating mutual sympathies. In this way there can develop the kind of moral vision called for in South Africa, helping people to see things from an unfamiliar point of view and stimulating them to lead deeper and richer lives. The arts, particularly literature, have an important role to play here in enlarging people’s imaginative and moral range – and, surely, in extending their aesthetic and theological sensibilities toward the vision of ‘the rainbow nation’.

It is important to note John de Gruchy’s comment that the rainbow nation metaphor is ‘problematic because of the way in which it can be abused to sanctify the status quo’ – to which he adds that artists, among others, have used it even while sceptical of its power to heal the nation’s historic divisions. But it is equally important to note his account of Bonhoeffer’s understanding of what Kierkegaard called ‘aesthetic existence’. Bonhoeffer tantalizingly raised the question of what it would mean if the church could again (as in the thirteenth century in particular) provide a broad area of freedom and creativity, relating art inclusively to the flowering of humanity’s inner being – seeking deliberately an aesthetic mode of living that gives space to the creating of friendship, formation (bildung), play, happiness. Here he was exploring the notion of a true ‘worldliness’, a way of being Christian in the world that is fully human, truly of the earth. Although Bonhoeffer wondered about the possibility of recovering ‘aesthetic existence’ within the life of the church – as a vital step along the path of Christian formation – the concept lends itself to the development of art in society at large, helping to create a realm of freedom for creativity.

Such ideas point to a particular theological task that lies within the broad enterprise of ‘reconciliation and reconstruction’. Whereas the challenge facing the nation is that of developing a new moral vision, the challenge facing the religions, especially Christianity, is that of developing a new theological vision – one that embraces the moral inasmuch as it broadens the area of freedom for aesthetic existence and, indeed, preserves and enlarges ‘the dominion of beauty in the universe’.

For Christianity this is essentially a challenge to understand afresh the role of the Spirit of God in the world. The labels of Beautifier and Perfecter imply a strongly active role, not least in the field of inter-religious engagement. Former WCC theologian Wesley Ariarajah writes that a re-emphasis on the Spirit as ‘the One who moves, corrects and rules over all life will open up many possibilities for relationship with people of other faiths’. He asks: ‘Can we not see this as a new historical moment in the life of the church, which could give it a new impetus and mark a new beginning?’ and urges that the church is being called to deal theologically with religious pluralism – to struggle to discover a new theological basis for its relationship with those of other faith convictions and to come to a new understanding of the way to relate to, and live and work with, people of other faiths.

Is there, indeed, a way for the Christian people of South Africa to view the others inclusively, as recipients of God’s grace in the distinctness of their religious traditions? Much attention has been given to the general question of religious pluralism, especially from the perspective of the Christian faith. Here we simply note briefly the thesis of S Mark Heim in his two main books Salvations and The Depth of the Riches in which he develops a distinctive Trinitarian theology of religious ends (or destinies).

Christianity’s understanding of the ultimate destiny of human beings has sometimes been characterized as either exclusivist or inclusivist or pluralist. In all three stances a single mode of ultimate union with God is envisaged. Heim offers a fresh perspective, on the other hand, which John Bowker names differentialism and which seems worth addressing wherever Christian people seek to engage seriously with those of other religious traditions. As Bowker explains, differentialism allows that differences of belief are real, that they imply differently envisioned destinies, and that all of these may indeed be carried through to their different conclusions – that it is logically and theologically possible that nirvana on the one hand and the communion of saints on the other may both be attainable and attained. In other words, perhaps the Lord God is pleased to affirm the particular vision of each and seek to bring it to its own appropriate perfection. After all, if God can relate to the huge diversity of the creation now, why should that richness be cut short in the new creation?

For Christianity, such a theory of eschatological pluralism, although speculative, can surely encourage an attitude of openness and respect towards the members of other religious traditions – even though, as Bowker suggests, the missionary impetus remains central, given that choices are important. On the basis of differentialism, he continues, ‘the consequences of grace and truth in other religions can be held in wonder, respect and awe. Only then (italics added) will that mutual encouragement and criticism become possible that the religious world so much needs. Then, too, the cooperation of religions in resisting evil and assisting goodness becomes an uncomplicated priority’. And then, we may add, the religions will be released to play their full part together in the building of compassionate nationhood.

As a postscript to Heim’s differentialism we note that his thesis seems to lack the concept of temporality in the new creation, an idea that has been given detailed treatment recently by John Polkinghorne. As a scientist-theologian, Polkinghorne suggests a speculative but coherent scenario in which the ongoing work of divine creation culminates in a transformation of the world – creatio nova ex vetere – the making of a new resurrected world out of the old. And since Einstein’s General Relativity indicates that matter-energy requires the existence of space-time, and vice-versa, it is not unreasonable to suppose that a resurrected universe (with its resurrected humanity) necessarily comprises a transformed space-time to go with its transformed matter-energy. What is theologically significant here is the notion that there will be ‘time’ in the new creation.

If so, we may add to Heim’s picture the expectancy that things will not exist in simply a state of frozen perfection but rather exhibit the dynamic properties of change and temporal succession. Those Christian believers who hold such an expectation would inevitably hope that all religious ‘ends’, however perceived from the perspectives of other faiths, would not remain static but would be part of an ever deepening enjoyment of the beauty of God – and that each distinctive destiny would, in due course, be one of special personal relationship to the one true Christlike God. After all, as Polkinghorne suggests, if it is the joy of the self-giving God to share the riches of divine beauty, then time is needed in which to explore the endless variations of that beauty, for how otherwise could finite beings encounter the Infinite?

No doubt the great qualities of truth, goodness and beauty are intimately linked in the nature of God as limitlessly self-giving love. And for Christian believers there is a ‘gospel of creation’ to be affirmed, embracing the gospel of redemption through Christ crucified and summed up in the idea that this is God’s beloved world, seen by God as very beautiful – seen not only in its present reality of costly and often harsh evolution but in its ultimate potential, surely, as a plenitude of fullness of being-in-relationship.

We have considered aspects of South Africa’s need for a new spirit of nationhood – one that would fulfill the Mandela/Tutu dream of a compassionate rainbow-nation – and compared this briefly to a similar need in France during World War II. The words, fraternité and ubuntu, were introduced as key symbols in the task of nation-building – both offer the challenge to explore their fullness of meaning and to give them new expression within the context of extreme diversity of race, culture and religion. A hopeful note was sounded in the description of the Australian arts scene with its affirmation of what might be termed ‘inter-group ubuntu’. This led into the theological realm through questions about beauty in art and in nature, including Simone Weil’s claim that natural beauty is the form in which human beings ‘see God’. The word beauty was then discussed and assigned a broad meaning that would enable it to be used as a theological source, especially as an organizing idea for a theological description of the world – one that builds upon an understanding of the Spirit of God as the Beautifier and Perfecter of the creation who inspires ‘aesthetic existence’. That double role readily suggests the idea of the maximization of beauty – created, shared and enjoyed – as the overall purpose of God in the unfolding cosmic drama.

Such a theological approach could encourage the Christian people of South Africa, as the predominant religious group, to relate to and work with people of other faiths – all the more so if it forms part of a new understanding of the stunningly imaginative and costly creation of the world.

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