Divine Beauty: The Aesthetics of Charles Hartshorne

This monograph examines Charles Hartshorne's distinctive contribution to philosophical theology through his aesthetics-centered approach to understanding divine reality. Dombrowski argues that Hartshorne's process philosophy offers a unique resolution to classical theological problems by grounding metaphysics in aesthetic experience rather than traditional categories of substance or causation.

The work demonstrates how Hartshorne develops his concept of God as the supreme aesthetic experience, drawing from Alfred North Whitehead's process thought while advancing beyond it. Dombrowski shows that for Hartshorne, beauty serves not merely as one divine attribute among others, but as the fundamental category through which all divine perfections become intelligible. This aesthetic framework allows Hartshorne to reconceptualize traditional theological issues: divine omniscience becomes God's perfect aesthetic appreciation of all reality, divine love manifests as supreme aesthetic sensitivity, and creation expresses God's aim toward maximum aesthetic richness.

Dombrowski traces how this aesthetic theology addresses perennial philosophical problems. Against classical theism's static perfection, Hartshorne's God experiences genuine aesthetic enrichment through temporal creation. Against pantheism's identification of God with the world, aesthetic categories maintain divine transcendence while affirming intimate divine participation in creaturely experience. The work particularly emphasizes how Hartshorne's aesthetics resolves the problem of evil by reconceiving it as aesthetic discord rather than moral failure, making theodicy a question of how God harmonizes rather than eliminates dissonance.

The monograph situates Hartshorne's aesthetic theology within broader philosophical conversations, showing debts to Peirce's metaphysics of feeling and Bergson's creative evolution while critiquing both Thomistic substance metaphysics and modern materialism. Dombrowski demonstrates how Hartshorne's position offers resources for contemporary philosophy of religion, particularly in dialogue with environmental philosophy and theories of emergence.

Throughout, Dombrowski presents Hartshorne's aesthetics not simply as describing divine attributes but as providing epistemic access to God through human aesthetic experience. This methodological move grounds theological claims in phenomenologically accessible beauty rather than abstract argumentation. The work thus presents Hartshorne's aesthetic theology as both a metaphysical system and a spiritual practice, uniting contemplation and analysis. By foregrounding beauty as the primary theological category, Hartshorne's vision suggests that encountering God resembles aesthetic appreciation more than logical demonstration, offering a distinctive path beyond both rationalist proofs and fideistic leaps.