Christ, as the ultimate Imago Dei is alluded to in scripture as being without external beauty in the Classical sense, and should better be thought of as one who passed through all the slime and mire of a fallen and sinful creation in order to redeem it. His own body is to be remembered for the marks it bears-even in resurrection-of the scars of his sacrificial death. For the Christian, a theory of beauty might better begin at this point.

Begbie offers an additional valuable contribution by rejecting the traditional emphasis on beauty, in its Platonic sense, and instead suggesting that beauty be reconceived in Christological terms-as disorder redeemed.

Advertizing, television and film all wield mighty powers to visually seduce us, while much fine art leaves us indifferent, confused or, at worst, repulsed. There is a desperate need for creative Christians to redeem the visual arena from both forms of excess, cutting through all the false glamour, tawdry baseness and dense obfuscation.

Redemption in Christ should give the artistically gifted not only a new orientation and a new sense of purpose, but also a new vision of reality, seeing the world through the eyes of faith, looking at the human condition through the eyes of Christ.

Narcissism and Christianity have little in common, yet the Romantic paradigm of artistic creativity, particularly in light of subsequent Freudian ideas, has tended to foster its share of narcissism. It was the tragic fate of Narcissus that he was so preoccupied with self that he could not appreciate God, nature, or the other.

Beauty, therefore, for the modern and postmodern artist has become a highly dubious metaphor for a discredited belief system.

Postmodernism has not overcome the problems of modernism, but only compounded them with a dosis of cynicism, relativism and indifference.