To begin the search for the Kantian aesthetic through a discourse of John, it becomes imperative to see that the opening chapters of John set up a connection to the opening chapters of Genesis. In Genesis, though there is an express and intentional appeal to the spiritual intervention of God, it presents the creation of the physical world. One will observe that in the initial sequence of events, after the six days, there is a picture presented in which creation is new and perfect, and in this new creation stands a man and a woman, Adam and Eve, on the first day of a new and perfect reality. One can infer that this picture, especially in contrast with John's picture, shows an overt appeal to the objective world so that the subjective mind of God has begun His great work by separating himself through materiality from his perfect creation; there is a bridge between the existence of man and God which manifests as the objective world (the external world of things)
This picture of creation as a perfect objectivity masks within it an expression of the Kantian aesthetic through the idea of disinterestedness. Genesis relates, " In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (REB 1.1). God in this instance becomes the creator, just as a painter might create, but what is more implicit is the separation between God and His creation that is assumed. One might say that because creation is perfect at this point, it is somehow at one with the author, but creation, with similarity to an art piece, anticipates a nature, and may be a reflection of the innate nature, of a disjointed human mind; though one may argue that creation, in this scene, must be linked subjectively to its creator (that is to say that because the creator has a mind), it anticipates a time when humanity and divinity are strictly subjectively separated, but through this "we glimpse for an exhilarated moment the possibility of a non-alienated object, one quite the reverse of commodity, which like the 'auratic' phenomenon of a Walter Benjamin returns our tender gaze and whispers that it was created for us alone"(Eagleton 78).
Though separated from perfection, humanity is able to gaze upon it in a some formal sense. Also, with the world being the canvas of an almighty creator, one sees that it is not through the interest of even God's own subjectivity (again his mind) that the world is presented as perfect, but that through some sort of innate characteristic endowed onto it by its creation it is able to know perfection, for "[…] the presentation of this object is also judged to be connected necessarily with this pleasure, and hence connected with it not merely for the subject apprehending this form but in general for everyone who judges [it]" (Kant 505).
True, God was the one to give essential characteristics to His perfect creation, but even here, beyond the point of actual creation, the world knows and embodies perfection only by its appeal to the very nature that is endowed to it by the universality of its beauty which was established by God so that, in some sense, once creation is presented as perfect, even the omnipotent deity is helpless in disinterest to its display. Terry Eagleton has an interesting take on this when he says, "However contingent their existence, these [aesthetic] objects display a form which is somehow mysteriously necessary, which hails and engages us with a grace quite unknown to the things in themselves, which merely turn their backs upon us" (78).
One may here object that an omnipotent God could in fact change creation in anyway that He saw fit so as to extract His own disinterested association to it, but this would suggest that perfection at some point would not have actually been perfect due to some defect of God's handiwork and would thus actually strike at his omnipotence.
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*Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic.
*Kant, Immanuel. "Critique of Judgment." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch et. al.
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