Our last three pontiffs have exhorted
artists and the faithful
about the need for beauty in the life of the Church.


Beauty and the Sacred


By Joan L. Roccasalvo

If God has revealed beauty to us in the order of creation, then God’s revelation of love includes beauty, as well as truth and goodness. Reasonable faith tells us that all things are beautiful in themselves because whatever exists originates from “the unconditional shining of the divine in creation.”[3]  The entire cosmos has been declared “very good” and God’s “work of art” (Gen. 1:26; Eph. 2:10). The Catholic’s faith-response participates with God in the co-creation of beauty in the world. The faith-response of a Catholic to God’s revelation of beauty remains incomplete without the theological category of beauty, without a theological aesthetics.[4]  This article is presented as an apologia to our clergy and religious leaders to renew their understanding of beauty and to restore its rightful place in the Church’s proclamation of the Gospel.

The Need for Beauty

Whoever wishes to live meaningfully must experience beauty in body, mind and spirit. Why is this so? Because beauty fills our need for enjoyment and delight in the heightened way we feel, think and act. It affects us in the very way we live. Love of the beautiful is a quintessential human quality, for beauty is to life what air is to living. Beauty lightens daily burdens. The experience of beauty affects our subconscious and penetrates to the deepest levels of the psyche. Today we gasp for the lack of it!

A person deprived of beauty is like a person deprived of love. A person cannot attain happiness without beauty—sensible, intellectual or religious. The point is to live in such a way that the pleasure derived from beauty is morally good and of high quality.[5]  The experience of beauty brings with it something good, true and uplifting. It makes a person more completely human. Ugliness brings the opposite. Surely, ugliness captures our attention, but however fascinating, it cannot uplift us or give wholesome pleasure. Ugliness denigrates us as human beings.

Beauty enables people to rise above the daily grind and contributes to an ordered society. A nation cannot function properly without the beauty of religious and national celebrations, parks and playgrounds, art exhibits, musical and literary performances. Deprived of beauty for any length of time, society seeks other forms of pleasure, often vulgar and offensive to the dignity of the human spirit.

Beauty and Leisure

To experience beauty, one must have leisure, but a relentless work ethic dismisses leisure as wasted time. Still, society guards a free weekend as a precious value. We know instinctively that we work to live and not the other way around.[6]  We anticipate time off, whether it be the weekend or its equivalent. In practice, however, this view is everywhere challenged.

What is leisure? Leisure is not just cessation from work, but another kind of activity. Leisure is not idleness but “the enjoyment of the natural ecstasies of life … reflection amidst preoccupation … an attitudinal approach to life.”[7]  Leisure disengages man and woman from the cares of life, freeing us to wonder at natural or artistic beauty. Still it must be noted that leisure varies from one person to another and from one culture to another. What may be leisure for one is work for another. Despite difference in age or status, this word conveys universal understanding.

Leisure is life-giving and brings with it freedom from external constraint, joy, fulfillment and meaning. Beauty fosters reverence and awe for life. Josef Pieper rightly observes that “from a purely business point of view, Sunday worship and the coffee break are qualitatively the same: they both contribute to making better workers for the enterprise.”[8]

Western civilization is indebted to the Jews for keeping the Sabbath holy and for valuing it as a gift from God to come aside and rest. Ceaseless work dulls the sense of wonder, a thought implicit in the psalm verse: “Be still and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10). As if to confirm the need for leisure, Jesus tells us, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). If beauty evokes wonder, wonder evokes reverence—reverence for nature, for the arts and most of all for one another as God’s beloved images. Leisure is not only the basis of culture, but a stepping stone to God and a preparation for divine worship.[9]

Beauty and the Media

Common sense tells us that beauty is not synonymous with a pretty face or a well-toned body. Popular culture would have us think differently, equating human beauty with physical appeal. Today, the print and visual media exercise the power to define beauty and dictate their own standards for judging it. They spend billions of dollars selling cosmetics, high fashion and weight-reducers that claim to beautify what is skin deep, while theater and film equate love with sex and romance. The media would also have us believe that the coarse, the ugly and whatever is base is to be realized as an ideal. Not just our children and young adults, but all of us, are daily exposed to a culture of
disintegration and death.

To be sure, there are exceptions in entertainment that express universally accepted virtues. Some films, like To Kill a Mockingbird, Les Miserables, Gandhi and Bella, and some TV shows like The Cosby Show, are such examples, not to mention the great American musicals and the sheer delight they offer a general audience. Film companies like Act One, Inc. engage in formation programs for Hollywood writers and executives. New majors in higher education are currently preparing our youth to produce entertainment of high quality.[10]  In general, however, the media deserve a failing grade in transmitting universal values that are beautiful, true, good and loving—except perhaps at Christmas time. Instead of asking if their consumers will be better people for using their programs or products, they are concerned with sales and profits.

How can we discuss beauty in such an unlovely world? Despite the grim pictures that daily enter our homes, we still yearn for beauty, truth, goodness—all qualities of love. The human race may be flawed by limitation and sin, but at heart we do want these positive qualities to be supported in the family, in society at large and in the Church.

Beauty and the Catholic Church

Beauty and the Catholic faith belong together. For one thing, sacred beauty proclaims great truths in effective ways. When, for example, the Trinity, the Incarnation and the paschal mystery are beautifully expressed through the arts, their truths are intensified. At a time when all but the privileged were illiterate, the sacred arts served as artistic catechisms.

Throughout the centuries, the Catholic Church has taught, celebrated and inspired the arts understood as beautiful. As the greatest patron of the arts through the centuries, the Catholic Church recruited the finest artists of every age to express the Christian faith in music as well as in the visual and literary arts. Artists elevated the minds and hearts of the faithful by making divine mysteries felt and understood through what is human. The Church promoted beauty as a treasury of faith and as a stepping stone to contemplation, expressed beautifully by Irenaeus of Lyons in his dictum: “The glory of God is man and woman fully alive, but the glory of man and woman is the contemplation of God.”[11]  The cathedral at Chartres, for example, stands as a remarkable testament to these words. Sadly, in recent years, the study of beauty has been neglected in our education and in our liturgical worship. Whatever moral ascendancy the Church had in former years has been abdicated to the media. We as a Church no longer understand the meaning of beauty, and von Balthasar laments this fact:

Beauty’s role in the life of faith has never been considered superficial or elitist. Our last three pontiffs have exhorted artists and the faithful about the need for beauty in the life of the Church. Paul VI exhorts artists: “Remember you are the guardians of beauty in the world,”[13]  while John Paul II has stated that the Church needs art and that art needs the Church.[14]  Benedict XVI has repeated a favorite theme: that our Church leaders must rediscover beauty by their own formation and then teach it in relation to truth, goodness and love itself. He has preached not simply about the necessity of beauty. In fact, echoing von Balthasar, he pleads for the restoration of beauty to her rightful place in the Church’s identity and mission.[15]

What is Beauty?

There are few more misunderstood words in the English language than “beauty.” In an age that prizes subjective judgment, it goes without saying that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and that “taste may not be disputed.”[16]  These positions hold that the criteria for judging beauty lie primarily, if not entirely, on the individual. One’s subjective judgment takes primacy over objective criteria.

Several years ago, I taught sixth-graders who lived in blighted areas of New York City. Every semester, we would take bus trips to the country, and the beauty flashing before their eyes delighted them to no end. I was overjoyed to observe the children romp through the countryside, free of family concerns. Theirs was a simple and direct intuition of beauty. In the classroom setting, the children studied the fine arts. After some guidance, they were able to enjoy them. They came alive in these pleasurable experiences!

What can be surmised from these two anecdotes? What was revealed to the children had order, harmony and goodness shining out from them. The children were attracted and drawn to nature, which gave them deep satisfaction. In one case, beauty was directly intuited, while the other required guidance. Beauty, love and enthusiasm—what is good in life itself—are closely linked. My students’ experiences make this clear.

Beauty is the dynamic splendor residing deep within a being.[17]  A thing of beauty reveals itself and pleases the eye. [18] When beauty is seen, it strikes the entire person as coherent, intelligible, dynamic and good—all attributes of being itself.[19]  The parts fit together. While beauty, truth and goodness are viewed today largely as civic virtues, in the classic tradition of philosophy they are transcendentals, because they spill over to encompass every level of being.

Beauty is the most tangible of the transcendentals. More than truth and goodness, the beautiful is initially the most attractive because its appearance is visible to the eye. The senses respond directly and immediately to outside stimuli. The beautiful draws us because of the sense pleasure and delight it arouses in us. Then the sense faculties pass on the beauty to the spiritual faculties for them to judge and enjoy. Love of the beautiful is part of the human experience, and this ability separates men and women from non-rational animals.

Artistic Beauty

Works of art imply works of beauty. The word “aesthetics” (Greek, aisthesis), often used as a euphemism for beauty, is linked to the post-Reformation and the post-Enlightenment periods.[20]  Aesthetics minimizes objective criteria for works of art and stresses the subjective judgment and response. Art needs both dimensions.

Art is first of all disciplined creativity, a skilled way of making or doing something that results in the creation of beauty and order. A work of art serves as a communication between the artist and the beholder. The highest type of art integrates both sensory and spiritual responses. All great art is religious because, despite the artist’s awareness or lack thereof, it is an act of homage before the divine artist.[21]

If art delights the senses and spiritual faculties, then sacred art represents the highest form of this enjoyment. If beauty is a power that attracts for its own sake, how much more the invitation of sacred beauty that readies us for a vision of God!

The Call to Holiness

In Sacred Scripture, each of us is described as wonderfully made in God’s image. We are called to live in God’s likeness. In the Latin Church, this is known as transformation into Christ; in the Christian East, divinization, deification or theosis. These words recall the famous axiom of the Early Fathers: “God entered into the human condition and became a human being so that human beings might become as God.” Sacrosanctum Concilium, Vatican II’s constitution on the sacred liturgy, reiterates this belief; although the Church is “both human and divine … eager to act and yet devoted to contemplation, the human is directed and subordinated to the divine … action to contemplation.”[22]

Sacred Beauty

Leisure and periods of solitude are closely linked to contemplation of the arts. If beauty reflects God’s presence in material form, sacred beauty expresses God’s presence with a greater focus because its very content expresses an aspect of Christ’s paschal mystery, of the Mother of God and the saints, and of the Church’s mission.[23]  The sacred arts powerfully mediate God’s presence, for they are experiential and affective ways of expressing Christianity. More directly than words, the sacred arts awaken in us the divine and proclaim the beautiful dogmas of faith.

It is no secret that the hallmark of Eastern Christianity lies in the incomparable beauty of its liturgical life. It was just this sacred splendor that persuaded Vladimir, grand prince of Kiev (d. 1015), to accept Eastern rather than Western Christianity. Legend has it that after sending his envoys to search for a religion of beauty and joy, Vladimir was deeply moved by their account of the splendor of the Byzantine Greek Liturgy celebrated in Constantinople. The Chronicles of Nestor (1116) reports their impressions:

In the West too, incomparable beauty engages us in sacred architecture—theology in stone, especially in the great European cathedrals built out of Catholic faith. As they rise into the sky, they put us in
touch with heaven; they mediate the link between the human and the divine.

From ancient times, people from every race and color have held that music, more than any other art form, is the deepest form of human expression. To the Greeks, music possessed an almost mysterious and magical power. Indeed, music has the power to touch and move the person at the deepest part of the spirit. To the Ancients, a person imitated the kind of music he or she listened to or played. With repetition, one personified this music.

Liturgical Music

Liturgical music serves the liturgy. The Catechism of the Catholic Church gives three main criteria for music’s role in the Church’s liturgy: “beauty expressive of prayer, the unanimous participation of the assembly at the designated moments and the solemn character of the celebration.”[25]  Further, it should be easy to sing. Most importantly, liturgical music ought not to distract from the liturgical action.

Before liturgical music is composed, it needs a text, scriptural or canonical. The text tells us what we should think; the music, what to feel. The text must be true to Catholic teaching. Therefore, the text should have a God-centered theology. Egocentric lyrics or those that are sugar-laden are unsuitable for musical settings because they are too worldly and insufficiently transcendent. Cheap sentimentality that caters to emotion weakens Christian faith. We need strong and courageous texts united to strong and courageous music. Both must support us to live the Christian faith, which, in today’s world, may call for martyrdom of one kind or another. Many Catholic and Protestant texts are theologically sound, while others contain abstruse or airy flights of fancy. One example of the former is the Christmas carol “Hark, the Herald Angel Sing.”[26]  We have only begun to retrieve a hymnography from Sacred Scripture and the patristic tradition.

“Let There Be Peace on Earth” by Sy Miller and Jill Jackson, an unfortunate but ubiquitous liturgical staple, exemplifies bad, unlovely, so-called sacred music. It is a roller-skating waltz with a kind thought expressed in a prosaic way. It would have been the perfect song for Judy Garland! The overall body of music written by the St. Louis Jesuits was poorly-constructed by well-intentioned amateurs. Their music cheapens the scriptural texts they use. For too long our Church leaders, clerical and lay, have permitted wide usage of such music. This material should be purged once and for all from liturgical repertory because it harms our faith. Thomas Merton observes, “Bad so-called sacred art (like polluted air) constitutes a really grave spiritual problem”; it “affect[s] us only slightly at first, but in the long run, the effect is grave.”[27]

Beauty to Lift Up the World

The first step in retrieving beauty is to begin with oneself. This virtue is accessible to all and possible to all every day and in every circumstance. We should find beauty every day, and where it is absent, make it present. Mother Teresa was not a physically attractive woman. She was beautiful because she loved much, thereby lifting up the world.

Beauty gives us a foretaste of what we anticipate with hope—the ascent to God through the transformation of all reality, material and spiritual. The Catholic faith proclaims the rich and unfathomable truth that God is love, which assumes unity, truth, goodness and beauty. This truth invites man and woman to participate in these attributes. God is not only the beginning and the end of human satisfaction. Ideally, God is our true delight and greatest pleasure, who makes his face visible through beauty in the world.

End notes

1 Michael Cook, “Faith,” The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, General Editor, Richard P. O’Brien (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995), 510.
2 Fides quae creditur and Fides qua creditor, respectively.
3 Kevin Hart, “Christian Beauty,” Communio (Winter 2006), 578.
4 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics (Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark; San Francisco: Ignatius Press). Von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics has been widely misunderstood to mean aesthetic theology. Aesthetic theology, which takes subjective standards as the criteria for the beauty of divine revelation, is not a theological aesthetics.
5 A. Doolan, “Pleasure,” The New Catholic Encyclopedia, 11:438-39. Doolan observes that for pleasure, four things are necessary: an appetite for the pleasant, something pleasant to satisfy the appetite, the union of the appetite and its object, and the perception of this union.
6 Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, translated by Alexander Dru with an introduction by T.S. Eliot (New York and Toronto, 1952; Random House, Inc., 1963), 19.
7 Leonard Doohan, Leisure: A Spiritual Need (Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1990), 30, 32, 34.
8 J.R. Kelly, “Leisure,” NCE 8:623-25.
9 Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, 19, 56.
10 See www.barbaranicolosi.com.
11 St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Ad. Haereses, Bk 4:20, 7.
12 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, l:18.
13 Paul VI, “Letter to Artists at Rome,” Walter M. Abbot, S.J., Documents of Vatican II, p. 732. “May that suffice to free you from tastes which are passing and have no genuine value, to free you from the search after strange and unbecoming expressions. Be always and everywhere worthy of your ideals, and you will be worthy of the Church.”
14 John Paul II, “Letter to Artists,” #12-13.
15 Benedict XVI, “Address to the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music” (October 15, 2007).
16  De gustibus non disputandum est.
17 Beauty, truth and goodness are attributes of being.
18 “Id quod visum placet,” St. Thomas Aquinas, S.Th., Pt 1.5, 4.
19 This means that beauty must have integrity, proportion or harmony, and splendor.
20 The word was first introduced in 1735 by A.G. Baumgarten, who defined it as “the science of sensory cognition.” Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus. The meaning of aesthetics has been broadened to include all artistic endeavors or activities that the makers call “art.”
21 Von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, IV:13.
22 Sacrosanctum Concilium, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, The Documents of Vatican II, Walter M. Abbott, S.J., General Editor (New York: Herder and Herder & Association Press, 1966), #2.
23 Specifically, Jesus’ passion, death, resurrection and ascension.
24 Nicholas Arseniev, Russian Piety (London and Clayton, WI: The Faith Press LTD and American Orthodox Press, 1966), #2.
25 Catechism of the Catholic Church, #1157.
26 Text by Charles Wesley; music adapted from Felix Mendelssohn by William H. Cummings.
27 Thomas Merton, Disputed Questions (New York: Farrar and Cudahy, 1960), 155.

Sister Joan L. Roccasalvo, C.S.J. teaches in the theology department at Fordham University. She holds two Ph.Ds, one in musicology and the other in liturgical studies. After publishing extensively on musicological topics and on Eastern Christianity, she is now focusing on the topic of beauty, theological aesthetics and the sacred arts as expressions of faith. This is her first article in HPR.