Together with the 255 Infallible Dogmas of the Catholic Church, there are 102 certain truths not yet defined by the Magisterium, and one of these is ‘God is Absolute Beauty.’ St. Thomas Aquinas, in ascribing each of the three transcendentals to the persons of the Holy Trinity, ascribes Beauty to the Son. 

Yet I am reminded of one of my favorite Bible passages, Isaiah 53:2, as written in the King James Version: ‘For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.’

Among Catholic circles, I believe there is some confusion of terms, and perhaps a bit of hopeful naiveté, in the conversation around the role of art in the Church and the usefulness of beauty in efforts of evangelization. There is an assumption that the majority of art and culture produced in this day runs explicitly contra to any of the transcendentals, truth, goodness, and especially beauty. And there is an aim that the production of beautiful art, and especially beautiful Catholic art, will serve as a means toward evangelization of the Catholic faith. 

I find myself cautious of the neatness of this latter aim, for while well-meaning, it doesn’t quite grasp the purpose of art. There are many secular cliches that the purpose of art is something horizontal and social, one often hears things like ‘art will change the world, ‘art will end poverty’, ‘art will raise political awareness, ‘if only we encouraged art, certain human evils would be redirected’, etc. etc. There is an implicit utilitarian impulse to these sayings, and to point to the end of art as a means of evangelization would suggest a kind of spiritual utilitarianism, founded on a similarly faulty ground. 

There is Sacred Art, which in both a material and formal end, expresses utility. Whether it is a painting for a side chapel, a chasuble or altar cloth, a line of chant, a motet, a statue or sculpture, its material function is of decoration and presentation in a church, and its utility is prayer. There are the primary concerns and constraints of the artist, who must be faithful to their vision and craft, however there is still a pointed utility: all that it serves is the act of prayer. Beauty in sacred art and in the aesthetics of the liturgy, while not a magic bullet, serves to incline one to prayer. 

With other forms of art, not fitting from the church porch to the altar, their end, beyond the production of a good work, is more nebulous and mysterious. It would be ridiculous to say that Van Gogh painted to advance egalitarian ideals, just as it would be to say that Melville wrote Moby Dick to be read as a breviary. One’s fidelity to a vision and to the good of the work, and if an artist of faith, to God, far surpasses any social aim. A strict detachment from the fruits of one’s labor is required. 

Jacques Maritain, in his wonderful book length essay, Art and Scholasticism, develops Aquinas’s definition of art as simply ‘reason in making’, it is an active virtue, not a passive thing, and constitutes less a finished work than an ongoing habit. This essay contains much practical wisdom to the Christian with an artistic vocation, and is an eloquent summation of the varying dispositions towards making art throughout history in light of Catholic truth. Much of his thought can be summed up in his comment on the anonymous artists of Gothic cathedrals: “They were men unconscious of themselves. They did not want to demonstrate the propriety of Christian dogma or to suggest by some artifice a Christian emotion. They even thought very much less about making a work of beauty than turning out good work. They had the Faith, and as they were, so did they work. Their achievement revealed God’s truth, but without doing it on purpose, and because it was not done on purpose.”

In an essay for Crisis Magazine entitled “The Myth of Catholic Art: An Unmanifesto”, the author Maureen Mulkarey argues for a strict distinction of terms. There is sacred art, produced for the use of the Church, and there is no Catholic art, rather simply art made by Catholics. She points to the ways in which modern art was viewed initially by Catholics in light of the heresy of modernism, and criticizes the traditionally held Darwinian piety that art, from classical times to the Renaissance, uninterruptedly followed a line of vertical progress only to degenerate in modernity. 

“Even to consider art in the realm of heresy is to adopt a secularist fallacy: that of seeing art as a vehicle of transcendence. This last point concerns us most because it capitulates unwittingly to the very secularism that Crisis readers reject. Moses did not come down from Sinai with a code of aesthetics; Jesus, craftsman that he was, kept silent on whether or not Solomon’s architects were men of taste.” 

There are many people today who view art and culture as a form of religion, because it offers a glimpse of transcendental reality. As the philosopher Simone Weil writes, “The beautiful is the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible. Hence all art of the highest order is religious in essence.” Beauty entices and ravishes one to a perception of truth. Yet truth in art is necessarily elusive, refracted, and cannot lend itself to a total integrity and self-giving, and can be no substitute for the transcendence of faith. Art and culture cannot pass for liturgy, any more than liturgy can dictate an aesthetic code for art. The worship of art constitutes an idolatry, which in turn produces banality and cultural stagnation.  

When I was in Europe on pilgrimage this summer, I visited many of the glorious cathedrals, containing all manner of treasure in the way of Sacred Art. There is a ton of wonderment at the Byzantine Mosaics in Ravenna, or Giotto’s frescoes in Assisi and Padova, and scattered minor masterpieces of Bernini and Caravaggio humbly housed in the parish churches of Rome. One does not have to be Catholic to appreciate this beauty, and that is more than often the case: thousands of people go to these churches for the beauty, they revel in the beauty, and yet of the Truth of the Faith they remain wholly unconvinced. There is an argument that beauty, whether in architecture or culture, inclines one to virtue rather than vice, but how then do you explain the continent of Europe, surrounded by a patrimony and landscape of beauty but often jaded and dulled to supernatural reality? 

One of the most ironic comments by Pope Francis was his characterization of liturgical traditionalists as favoring a “conservatism of the museum.” There is definitely some truth to his words, among traditionalists one can often detect a whiff of archeologism or blind appeals to historicism, or as John Tarvin says, “mistake the accidents of tradition for the substance of tradition.” But when many of the most splendorous churches in Europe have coin boxes for thirty second spotlights, pre-recorded Gregorian chant, ambulatories crowded with tourists taking pictures rather than pilgrims stooping and lighting candles at various altars, not to mention often times an admission fee, and to top it off, in the least aesthetic chapel, a “Designated Prayer Area”, one can only come away noticing that these churches are run like museums and not with the idea of propagating the Faith. This is where the celebration of beautiful liturgy can come to rescue the context of these artistic masterpieces, so they are viewed and appreciated for their distinctive end of prayer. As Hans Urs Von Balthasaar writes in The Glory of the Lord, “Works of art can die as a result of being looked at by too many dull eyes, and even the radiance of holiness can, in a way, become blunted when it encounters nothing but hollow indifference.”

Much of the cultural output today, whether in film, TV, publishing, or visual art, is often overly derided by Christians for its supposed degeneracy or moral evil, when really it is more a banal stagnation, the glitch in the code of postmodernism which can only produce copies of copies. The appeal to simply go back and revive more traditional or ‘pure’ schools of art, such as neoclassicism, or Elizabethan verse, is to engage in a kind of academicism which is pastiche and impotent in the face of this stagnation. 

I believe it true that in order to escape cultural stagnation, we can only do so by returning to the root of culture: religious faith. And this may not follow set conventions nor deal with explicitly Christian subject matter. With Christ, all things are new. And this brings me to my last point, which is that often in the discourse surrounding a revival of beauty, what is often undermined are the merits of the grotesque or the ugly. I have heard things thrown around by various Catholic podcasters such as “Any art that isn’t representational art is therefore anti-Incarnation and anti-Catholic” or “A disordered appetite due to sin inclines one to find ugly things beautiful.” It may be true that Abstract Expressionism was CIA propaganda, more true that sin dims one’s vision and appreciation of the truly beautiful, and depending on the person’s taste, inclines them to enjoy bad art, but these statements as a whole are awfully doctrinaire. 

The great Catholic writers, filmmakers, and artists of the 19th and 20th centuries did not shy away from depicting the sordid realities of a fallen world, in fact they embraced them with great difficulty because therein were contained the depths of human nature which Christ compassed and descended to in order to redeem. They worked subversively through the contradictions of the raw material in which their times presented them, in order to sense the action of grace, even when the easy formula of a redemption arc was hard to see. And this is still, I believe, the primary task of the Christian artist. Truth has primacy, and Beauty follows closely. 

Where much culture tends towards nihilism, there is a yearning for wholesome endings, a rightful distaste for a pointless gratuity of sex and violence. Yet regardless of the degenerated stagnation of 21st century art and media, it seems that among Catholics there is a revival of an attitude of prudishness towards art in general, an all too Victorian mentality which would fain be scandalized by even some of the sacred art of the Middle Ages, or stories in the Old Testament. There are personal occasions of sin, and one’s own tastes and tolerances to reckon with, but as Christians we should not be scandalized by depictions of the realities of a fallen world. Rather, being confirmed in our faith, we should be able to engage with art that is grotesque, sordid, and even openly hostile to faith. For artists, most of the time, reveal something valuable in spite of their intentions, good or bad. And moreover, isn’t this attitude also required for evangelization? 

So I confess, this is no slight against Dostoyevsky when he writes that “Beauty will save the world.” God is Absolute Beauty, Beauty is an attribute of God, and God alone saves. I only aim to argue towards an understanding of the limitations of the role of art, the servant of beauty, is to play in the unfolding of this reality. In the paradoxical glory of our faith, St. Thomas Aquinas’s definition of the Son as Beauty is in every way reconcilable with the sparingness of this line: 

‘For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.’