Gloria Tibi Domine: The Role of Beauty in the Life of the Church
All for the glory of God
A few months ago, I used Abraham Joshua Heschel’s essay “The Vocation of the Cantor” to affirm the Church’s traditional stance on the purpose of beauty, particularly in the context of sacred music. Today, I would like to take a little different approach in light of an excerpt from our Holy Father Pope Francis’ memoir Hope that has gained much attention since its publication yesterday.
In his memoir Hope, Pope Francis wrote, “It is curious to see this fascination for what is not understood, for what appears somewhat hidden…. This rigidity is often accompanied by elegant and costly tailoring, lace, fancy trimmings, rochets. Not a taste for tradition but clerical ostentation, which then is none other than an ecclesiastic version of individualism. Not a return to the sacred but to quote the opposite, to sectarian worldliness.”
Beauty is at the heart of sacred music and sacred art, and therefore at the heart of our mission at Heavenly Chant. I would thus like to study what the Church has taught about the matter throughout the ages, examining the role of beauty—which by extension includes Gregorian Chant, hymnody, and sacred art—in the Church throughout the ages.
Pseudo-Dionysius, an influential 6th century Greek theologian, wrote extensively about beauty in the contexts of philosophy and theology. In his writings, which were foundational to later medieval mystical writings, Pseudo-Dionysius described God as the Source of all beauty. Since the source of a quality must possess the quality to the fullest degree, God is therefore beauty itself. This beauty is the manifestation of God’s goodness, which is likewise infinite. Since all beings are good insofar as they possess existence, all beings also possess some aspects of God’s beauty. This beauty, present in degrees everywhere around us, reveals God, the Source of all beauty.
St. Thomas Aquinas’ writings in the 13th century reached similar conclusions to those of Pseudo-Dionysius. Aquinas wrote that there are three conditions of beauty, all of which can be found in Jesus Christ. These three conditions are: “’integrity’ or ‘perfection,’ since those things which are impaired are by the very fact ugly; due ‘proportion’ or ‘harmony’; and lastly, ‘brightness’ or ‘clarity,’ whence things are called beautiful have a bright color.” The condition of integrity can be found in Jesus “inasmuch as He as Son has in Himself truly and perfectly the nature of the Father.” The condition of proportion or harmony is found in Jesus “inasmuch as He is the express Image of the Father.” Lastly, the condition of brightness or clarity is found in Jesus “as the Word, which is the light and splendor of the intellect” (ST, I, q. 39, a. 8, respondeo).
Fast forwarding through time to the 21st century, the Pontifical Council for Culture published a document in 2006 entitled “The Via Pulchritudinis, Way of Beauty.” In this document, the council wrote: “[T]he via pulchritudinis can open the pathway for the search for God, and disposes the heart and spirit to meet Christ, who is the Beauty of Holiness Incarnate, offered by God to men for their salvation. It invites contemporary Augustines, unquenchable seekers of love, truth and beauty, to see through the perceptible beauty to eternal Beauty, and with fervour discover Holy God, the author of all beauty.”
Much more can be said about the topic, with many other saints, pontiffs, and mystics writing about the role of beauty in the life of the Church, but I shall limit myself to these three sources, which demonstrate the great importance the Church has always placed on the role of beauty. All beauty reflects—albeit imperfectly—the infinite beauty found in God. Beauty is a physical way by which we can unite ourselves with the divine. As beings comprised of both a body and a soul, we cannot dismiss the role of the physical in our spiritual lives. Yes, the physical world is necessarily bound by certain limits owing to the limits of matter, but we cannot adopt a Gnostic or Puritan abhorrence for all things earthly.
The Church has given us the seven sacraments as a sign that both body and soul, matter and form, must together ascend to the sacred. Baptism is not a mere spiritual ceremony with good feelings and a resolve to follow Christ; it involves water that must touch the person three times in a physical symbol of the Blessed Trinity. We receive forgiveness for sins committed after Baptism through the Sacrament of Confession, which is not merely an abstract telling of our sins to God but rather the sacramental confession of our sins to God’s earthly priest, with the words of absolution and a prescribed penance to give us the assurance that our sins have been forgiven. The Eucharist is not merely an abstract concept but physical bread and wine becoming truly and substantially Christ’s Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity in physical forms that we consume as sacred food.
Likewise our bodies must also be involved in our prayer, which is why we typically kneel when praying. The postures at Mass of sitting, standing, and kneeling at certain times unite our bodies with our souls as our full beings worship God. The smells and bells, the solemnity and ceremony, the finely gilt Book of Gospels, the lace-edged linens and silk vestments, the ornate architecture and frescoes, the swelling chants and hymns—all these and more serve as physical manifestations of the infinite beauty found in God, Whom we worship in the liturgy and to Whom all these things are ordered.
We can never fully understand God, Who is incomprehensible to our limited, finite intellects. In this life, we can never see God in His glory; while we certainly gaze upon Him in the Eucharist, we see Him veiled beneath the appearances of bread and wine. By surrounding ourselves with sacred beauty and incorporating this beauty into the highest form of worship that we possess, the holy Mass, we are able to better glimpse God as He truly is, the Source of all beauty and goodness, which is reflected imperfectly in the beauty with which we worship Him. The beauty of the Mass and its physical qualities are not meant to glorify man but instead to glorify God, in Whose physical presence we are worshipping. Just as the gilt halls and fine uniforms of a palace porter do not glorify the porter but instead glorify the king whom he serves, so too the beauty of sacred art, music, and liturgy do not glorify the worshippers but instead glorify the One Whom we worship, to Whom “be glory in the church, and in Christ Jesus unto all generations, world without end. Amen” (Eph 3:21 DRB).
