Sacred Art and Beauty

Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa

Here's a snippet from an excellent article written by a good friend, Dr. Alphonso Pinto. The entire piece is worth reading and it appears in the February issue of In His Name Newsletter:

Sacred art can be described as a theological language, a muta praedicatio, that is, silent preaching through form and color. ... Thus, it is an imitation of not only words, but the Logos Himself. Through the beauty of its design, it radiates the Truth of the word of God as well as its attractive and imitative goodness. The Council of Trent taught that Sacred Art should be a faithful imitation of the life of a saint or a Scriptural text. This instruction goes all the way back to St. Gregory the Great who described sacred art as a biblia pauperum, or, a bible for the poor. The uneducated would "read" the Scriptures through the form and beauty of sacred art itself, through paint, relief, and sculpture etc. And so, sacred art is an imitation of Sacred Scripture, which has God as author, or the life of a saint, which has God as source of grace. The artist then must unite humanity and created beauty to divine inspiration. ...

Why must it be beautiful? Beauty attracts the worshipper in both body and soul, the senses are delighted, the soul understands and is enlightened. With the eyes, man comes to know the magnificence of the image of Christ, and with his soul, as a human person, he understands the ineffability of the Divine Person through that image. A beautiful Crucifix tells us that there is a spiritual reality and contemplative significance that unites the brutal aspects of Crucifixion and Death with the ecstatic radiance of the Resurrection. Beauty reveals the reality of salvation which was hidden to many eyes at the foot of the Cross many centuries ago.

In an era of relativism, true art is not immune from attack and distortion. Plays that blaspheme Christ are defended in the salons of Paris as "art". But is it genuine art, or a perversion? It would be interesting to discuss the arguments in favor of an objective representation of beauty through art. Before Truth Himself, Pilate once asked, "What is truth?" And so today, many lost in the sea of skepticism and nihilism ask, "What is beauty?"