One of the ways that God’s creation is very good in in its beauty. The concept of beauty is central to the philosophy of aesthetics and the appreciation of art. But what about theology? This section addresses this question by first discussing the religious context of beauty as found in Scripture. It then examines the theological treatment of beauty as a transcendental quality. After these background topics, it discusses the religious and theological significance of beauty in terms of natural beauty, created beauty, and beauty in worship.
The Bible is surprisingly silent on the topic of beauty as a divine attribute, as a description of creation, or as serving a sacramental function. The combined terms “beauty” and “beautiful” occur 109 times in the OT and only 8 times in the NT. In the OT, divine beauty is addressed three times in Psalms and once in Isaiah: “Your eyes will see the King in His beauty” (Is 33:17). In the NT, divine beauty is hinted at twice in reference to the infant Moses (Acts 7:20, Heb 11:23).
Psalms is where divine beauty is most directly referenced, and even here only a few times. These include the following:
- “One thing I have asked from the Lord, that I shall seek: That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, To behold the beauty of the Lord and to meditate in His temple” (Ps 27:4);
- “Splendor and majesty are before Him, strength and beauty are in His sanctuary” (Ps 96:6); and
- “Praise the Lord! For it is good to sing praises to our God; For it is pleasant and praise is beautiful” (Ps 147:1).
From a direct reading of the Bible, one can “behold the beauty of the Lord,” know that “strength and beauty are His sanctuary,” and that “praise is beautiful.” These basic truths are quite simple when compared to typical theological treatments of beauty.
Most theological understandings of beauty involve the Platonic triad of truth, good, and beauty, typically referred to as transcendentals. These three transcendental qualities roughly correspond to the classical Greek “rhetorical triangle” of logos, pathos, and ethos. These refer to reason/truth (logos), emotion/beauty (pathos), and authority/goodness (ethos). But there is nothing in the Bible that directly associates beauty with truth or beauty with goodness. This is perhaps the reason that that opinions on the use of images in worship vary so widely.
God created the natural world, and there is natural beauty in the goodness of His creation. “Notice how the lilies in the field grow; they do not labor nor do they spin thread for cloth, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these” (Mt 6:28-9). Through aesthetic contemplation we can partake in the part of general revelation that demonstrates God’s truth and goodness through beauty. Pavol Bargár writes, “It is in the beauty that one can find the fragments of the divine.”[i] Benjamin Crowe adds, “The deepest reason … for the fact that our sense of beauty fits the world is that the pleasures it engenders play a central role in coming to know God.”[ii] In this sense, natural beauty can be understood as divine revelation. One final quote from Richard Viladesau emphasizes this point. “[B]eauty has an intrinsic relation to the sacred and that art can therefore be a means of the mind’s apprehension of God–or from another point of view, of God’s self-revelation through creation.”[iii]
God is the Creator and made man in his likeness. As such, we to are also able to create, including objects of beauty that we can look through to glimpse aspects of the divine and remind us of God’s glory. George Steiner writes that the human creation of beautiful objects harkens to God’s creation. “There is aesthetic creation because there is creation.”[iv] Steiner lists a wide range of human emotions that can be stirred through aesthetic contemplation. Works of fine art are “re-enactments, reincarnations via spiritual and technical means of that which human questioning, solitude, inventiveness, apprehension of time and of death can intuit of the fiat of creation.”[v] In this way, an artist can target specific combinations of emotions not possible in natural beauty. This emotional content, often in the context of biblical themes, can help us to gain deeper meaning on a variety of theological and religious subjects.
An influential Swiss Roman Catholic theologian who wrote extensively on beauty is Hans Urs van Balthasar (1905–1988). Balthasar is best known for his 15-volume work on the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty. In his works on beauty (The Glory of the Lord), Balthasar emphasizes the importance of Christians to appreciate, consider, and meditate on beauty and the reality of beauty just as much as for truth and goodness. Balthasar writes:
“Beauty is the word which shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach since only it dances as an uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness. No longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man. We no longer dare to believe in beauty, and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name, as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past, whether he admits it or not, can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”[vi]
Thomas Aquinas was the first to emphasize the role of transcendentals in theology. Transcendentals are fundamental properties of being that cannot be derived from any other properties. Fundamental attributes of God are therefore perfect truth, perfect goodness, and perfect beauty. Since the ultimate goal of a Christian is to become like God, the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty is of primary importance. The point of Balthasar is that Christians today commonly pursue truth and goodness but neglect the pursuit of beauty. This neglect inhibits the pursuit of truth and goodness (neglected beauty will take truth and goodness “along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance”) and will fundamentally inhibit one’s relationship with God (i.e., prayer) and one’s ability to obey the greatest commandment (i.e., love).
The use of beautiful art in worship has been common in Eastern Orthodoxy, but the use of physical images in worship in general is controversial. Many have cautioned against their use and many others have embraced their use. This is still true today. This said, Scripture is filled with imagery. In addition, the formation of mental images during worship is inevitable. Therefore, Trevor Hart asserts that theology is incomplete without the consideration of images. “Christian theology in inexorably wedded to the economy of the image due to the nature of its proper object.”[vii] Pavol Bargár believes that beautiful objects are particularly useful when pondering theological questions. “[B]eauty represents a key theme for theological reflection (locus theologicus), having aesthetic, ethical, and ontological implications for Christian theology.”[viii] For this reason, good worship art must be beautiful. Nicholas Wolterstorff thinks that this is particularly true for Christian music. “For the aesthetic merits in things to work in one’s consciousness, there producing satisfaction, it is enough that one’s awareness of them be peripheral. Ugly or vapid music, no matter how effectively it may serve its dominant purpose, is not good liturgical music.”[ix]
In summary, beauty plays a key role in both theology and religion. Beauty is a theological transcendental and is as fundamental to the human experience as truth and goodness. These features are also those found in effective worship art, which can guide out mental images to become closer to the divine. To quote John Keats, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”[x]
[i] Pavol Bargár, “And Beauty Will Make You Free: On the Transformative Power of Beauty,” Acta Universitatis Carolinae Theologica, Vol. 12 Issue 2, 2022: 41.
[ii] Benjamin Crowe, “Hutcheson on Natural Religion,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Vol. 19 Issue 4, July 2011: 725.
[iii] Richard Viladesau, Theology and the Arts: Encountering God through Music, Art and Rhetoric, Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press: 13.
[iv] George Steiner, Real Presences, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 1989: 201.
[v] Ibid., 215.
[vi] Hans Ur von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 1, tr. T&T Clark, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1697/1982: §1.1.
[vii] Trevor Hart, Between the Image and the Word: Theological Engagements with Imagination, Language and Literature, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2013: 75.
[viii] Pavol Bargár, “And Beauty Will Make You Free: On the Transformative Power of Beauty,” Acta Universitatis Carolinae Theologica, Vol. 12 Issue 2, 2022: 41.
[ix] Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980: 170.
[x] John Keats, Endymion, Book I.
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