In the introduction to his magisterial 1967 work The Glory of the Lord, Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar notes that Christian scholars have largely abandoned the effort to think about beauty. He adds that “the transcendentals are inseparable, and that neglecting one can only have a devastating effect on the others.” The “transcendentals” – truth, goodness, and beauty – are so called because they are the fundamental and universal qualities of reality that point us beyond this world to God. Because God is the good creator, all that he creates is characterized by truth, goodness, and beauty. The transcendentals are synonymous with being and with each other, which is why Balthasar worried that the neglect of beauty would lead also to the neglect of goodness and of truth.

Over half a century after The Glory of the Lord was first published, it is hard to say that truth and goodness are in the best of health in the Christian world. If we consider how perspectives filter down from the theologians to congregations, it can seem like we have some churches that specialize in truth and others that specialize in goodness, though few focus on both. Perhaps what is missing is the third transcendental, beauty, to bind them together. If so, there is cause for hope: beauty’s comeback is on the way. In recent years, there has been a resurgence among theologians writing about beauty and aesthetics. If this renewed interest in beauty were to filter down to the churches, it could change American Christianity in several important ways. If, that is, Christians can come to some “merely Christian” understanding of beauty and its place in the life of faith.

The handful of fascinating and important books on Christianity and beauty that have been published in the last few years have come from several different confessional traditions and approach the subject from several different angles. What they all share, though, is the insistence that Christians should take beauty seriously. These books join others published in recent years in contributing to what will hopefully be an ecumenical retrieval of beauty in the thought and life of the church.

The Artistic Vision: Cultivating a Sacramental Imagination for Creative Practice, by Alex Sosler and Gary Ball, is the only book among those reviewed here that is aimed expressly at practicing artists, yet it may also be the most broadly applicable. Both authors are Anglican priests, and their goal is to encourage and support artistic practice in the church. Although they frequently discuss poetry, the book is primarily focused on visual art, particularly painting. Despite this focus, the discussion is far-ranging, in part because one of the authors’ main concerns is the way the church helps to shape the imagination of the artist. They write, “First, the church trains the vision of artists while artists can help restore mystery and reverence for the world. Second, the church provides a story and community for the artists, while artists shape space and place. Lastly, the church can be a place of rest and depth for the artists, while artists can express what’s there in the depths.” The church feeds the soul of the artist, and the artist feeds the soul of the church.

Sosler and Ball emphasize that fostering beauty in the life of the church requires pushing back against the rationalist assumptions of our age, which reduce beauty to, at best, a secondary concern to truth and, at worst, a deceptive threat to both truth and goodness. Sosler and Ball enlist the help of the Oxford Movement for this necessary correction: “The Oxford Movement theologians had largely attributed the state of the church to an over-rational approach to Scripture that had made its way to England from Germany.”  Among theologians such as John Henry Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey, and John Keble, beauty was valued for its ability to draw us closer to God, independent of rational or theological propositions. The Oxford Movement sought to take back space in worship services from the sermon, which had expanded and squeezed the more symbolic and mysterious elements of worship into the margins. This countermovement in the Church of England thus emphasized the sacraments.

This legacy of a movement within the Church of England – as expounded on by two Anglican priests – may seem like a purely Anglican concern. Yet, within Sosler and Ball’s distinctly Anglican vision for art’s revival in the church, there are seeds for a more ecumenical understanding of beauty’s place in Christian thought and in the Christian life. The possibility for a unifying view of beauty comes through the relationship between beauty and the sacramental. This hope may seem surprising, since Christians have been endlessly divided over the nature of the sacraments since at least the sixteenth century. We have been divided over the sacraments, however, because none of us is indifferent to them. We argue over their nature. We even argue over their number. But we all do something sacramental at least in connection with the final meal Jesus shared with his disciples. We may call it the Eucharist, Communion, or the Lord’s Supper. We may subscribe to transubstantiation, consubstantiation, spiritual presence, or the memorial view. We may receive it from a priest, walk the aisle, take it in the pews, or share it around a dining table. Nevertheless, it is there in our worship.

Since we often disagree about the sacraments themselves, the most important point made in The Artistic Vision may be that beauty is not a sacrament but rather is sacramental. The authors state, “When we say sacramental, we are referring more to the artist’s vision than what their art is. The divine presence, in this sense, changes an artist’s way of seeing. When we participate with God in the act of seeing and therefore creating, it leads us into contemplation of the divine, and therefore the divine realities become present to us.” Beauty doesn’t impart or channel grace but, rather, helps us to see grace. Such a concept of the sacramental nature of beauty is big enough to include both Balthasar’s conception of “form” as the portal of the glory of the Lord and the common Baptist observation that a beautiful sunrise is an incitement to worship our creator. Beauty, in some sense, brings us into the presence of God.

Turning from Anglicanism to the broader evangelical world, we find Philip Ryken, president of Wheaton College, contributing to the theological understanding of beauty with his recent book, Beauty Is Your Destiny. Ryken is a Presbyterian minister, but he speaks for a wide evangelical consensus. He has relatively little to say about beauty in art, focusing rather on beauty as an aspect of essential Christian doctrine. He offers, for instance, chapters discussing the beauty inherent in doctrines such as the Trinity, creation, and the church. He reminds us that humility and holiness are beautiful. He also considers beauty in light of the crucifixion. Ryken’s discussion of beauty often comes back to its role in sanctification and redemption, as well as to how the beauty we encounter in this world offers a foretaste of the beatific vision. While Sosler and Ball tend to cite Plato, Augustine, and Pseudo-Dionysius, Ryken repeatedly sources his discussion of beauty in the writings of the Puritans and Jonathan Edwards. He is likely to quote John Piper where other writers on beauty quote Joseph Pieper. Despite the difference in the footnotes, Ryken comes to a very similar conclusion as Sosler and Ball: beauty draws us toward God.

Not unlike Balthasar, Ryken puts Christ’s incarnation at the center of his understanding of beauty. Quoting from Hebrews, Ryken writes, “The culmination of all beauty – literally, its apotheosis – is the incarnate Son of God. He is the beauty of God in visible form, ‘the radiance of the glory of God.’” Although he does not use expressly sacramental language, this emphasis on Christ as beauty leads Ryken to explore the way all beauty mirrors Jesus in bridging the gap between us and God. Ryken, of course, does not say that beauty can save us any more than he, a theologian in the Reformed tradition, would say that the sacraments save us. He does affirm, however, that our experiences of beauty “produce in us a deep longing to go beyond these earthly glimpses and get to the place where we can gaze” at the face of Christ.  Like the communion meal, beauty nourishes us and deepens our bond with the Lord.

In The Wounds of Beauty: Seven Dialogues on Art and Education, Margarita Mooney Suarez, a sociologist affiliated with Princeton Theological Seminary, discusses beauty with seven Catholic thinkers and artists. Mooney Suarez’s discussion with the renowned classicist, Peter Brown, about beauty’s status among ancient philosophers is a highlight and highly educational. Mooney Suarez’s other dialogue partners include poets, professors, painters, and cheesemakers, all demonstrating beauty’s sacramental effects in the lives of thinkers, artists, and makers. The common theme in these discussions is the way beauty draws us closer to God.

While several of the dialogues focus on demonstrating how beauty works in the art and life of various people, her discussion with the poet and scholar James Matthew Wilson offers a deep but succinct theory of beauty and its sacramental function. Wilson, whose book The Vision of the Soul offers one of the best explanations of beauty published in the last decade, outlines an understanding of beauty grounded in classical Christian metaphysics. He tells Mooney Suarez, “Beauty is nothing other than the capacity of being as such, of existent form, to disclose itself. At the very root of existence is the capacity of existence to share itself, to give itself away in myriad ways. Beauty is the fundamental generosity of being to other beings, a generosity of ones, of individual beings, such that they constitute a whole or totality called the world, the universe, even reality as such.”

This view of the association between beauty and being is a major part of what Wilson calls, both here and in The Vision of the Soul, the “Christian Platonist tradition.” In this tradition, all that is has been given its being by its creator, God, the uncreated being. Since God is simple – that is, since his characteristics cannot be separated, added to, or subtracted from and thus are synonymous with each other – he simply is any characteristic that can be attributed to him, such as justice, truth, goodness, or beauty. Inasmuch as it participates in being, then, God’s good creation is also his beautiful creation. The loss of this metaphysical tradition has undeniably impoverished theology by pulling aesthetics out of it into a separate area of inquiry. This impoverishment is another element in the disenchantment that mars the modern world, separating beauty from truth and goodness. The effort to restore this understanding of beauty as a fundamental aspect of being – rather than as in the eye of the beholder – is nothing less than an effort to return enchantment to our vision of the world.

In another dialogue in The Wounds of Beauty, George Harne, a musicologist and dean at the University of St. Thomas, tells Mooney Suarez, “Like the need for oxygen, for food, and for light, humans need to experience beauty and to know the author of beauty.” Wesley Vander Lugt, author of Beauty Is Oxygen: Finding a Faith that Breathes, would seem to agree. Vander Lugt, who directs the Leighton Ford Center for Theology, the Arts, and Gospel Witness at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, has written what is ultimately not a sustained argument but rather a series of short contemplations. While some of Vander Lugt’s meditations take root in the ideas of philosophers such as Charles Taylor, others center around pop culture references such as The Simpsons or American Beauty or the rapper G-Eazy. Beauty Is Oxygen is an effort to come at our need for beauty from as many different angles as possible. Though Vander Lugt differs from Mooney Suarez and the mostly conservative contributors to her dialogues in that he sometimes speaks the language of progressive Christianity – for instance, he suggests it is “problematic” to sing “America the Beautiful” – Beauty Is Oxygen is in accordance with the other books reviewed here in defining beauty as “traces of divine glory in the natural world and human culture.” Although he doesn’t use the precise language of sacramentality, Vander Lugt describes beauty as “God’s breath” and states that “God’s beauty is revealed within the particulars of the world because God’s beauty is beyond the world.” Like Ryken and Balthasar, he sees this beauty as most present in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ. Jesus is the answer to the question Vander Lugt takes as the title of his final and most important chapter, “What Sort of Beauty Will Save the World?” Yet, in answering this question with the person of Christ, he also states that “if keeping your eyes fixed on the beauty of Jesus diminishes the beauty of blue jays or Banksy’s prophetic graffiti, then we’re missing the full potential for God’s beauty to be oxygen for our souls both now and forever.” I’m not sure Banksy is the example I would have chosen, but the essential point is a good one, reminding us that enchantment with the beauty of our savior ought to bring re-enchantment to our view of creation. Indeed, both Ryken and Vander Lugt seem to agree with Balthasar that “to be a Christian is precisely a form,” in that both emphasize the Christian life itself as beautiful and open to beauty.

One last recent contribution to the Christian discussion of beauty, James Clark’s The Witness of Beauty and Other Essays, takes a more overtly political approach to the subject, yet it, too, endorses a view of beauty that is analogous to the sacraments. Clark, who is the book review editor for The North American Anglican, argues that the natural law tradition lacks the convincing force to help us re-establish for our fractured public life a consensus regarding the common good and that beauty can do what reason alone cannot. The Witness of Beauty is the most scholarly of the works reviewed here, with copious footnotes. The first essay in the book establishes the limits of the natural law tradition, endeavoring through many examples to show that even the scholars who most support natural law as a basis for moral consensus doubt its persuasive force.

In the second essay, and to a lesser extent in the shorter essays that follow it, Clark works to show that beauty, through its ability to make God present to us without logical argumentation, can provide a basis for moral consensus and a sense of the common good by establishing a shared sense of transcendence. Clark asserts that many of our most contentious issues become less so if we all agree that there is an authority above our own preferences. He states that “the experience of beauty bypasses discursive reasoning, whereas natural law arguments hinge on such reasoning.” Along the way, Clark demonstrates the compatibility between Protestantism and the kind of classical Christian metaphysics professed by Catholics such as James Matthew Wilson. “Multiple classical Protestant figures specifically affirm created beauty as a species of the natural knowledge of God available to all people,” he writes, before going on to cite no less a Protestant authority than John Calvin. In the classical Christian metaphysics that sees beauty as synonymous with being and as a reflection of the God who is beauty, Clark finds common ground for all Christians, and perhaps even for all people willing to acknowledge the actual experience of the beautiful.

So, what does this possible consensus about beauty’s place among the transcendentals mean for the church today? Among other things, it could mean that beauty does not have to belong only to Catholics and Anglicans; low-church traditions such as my own Southern Baptists can also experience God’s presence through beauty. Just as Baptists once celebrated the Lord’s Supper more than quarterly, we once built beautiful churches. Over the last century, however, our relationship with aesthetics has become more fraught. To some extent, beauty has been driven from our worship services, which are often held in ugly buildings built primarily for functionality. A renewed “merely Christian” understanding of beauty as a sign within creation of the transcendent glory of God can restore to Baptists and other low-church traditions a sense of how God makes himself known through beauty. What we gain from this is a fuller sense of God’s sovereignty – a fuller awareness of the God that is “over all and through all and in all” (Eph. 4:6). Such an understanding can help us to build beautiful churches and script beautiful worship services, but also to live beautiful Christian lives, lived for the glory – which is to say, the beauty – of God. 

Works Cited

Balthasar, Hans Urs von. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Volume 1: Seeing the Form. Translated by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, edited by Joseph Fessio and John Riches. Ignatius Press, 1982.

Clark, James. The Witness of Beauty and Other Essays. The North American Anglican Press, 2024.

Mooney Suarez, Margarita. The Wounds of Beauty: Seven Dialogues on Art and Education. Cluny Media, 2022.

Ryken, Philip. Beauty Is Your Destiny: How the Promise of Splendor Changes Everything. Crossway, 2023.

Sosler, Alex and Gary Ball. The Artistic Vision: Cultivating a Sacramental Imagination for Creative Practice. Cascade Books, 2024.

Vander Lugt, Wesley. Beauty Is Oxygen: Finding a Faith That Breathes. Eerdmans, 2024

Wilson, James Matthew. The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition. The Catholic University of America Press, 2017.