A Plea for Beauty in the Sacred Liturgy

Superman fights for “truth, justice, and the American way!” We should fight for the three transcendentals: truth, beauty, and goodness.

The transcendentals were known to the Ancient Greeks, but Catholic theologians quickly baptized them into their study of philosophy and theology.

Transcendentals are the timeless and universal attributes of being.¹ They are the properties of all beings, as well as of “being” itself. They are ontologically one thing – that is, they are the three ways that humans use to perceive the single divine origin of all things and the unity of reality in God.²

In a more human sense, the transcendentals are lenses you can use to determine the characteristics of any object or action. Is it beautiful? Is it true? Is it good?

“These are the only three things that we never get bored with, and never will, for all eternity, because they are attributes of God, and therefore of all God’s creation: three transcendental or absolutely universal properties of all reality.”

(“Lewis’s Philosophy of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty”, essay by Peter Kreeft in C. S. Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty)

But isn’t “beauty in the eye of the beholder”? Well, no. Thanks to the imprecision of our language, we have conflated the idea of beauty with the ideas of “pretty” or “attractive”. Something can be beautiful without necessarily being pretty, and something can be pretty without necessarily being beautiful.

Whole books have been written on whether beauty is subjective or objective. Even the definition of beauty by Saint Thomas Aquinas is no help in this regard, for he says “that which pleases when seen”. Surely being pleased by something is a subjective opinion? Nope, we’re just running into another imprecision of language.

Beauty is a transcendental. A thing is beautiful when it points to the truth. And truth, no matter what the postmodernists say, is objective. The mathematical truth that 1 + 1 = 2 remains true no matter how much you don’t like it or disagree with it. Or, as a friend of mine says, “Gravity: it’s the law!” The truth is always true. Beauty is always beautiful.

Our souls hunger for beauty, because beauty points to truth. In a sense, beauty is the tangible form of that third transcendental, goodness. As Saint John Paul II said,

“The link between good and beautiful stirs fruitful reflection. In a certain sense, beauty is the visible form of the good, just as the good is the metaphysical condition of beauty.”

Pope John Paul II, Letter to Artists (1999)

Human art exists for this purpose, to bring joy by pointing to goodness and truth. Human art exists in imitation of the divine art found all around us in the natural world. This divine art brings joy because it, too, points to goodness and truth.

“Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God’s handwriting – a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.”

(Charles Kingsley)

The Church maintains that the highest of human arts is the sacred liturgy. Indeed, it is the culmination of all human art from music to prose, from architecture to movement, from incense to textile. The Church in her liturgical documents practically pleads for beauty in the liturgy.

Beauty, then, is not mere decoration, but rather an essential element of the liturgical action, since it is an attribute of God Himself and His revelation. These considerations should make us realize the care which is needed, if the liturgical action is to reflect its innate splendour.

(Sacramentum Caritatis 35)

The Mass is always intrinsically beautiful because it is the eternal sacrifice of Jesus, who is Truth itself. It is up to us workers in the field, however, to make that beauty manifest extrinsically, so that the accidents and the substance of the sacred liturgy correspond with each other as exactly as we can make them.

There is a tendency to remove much of the extrinsic beauty from the liturgy. This is not a new problem, and you can make a pretty good argument that the stripping of beautiful things and actions from the liturgy, whether it is in the name of expedience or of “simplicity”, is simply a variation of the ancient heresy of iconoclasm. The saints exhort us to do otherwise:

The Church’s liturgy may, therefore, be considered as a sacred poem, in the framing of which both heaven and earth have taken part, and by which our humanity, redeemed by the blood of the Lamb without spot, rises on the wings of the Spirit even unto the throne of God Himself.

(Blessed Ildefonso Schuster)

My fourth-ever post on this blog was a lament of liturgical minimalism. See if this sounds familiar in your parish:

It seems like every time there’s a corner can be cut, we cut it. Every time there’s a choice of doing or not doing, we choose to not do.

Why, oh why do we do this? The message seems to be that this is a heavy obligation and we’ve just got to get through it as quickly as possible.

I read a book by Scott Hahn about the mass called The Lamb’s Supper. The subtitle, and one of the major themes in the book, is “the Mass as Heaven on Earth”. It presents a picture of the liturgy as our most intimate time with God, a reflection of the eternity which we’ve been promised.

Who would want to rush through that?

We shouldn’t be stripping out the beauty, we should be magnifying it. We shouldn’t be liturgical minimalists, but instead should follow the mind of the Church and Her saints and be liturgical maximalists.

The Evangelists and Apostles speak of the Church’s relationship with Christ in very intimate terms. Saint Paul compares the love and relationship between husband and wife to that of Christ and His Church. The Church is the bride of Christ.³

And we are the Church. We are the bride.

In the liturgy, we are the bride celebrating the bridegroom, who is Christ Himself. It is our most intimate encounter with the Divine, at least until the four last things.

How we celebrate the liturgy says a lot about our relationship with God.

Are we celebrating the Mass? Or are we just going to Mass?

Are we truly and actively and interiorly participating in the greatest of all possible prayers to God? Or are we just reciting and singing by rote and taking our Communion like it was some sort of participation trophy?

And if it’s the latter, shouldn’t we aspire to more? How can we possibly treat the Beloved like that? We who lavish love and the gifts of the world on our earthly beloveds – whether they be dates, spouses, families, or friends – how can we then deny the same and more to our eternal Beloved?

Relationships transform us. We become more and more like what our beloved sees in us. We try to live up to that impossible ideal we see reflected in their eyes across a candlelit dinner table or a colouring book.

When we are in that first flush of romance – or parenthood – we do everything we can to become worthy of their love. Now what would the liturgy look like if everybody who was participating, everyone who was present, was doing everything they could to become worthy of the love of God?

Wouldn’t we try to give God what He desires? What He deserves? That we will inevitably fall short of that is no possible excuse for not trying.

And in conforming ourselves to the love of God, won’t we then come out of that encounter ready to take on the world?

This is why the Church calls the Eucharist “the source and summit of the whole Christian life”.⁴

The Church becomes visible in many ways: in charitable action, in mission projects, in the personal apostolate that every Christian must carry out in his own walk of life. However the place in which she is fully experienced as Church is in the liturgy; it is the act in which we believe that God enters our reality and we can encounter Him, we can touch Him. It is the act in which we come into contact with God: He comes to us and we are illuminated by Him.

(Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience of October 3, 2012)

And not just the Mass. The Church encourages every parish to publicly and regularly celebrate the Liturgy of the Hours.⁵ How many parishes do this, or at least try to do this, and how many just don’t bother?

The sacred liturgy – as the Church hands it down to us in Her splendid multitude of rites and forms – contains riches beyond compare. It is up to us to make use of this treasure and so present ourselves by means of it to God at the altar, at the altar where we join with the greatest offering of all, that of Christ Himself at Golgotha.

Our liturgical celebration should reflect our love for God, who is all beauty, all goodness, and all truth.

Without the proper ars celebrandi and the proper interior disposition we risk oversimplifying or dumbing down the liturgy for our own convenience, rather than celebrating the liturgy for the glory of God out of our grateful love for Him and His infinite goodness and mercy.

If we make the liturgy for ourselves, it moves away from the divine; it becomes a ridiculous, vulgar, boring theatrical game. We end up with liturgies that resemble variety shows, an amusing Sunday party at which to relax together after a week of work and cares of all sorts.

Once that happens, the faithful go back home, after the celebration of the Eucharist, without having encountered God personally or having heard Him in the inmost depths of their heart.

(Robert Cardinal Sarah, God or Nothing)

God created the world and us in it. He did so out of an overflowing of divine love. We were created that we might return that love to God and to His creation.

The Church gives us a glorious vision of what the sacred liturgy should be. This is what the Council Fathers envisioned: not liturgical minimalism, but the elevation of our celebration, so that it “rises on the wings of the Spirit even unto the throne of God Himself”.

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Footnotes:

1. Rev. John Hardon, SJ, Modern Catholic Dictionary.
2. Dr. Daniel Guernsey, “Educating to Truth, Beauty and Goodness”. (https://newmansociety.org/educating-truth-beauty-goodness-2/)
3. cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church 796.
4. This phrase is also sometimes translated as “fount and apex”; Lumen Gentium 11, Sacramentum Caritatis subtitle.
5. cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church 1175, Verbum Domini 62, Redemptionis Sacramentum 41.