When people today talk of ‘icons’ or ‘holy icons,’ what many have in mind is the style commonly associated with the Eastern Church, especially that of the Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches. In fact, the iconographic tradition took root across the Christian world, East and West, before Russia existed, and was not limited to the Greek Orthodox Church.

As Christianity became the dominant religion of the Late Antique classical world, a distinct style of art, an adaptation of contemporary Roman art, emerged, and by the early 5th century AD it had become the universal standard for liturgical art across the Christian world. This is the style that became known as icons today and, broadly speaking, is associated today with the Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic churches.

As with so much of Christian culture, the liturgy is the driving force behind the tradition, in that what gives it authenticity as a style is its role as a complement to right worship. Yet, as with Christian culture more broadly, we see variants responsive to particular local cultures and times, all consistent with the broader principles that characterize it and make it authentically liturgical. In the Latin West, sacred art up to about the 12th century — encompassing, for example, the Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Ottonian, Carolingian, and Romanesque styles — was all consistent with the iconographic prototype. Most non-Roman Churches in the Christian East have their own styles, too. Beyond the Greek and Russian Orthodox traditions, one thinks, for example, of Coptic iconography from Egypt as a particularly distinctive variant. Not only are these national styles distinguishable from one another, but within each there are typically distinct regional variants as well.

It is important to distinguish between the use of the word ‘icon’ as a generic term for any work of sacred art that is worthy of veneration, as we might use it in considering the decrees of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, and its use to denote a particular style of sacred art. In translations of the writings of St John of Damascus and the deliberations of the Seventh Ecumenical Council in the 8th century, and of Theodore the Studite in the 9th century, the word ‘icon’ is best understood as interchangeable with the English word ‘image.’ It is not being used to denote a particular style of sacred art or to elevate any one style above another. Everything the Council documents about, for example, the necessity of having sacred art in our churches and the criteria by which that art is worthy of veneration applies to all liturgical art. The theology the Council articulates is therefore a general theology of images.

In what follows, when I refer to icons, I mean sacred art in the iconographic style. Before considering how to identify that style and distinguish it from the other legitimate forms of liturgical art, the Gothic and the Baroque, I want to address a few misunderstandings and myths about icons so that we are clear about what we are discussing.

The Creative Retrieval of Iconography

The theology of the iconographic style, developed to account for the stylistic elements that characterize the tradition, is a relatively recent development. It may surprise many to learn that, to my knowledge, no such formulation appears in the writings of any Church Father, East or West, until theologians in the 20th century began to develop the theology of icons. This does not necessarily mean there was no shared understanding of the governing principles prior to that; there may well have been. Yet if there was, no record of it has come down to us.

A group of Russian Orthodox expatriates living in France in the mid-20th century developed what is now generally accepted as the theology of the iconographic style. This group included prominent figures such as the theologians Paul Evdokimov, Vladimir Lossky, and Leonid Ouspensky, who was both a painter and a theologian, as well as the icon painter Gregory Kroug. They were responding to what they saw as the steady degeneration of the iconographic tradition in the Eastern Churches over centuries and wished to reestablish it authentically.

Unlike the West, which saw the development of Gothic and then Renaissance traditions from the 11th to the 16th centuries, the art of the Eastern Church did not undergo these transitions. However, the effects of the Enlightenment, which came after the Renaissance, were felt in the East, particularly in Russia, through the efforts of reforming rulers — Peter the Great and Catherine the Great especially — who looked to Western Europe as their model for modernization. Arising from this, there was an increased naturalism in iconography which, unlike the naturalism of Gothic art, was not carried out in accordance with a truly Christian understanding. The result was a style that is neither properly naturalistic nor properly iconographic.

Russian painters of the 19th century noted this degeneration, and arguments were made to abandon the iconographic style altogether in favor of Western naturalism in sacred art. For a while, Orthodox churches were adorned with 19th-century naturalistic styles. While this may have produced fine results in secular painting — the Russian traditions of portraiture and landscape in this period were indeed spectacular — they jarred with many Orthodox Christians, who felt that this naturalistic style of art undermined their worship. By the turn of the 20th century, commentators once again argued for the reestablishment of a purer, more authentic iconographic tradition. This process of creative retrieval, begun in that period, was interrupted by the Bolshevik Revolution, and it was not until the mid-20th century that the expatriates based in Paris who had escaped from Russia, including those already mentioned above, were able to work toward a change.

Their approach was first to establish a canon of imagery they considered the epitome of the style (generally Russian icons from the 15th century). By analyzing the common features within this canon, they developed a theology to explain them, hoping to define a set of principles that would allow both conformity to the tradition and the legitimate organic development of styles within it, as needed by the Church in particular times and places.

It is a tribute to the work of this small group of pioneers that the painting of icons has developed so authentically that many people today wrongly assume that the iconographic tradition of the Eastern Churches has been passed down through an unbroken line since St Luke painted the first icon of the Theotokos. We are now in the third or fourth generation of icon painters who have passed these principles down from teacher to pupil since those 20th-century pioneers, and the best of them are creating work today that is as beautiful and significant as that of the great iconographers of the past.

Because of the success of the pioneering Russians based in Paris, iconographers from other Orthodox and Eastern Rite churches were influenced by their work. Among these were the Greek painter Photis Kontoglou, who contributed to the reestablishment of a flourishing Greek iconographic tradition, and the Egyptian Isaac Fanous, who did the same for the Coptic style.

I have long felt that their approach should serve as the template for Roman Catholic Christians to reestablish their Western traditions of Gothic and Baroque art today. My own analysis of those traditions is based on the work of those 20th-century Russian theologians and is my attempt to begin that process.

The Modern Myths of Iconography

The mystique that so many contemporary Roman Catholics and Protestant Christians associate with iconography has also emerged from this recent period, and bound up with this are several modern myths about icons. These include the ideas that you have to be Orthodox to paint icons well, that you have to be a monk to paint icons, that you must ritually fast and pray before painting an icon, and that the true iconographer does not paint icons but only ‘writes’ them.

Is it true that only Orthodox Christians can paint icons successfully? I would certainly agree that someone who regularly worships with sacred art is more likely to paint it well. This does place Roman Catholics at a disadvantage. Unless a Roman Rite Catholic prays the Divine Office with an image corner at home, he will almost certainly not have the opportunity to do so in the Roman liturgy as it is generally celebrated today, even if there is beautiful art in the church. This therefore greatly favors Orthodox and Eastern Rite Christians, although in principle it does not preclude others from painting icons well; in fact, there are several excellent Catholic iconographers today.

Can only monks paint icons? While a monk’s spiritual life is likely to be compatible with that of an artist who wishes to pursue his vocation, it is not the only form of Christian life that can offer such formation. A devout and sincere layman might flourish as an artist too, and there are many fine icon painters today who are not monks.

On the question of fasting and praying: while there is no accounting for whom God may choose to inspire, or which individual will respond well to that inspiration, the greatest chance of a good response lies with those who lead good and holy lives, and typically this involves regular fasting and prayer. However, this principle is not uniquely applicable to artists; it applies to every aspect of the Christian life and to every Christian. Icon painters should fast and pray regularly, as all Christians should, but this is not a special requirement peculiar to icon painters.

On whether we ‘write’ or paint icons: this question arises from the fact that the Greek and Slavonic words for creating an icon carry no distinction between the two activities, and could legitimately be translated as either writing or painting. One well-known Orthodox iconographer told me that he considered the insistence on the word ‘write’ to be ‘a bit precious.’ As far as he was concerned, if someone uses a paintbrush to apply paint, the English word for that activity is painting, and it does not diminish the standing of the profession to say so. On the contrary, when the icon is beautiful, and we venerate it as we should, that elevates the role of the painter of icons to one of the highest importance, regardless of what we call the process of creating them.

There is also an associated myth that overstates the role of a theology of method, as distinct from the theology that governs the style of the finished image. Some, for example, hold that the image must be created by starting with a dark base and adding layers of lighter color, because God created Light out of darkness. There is no basis for this. A painting is as good as it looks, and if the finished work is good, the method by which it was made is of secondary importance. This is confirmed by modern X-ray analysis of authentic and ancient icons, which shows that painters of the past used a wide variety of methods to produce authentic work.

A Short Summary of the Theology of Iconographic Style

So what is the theology of icons? The iconographic style expresses a desire to present man in full union with God, that is, eschatological man. Consider the Transfiguration icon below, painted in Yaroslavl, Russia, in 1516.

The nimbus around Christ darkens toward its center, reflecting a theological point about the nature of divine light. Christ in the Transfiguration is understood as the prototype for all iconographic imagery, and the principle extends further, since all saints shine with the light of Christ because, as baptized Christians, they have ‘put on Christ’. The halo, typically a gold disc around the head, is a stylized representation of the light emanating from the person. In the Transfiguration icon, the prophets and Christ bear halos, while there is a convention that before Pentecost the apostles do not, though they are still portrayed as saints in other respects: there is no cast shadow from any figure, since each is his own source of light, and we see the floating sparkles of uncreated light on their clothes and bodies.

To convey the heavenly dimension, which is outside time and space, the image avoids creating the illusion of depth. The artist paints the image so that it lives, as it were, in the plane of the surface. Rarely does an iconographer use single-point perspective, in which things diminish with distance; he will often use inverted perspective instead, in which things appear wider as they recede.

The size of the beings and creatures portrayed varies according to the hierarchy of being, a feature often referred to as hierarchical perspective. Christ is the largest figure, while trees and mountains are shown smallest relative to their natural size. Even inanimate objects, such as trees and mountains, can be shown bowing toward Christ, indicating that each owes its existence to him and further reinforcing our sense that each has its place in the hierarchy of being. The negative space around the figures is usually a single color, often gold leaf, with minimal indication of the location. The gold or other single-color background reinforces the sense of flatness, and the environment is suffused with light, an effect accentuated by gold leaf that reflects candlelight, causing it to shimmer as though it were a source of light in itself. Some variants, particularly Western variants, have complex patterned backgrounds that achieve the same end — the sense of flat negative space around the figures.

The sense of another world is further heightened by placing the figures in the middle distance. No matter how near we approach the image, there is always some sense of distance between us and the closest figures depicted; they seem to recede as we draw closer. Even with our faces pressed against the surface, they remain some way from us. This creates a dynamic between us and the icon when we pray with them, for it instills in us a longing to be with the saint. This is a longing that finds its fulfillment only in heaven.

All icons aim to portray heavenly realities. Heaven is a realm in which time is compressed into a single moment; past, present, and future are perpetually in a single moment. It is difficult even to imagine this, but it is possible to reflect this mystery. A way to do so is to present a full narrative with different scenes from a story portrayed simultaneously in the image, even though, in real time, they happened sequentially. What took place over an extended period appears in a single image. This might be useful in an icon of the life of a saint, for example. It is common for an important event in the saint’s life to be the largest image, with several miniature scenes of other events from his life around the periphery.

Consider now another image. This icon of the Mother of God with Christ is known as the Vladimir Mother of God. It was painted in Constantinople around 1100 AD, brought to Russia, and became the prototype and model for Russian iconography.

[Image: The Vladimir Mother of God, Constantinople, c. 1100 AD. The prototype for Russian iconography.]

The first thing to notice is how the Theotokos, who bore and gave birth to God, expresses a contentedness tinged with melancholy. This is called ‘bright sadness’ and is intended to convey that the saint lives in eternal bliss but nonetheless feels compassion for those who are not yet with God. The saints want us to join them, and they are happy to intercede for us so that it might happen.

The proportions of the person's features are subtly modified to communicate holy wisdom. The wise man reflects on God’s will before acting. To convey this aspect of wisdom, the receptive organs are relatively large, while the active ones are smaller. Therefore, the eyes are enlarged, and the nose, which inhales the fragrance of heaven, is elongated slightly, and the ears, if they are visible, are slightly larger than they would be naturally. (Typically, we don’t see Our Lady’s ears.) In contrast, the mouth and hands are made smaller. This is not to say that saints are inactive; when they act, their actions are effective. Rather, it speaks of an economy of effort in which nothing is wasted. And similarly, while there is no superfluous word coming from the mouth of a saint, every word that is spoken is golden.

We also see that Christ, though a child in his mother’s arms, appears as a little man. This indicates the paradox that, though human and physically immature, he is still fully God.

Another feature of icons is that the faces of saints are always portrayed in either a full or three-quarter view, so that both eyes are clearly visible. This symbolizes the idea that in heaven we can behold another and know them fully; nothing is hidden, and we are fully known to all others. Only the devil would be shown in full profile. (This is one feature that differentiates early Gothic art from iconographic art. Gothic artists, in order to portray a more naturalistic three-dimensional setting and the sense of a more lifelike interaction between the figures in the composition, gradually begin to place some of those key figures in profile.)

These stylistic devices in icons draw out realities that would otherwise be invisible. The modification of natural appearances, therefore, produces a greater realism than any naturalistic painting or photograph could achieve.

It is common for people who cannot draw well to want to learn to paint icons, assuming that draftsmanship matters less in this tradition, but this is not the case. The artist must not be tempted to use the style to conceal a lack of drawing ability. It takes great skill to reflect visible and otherwise invisible realities in the same painting, so that the two aspects support rather than undermine each other. Our figures must both sparkle with the uncreated light of Christ and read anatomically, just as the drapery must hang and fold as it would naturally around the figure.

Here is another common image of Christ, known as the Mandylion.

[Image: The Mandylion (Christ Acheiropoietos), 12th century, Russia.]

The name comes from the archaic Greek term for ‘cloth’ or ‘towel’ and refers to the tradition that the prototype of this icon was a cloth pressed against the face of Our Lord, and that the image was miraculously transferred to it. It is perhaps the most famous of the icons called acheiropoietos, meaning ‘not made with human hands,’ images that are revealed rather than painted. Notice how stern Christ appears. This sternness is sometimes employed in the depiction of Christ to indicate that he is a judge. It must never be excessive, because we also wish to convey that he is a just judge and that divine justice is always tempered with great mercy.

In common with all authentically liturgical art, there is a general disposition against innovation and originality for their own sake. New icons are created only as needed by the Church, for example to portray a newly canonized saint. The icon painter always reproduces the prototype with an understanding of the ideal it is intended to express and always aims to portray the ideal as best he can rather than a simple copy of another work of art. Accordingly, the goal is to create something greater than that which he copies.

These revealed images — the ones said to be “not made with human hands” — raise a question that goes to the heart of the whole tradition: does what we see in an icon actually correspond to what Christ and the saints are like in heaven, or is it simply an internally consistent system of symbols? That question, and the most remarkable of these revealed images, Our Lady of Guadalupe, are the subject of the second of these two articles.

What governs the style of these traditions?

The most important factor governing the style of figurative art is its understanding of the human person — what theologians call anthropology. Those familiar with John Paul II’s Theology of the Body will know that he distinguishes different states of human existence; it is helpful to draw on his categories here.

First, there is Original Man: Adam and Eve before the Fall, ‘naked without shame’, marked by innocence and complete reliance on God.

Second, there is Historical Man: mankind after the Fall, bearing the consequences of a broken relationship with God, with others, and with himself. Though corrupted by sin, Historical Man is not utterly depraved; he retains the capacity for sanctity through cooperation with grace. This is the condition we all share in this life.

Third, there is Eschatological Man: man as he will be in heaven — immortal, partaking of the divine nature, adopted as a son or daughter of God, and united to Christ in a perfect exchange of love.

These second two of these states, as I see it, correspond broadly to the three liturgical traditions in different ways. (There is no tradition directly relating to Original Man, to my knowledge).

The iconographic tradition reveals Eschatological Man. One important inspiration for this style is the account of the glorified Christ in the Transfiguration; all the saints share in that glory through baptism, as members of the Church, the mystical body of Christ. The stylistic features of icons are shaped by the desire to communicate the reality of man in heaven. The gold disc — the halo — represents the uncreated light radiating from the glorified body. There are no cast shadows, since each figure is its own light source rather than being illuminated from outside. And because heaven lies outside space and time, the icon deliberately reduces the illusion of depth through devices such as reverse perspective, ensuring that the figures inhabit the plane of the painting as much as possible. This is also why oil paint is generally avoided in iconography: it creates too strong an illusion of depth and a quality of sensory richness that works against the image’s purpose. Egg tempera, mosaic, and fresco are better suited to the iconographic style.

The Baroque tradition reveals Historical Man, and its distinctive style follows from that different subject. Where iconographic art flattens space and eliminates shadow, Baroque painting deliberately creates an illusion of depth through perspective and portrays deep cast shadows from external light sources. Shadow has been a symbol of evil and suffering throughout Christian tradition — the ancient Office of Tenebrae (named for the Latin word for darkness or shadows) uses precisely this symbolism within the Triduum, in the final days of Holy Week. In Baroque painting, those shadowy depths are deliberately exaggerated, but the Christian message is not one of despair. Just as Easter follows Good Friday, the darkness in a Baroque painting is always contrasted with light, representing the Light that is Christ, that overcomes darkness.

The Baroque style is far more naturalistic than the iconographic, but it is not a simple reproduction of appearances. The artist varies color, edge sharpness, and tonal contrast to direct the viewer’s eye toward what matters and to ensure that the figure is depicted with dignity worthy of a creature made in God’s image. While Baroque art is always the art of fallen, Historical Man, it insists on man’s capacity for sanctity and his need for God’s grace. It is the art of suffering and hope, a Christian hope that transcends suffering.

[Image: St Jerome and the Angel of Judgement, by Jose Ribera, Spanish/Italian, 1626, in the Baroque style]

Baroque art should be clearly distinguished from the academic painting of the 19th century, with figures such as Ingres or Bouguereau in France, and from the Pre-Raphaelites in England in the same period. While there were some good examples within each grouping, in my opinion, we can detect that, as a whole, there is a subtle drift away from the Christian balance of idealization and naturalism toward one extreme or the other, becoming either cold and sterile or sentimental to the point of being saccharine. Much of what became 20th-century modernism was an overreaction to this 19th-century academic art. Although the modernists believed they were reacting against Christian tradition, they were, aesthetically at least, reacting against an inferior distortion of it.

The Gothic tradition occupies the ground between the other two, which is fitting given its historical position as a transitional form derived from the Romanesque and anticipating the Baroque. In stylistic terms, it oscillates between the visual language of Eschatological Man, characterized by a highly abstracted iconographic style, and that of Historical Man, characterized by a highly naturalistic Baroque style. It might be called the art of pilgrimage: its imagery points simultaneously toward heaven and the fallen world, reflecting that although we cannot complete the transformation into Eschatological Man in this life, we can begin it. The sacramental life of the Church is precisely the means by which that transformation starts. Like the spires of Gothic churches, Gothic art reaches upward to the heavens while remaining rooted in the earth.

The late-Gothic painter Fra Angelico illustrates the point well. He uses elements of the increasing naturalism developing around him, such as single-point perspective and cast shadows, alongside the iconographic visual vocabulary of uncreated light and pictorial flatness. His depictions of the Annunciation (there are several) are examples of paintings that employ perspective and cast shadow; his heavenly scenes, such as the Coronation of the Virgin, revert to the iconographic prototype of flattened space and radiant light. His works are not inconsistent with each other: they reflect a coherent theological understanding of the difference between scenes set in this world and those set in the next.

[Image: The Coronation of the Virgin by Fra Angelico, painted around 1434.]

A reasonable question arises here. If each tradition rests on a different understanding of man — fallen, glorified, or on pilgrimage between the two — how is it that within a single tradition we find figures in all three states? Baroque art reveals Historical Man, yet it gives us scenes set in heaven, such as the Coronation of the Virgin. The answer, I would argue, is that while a tradition may occasionally admit some slight variation — Fra Angelico is a rare and notable case — in general, once a style of representing the human figure is established within a tradition, it is applied across all situations. To ask an artist to be fluent in several styles and traditions at once, switching between them according to the subject, would be asking too much of him and would likely confuse those who see it; working consistently within one style is what gives a body of work its coherence. And in any case, there are other means of indicating heaven while remaining within the Baroque idiom — the presence of angels, the absence of any earthly setting, and so on.

Why not the High Renaissance?

Many Catholics will be surprised to find that Benedict XVI’s list of authentic liturgical artistic traditions does not include the High Renaissance — the period of Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo, c. 1480–1530, which is often considered the summit of Catholic artistic achievement. I follow Pope Benedict’s lead here, and it is worth explaining why.

All traditional art training involves, in varying degrees, copying the works of great masters and the direct observation of nature. The style in which an artist ultimately paints is shaped above all by the art with which he is most familiar, which in turn shapes his response to the nature he observes. Gothic artists looked to Romanesque models and to one another; for this reason, there was no sharp break between the Romanesque and the Gothic, and Gothic art can be understood as a progressively “naturalized” version of the iconographic style, the level of naturalism increasing gradually and without any clear dislocation from its roots.

The High Renaissance represents a different kind of transition: a clear break from that inherited tradition. Artists of this period no longer looked primarily to Romanesque or Gothic masters for inspiration, but to the ancient Greek and Roman sculptures that surrounded them in Italy and were being excavated at the time. The sharp change in style between the Gothic and the Italian High Renaissance is not a reflection of increased naturalism — as we have explained, that process had already been going on for centuries. Rather, it is due to the incorporation into artists' training of copying ancient Greek and Roman statues and plaster casts of them, which radically altered the form of the art. The main impetus for this was not theological or philosophical; rather, it was simply that the period was enamored of the magnificence of this ancient form and wished to emulate it.

The implications of this shift were far-reaching. Benedict XVI described what followed:

The Renaissance did something quite new...its art speaks of the grandeur of man almost as if it were surprised by it; it needs no other beauty to seek...The tragic burden of antiquity is forgotten; only its divine beauty is seen. A nostalgia for the gods emerges, for myth, for a world without the fear of sin...True, Christian subjects are still being depicted, but ‘religious art’ is no longer sacred in the proper sense. It does not enter into the humility of the other sacraments and their time-transcending dynamism.

The Spirit of the Liturgy, p129

The phrase “without fear of sin” is worth dwelling on. It was the art theorist Alberti who first proposed, in his influential treatise On Painting (1435), that the observation of the nude should also form part of every artist’s training, along with the copying of ancient statues. In doing so, he was knowingly departing from the practice of Christian tradition up to that point — attaching excessive importance to direct observation of the unclothed figure without sufficient regard, in my opinion, for human dignity or for concupiscence, the natural inclination of fallen man toward sin.

The 16th century, shaped by Alberti’s ideas, is characterized less by a coherent tradition than by a series of dominant, individualistic, and brilliantly gifted figures: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian. While there were undoubted individual high points, the period as a whole represented a departure from the sacred character of what preceded it, for the reasons Benedict identifies. The Baroque style was a deliberate response to this, inspired by the Council of Trent (which closed in 1563) and the spiritual energy of the Counter-Reformation. Gradually, the contributions of these and other artists were assessed and integrated, and by the end of the 16th century a coherent Christian tradition, properly grounded in theology, had developed from their work.

This, then, is why the High Renaissance, for all its brilliance, does not appear among the three authentic traditions. It is not a judgment on the gifts of its artists, but a recognition that the sacred character of an artistic tradition depends on the end it serves and the understanding of the human person it embodies. The iconographic, the Gothic, and the Baroque each, in their different ways, keep that end in view; and it is to a fuller account of each that I hope to turn in the articles that follow.

The Essence Of The Way Of Beauty Groups

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Way of Beauty Fellowship Groups

The process can be followed individually or with personal mentorship. The establishment of a weekly Way of Beauty group at a school or elsewhere, under the guidance of a leader, helps create a community of people with different levels of experience. Typically, a group of 8 to 15 works best. The format of the meeting might be as follows:

• Opening prayer. Pray the psalms together; a psalm or two for the day can be selected.

• Introductions. Ask if there are new people who wish to introduce themselves and to explain what brought them. Welcome them, and encourage them to stay afterward to get to know the others. We suggest that new people with no experience simply listen the first time.

• Those with experience speak. Go around the room. Each person introduces themselves by name, shares how well they have been following the process during the week, and then speaks about a chosen topic for the week, for example, ‘my experience of weekly service.’ The atmosphere is encouraging and positive; the aim is not to call people out for falling short, but the sharing does help to make people accountable to one another.

• Announcements. If appropriate: for example, that the group meets next week at the same time, or goes for coffee afterward.

• Closing prayer. Of the group’s choosing. The Lord’s Prayer is a good choice.

The purpose of the group is as follows:

• A forum for giving witness to the benefits, so as to encourage others.

• A forum for the inexperienced to mix with the experienced, and perhaps to find a mentor.

• A forum for mutual encouragement, so that people stick to the habits of faith and creativity.

• A forum for community and friendship. A group that prays together as peers and offers encouragement can become a source of community.

• A forum for service. Volunteering to contribute to the running of the meeting, putting out the chairs, leading the meeting, opening up the room, can itself be the weekly commitment of service.

The Essential Elements Of The Way Of Beauty Process

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A Process of Personal Development in Faith and Creativity

The Way of Beauty is a program of personal development that cultivates the capacity to apprehend beauty and fosters personal creativity. It contains the essential features of the formation that would have been given to great artists in the Western tradition. The activities are consistent with faith in God and with the understanding that God is the source of our inspiration, so that, in our creative work, we look beyond ourselves. This is not so much ‘self-expression’ as inspired creativity, arising from a Christian understanding of the human person.

The Scala Foundation (www.scalafoundation.org) has experience in practicing and implementing all of these elements and can help you directly, but we invite you, if you wish, to follow your own vision for implementing these principles.

Do I need to be Christian?

A Christian will be very comfortable with this program, but a Christian faith is not necessary in order to benefit from it. All that is required is an openness to the possibility that there is a God, and a willingness to act as though He exists and wants us to be creative and inspired. The activities are habits of faith and creativity that can remain with someone for a lifetime.

The Process

The elements of the process are as follows:

Habits of faith. Pray first thing in the morning and last thing at night, and learn meditation in the Western tradition, for example, ‘counting your blessings’ by writing a gratitude list. This can take as little as three minutes a day in total.

Praying the psalms. The psalms are spiritually and psychologically nourishing, and are the way to ‘pray the Bible’ par excellence, as a complement to Sunday worship. They are full of vivid imagery that stimulates the spiritual imagination, and they have formed and informed Western culture for centuries, especially when chanted.

A habit of service. A regular, perhaps weekly, commitment to voluntary service. Volunteer to serve your community in any way, in order to develop the habit of self-sacrifice.

A habit of creativity. A regular, perhaps weekly, commitment to an activity in which beauty is the end, and in which we create it with care and with a skill that we learn. This is not just for the artistically gifted; anything that brings some pleasure in the doing will serve: gardening, art classes, music, embroidery. This habit stimulates the faculty of co-creating with God, an inspired creativity, which can then inform the talents a person does have, in any human activity.

The study of beauty. Developing an appreciation for the beauty of nature and of the great works of mankind: art, music, literature, architecture. Go out into the natural world and study it; study a canon of great works by the creative masters of the past. The deepest formation is to associate beauty with our prayer and worship, chanting the psalms beautifully and using traditional sacred images as a focus for our prayer.

Discernment of personal vocation. As appropriate to the age of the individual and their disposition in faith, undertake spiritual exercises to discern what God is calling them to do, their personal vocation. A person’s creativity will flourish most in the context of their personal calling, whatever that may be, and for most people this is not artistic.

Review of conscience and confession of sins. A regular review of conscience, followed by confession of sins. Ideally, this is done in a sacramental setting, but for those who are not a member of a Church where this is available, confession to a trusted layperson is recommended as an alternative. As the Letter of St James says, “Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed” (James 5:16). If we harm others, we should be ready to make amends to those whom we have harmed.

Sunday worship. For those who are Christian, we encourage them to view these activities as a complement to Sunday worship.

What should the content of sacred art be?

Every time an artist paints, he asks three fundamental questions: What do I paint? How do I paint it? And why am I painting it? All three are interconnected, but his answer to the first question — ‘What?’ — governs the content; and his answer to the second — ‘How?’ — governs the style. The third question, ‘Why?’, establishes the purpose that both content and style must serve.

The content and style of sacred art must accordingly serve its sacred purpose. By tradition, that purpose is to show us what we could not otherwise see, in such a way that it deepens our participation in worship and prayer. An image of Christ on the Cross is vital to our worship, for example, because it tells us something about what is happening at the Mass. Paintings of saints and angels reveal to us that there is a heavenly host who worship God alongside us. Paintings of the feasts and Gospel narratives connect these events to specific points in the liturgical year.

In this sense, sacred art makes the invisible visible. It does so in two ways. First, as one might expect, through its subject matter. Second, through the style in which it is painted. So, in the case of sacred art, how the subject is painted is just as important in communicating theological truths as what is painted. This second point is less immediately obvious and warrants careful explanation.

[Image: The Theotokos, Mary the Mother of God and the Christ Child by Gregory Kroug, Russian, 20th century, in the iconographic style. Egg tempera on panel. Three stars on her outer garment, on each shoulder (one is hidden) and her forehead are symbols of perpetual virginity, i.e. before, during and after the birth of the Savior.]

What governs style in art?

Most people coming out of fine art departments in the West today would assume that style is a purely personal choice, needing no stronger justification than the artist’s own preference. The Christian artist, however, should approach things differently. Every artist makes personal choices, but a Christian artist makes those choices in light of an end that aligns with his faith, and, as a result, Christian art should be as recognizably Christian by virtue of its style alone as the Christian life.

If an artist wants to paint Our Lady, he will not only represent her visible appearance as faithfully as he can; drawing on tradition, he will also seek to communicate truths about her that would not be visible even if she were standing before us — that she is a saint in heaven, that she is the Mother of God, that she is a virgin in perpetuity, and that, in common with all humanity, she is a person with an invisible soul as well as a visible body. These truths are abstracted — literally ‘drawn out’ — and made visible through a controlled and partial modification of natural appearances, which creates a characteristic style. It takes great skill to do this, but when done well, the resulting stylization conveys a deeper reality than a strictly naturalistic representation could and communicates many of these aspects to people who intuit these truths, even though they are often unaware of precisely how the artist uses style to communicate them.

To describe this in more detail, it is worth establishing the meanings of the terms I will use here. When I want to describe conformity to natural appearances, I use the word ‘naturalism’. Some other commentators will use the word ‘realism’ here, but I generally prefer not to, since it implies that natural appearances constitute the whole of reality, which is not true.

The tendency to deviate from natural appearances, on the other hand, is called by other commentators and me variously and interchangeably ‘abstraction’, ‘symbolism’, or ‘idealism’.

Both tendencies — that is, heightened naturalism or heightened abstraction (symbolism or idealism) — taken to their extremes, mask reality rather than reveal it. Too much abstraction risks an ugly distortion that hides the truth. The artist risks distorting appearances to the point that the viewer cannot recognize what he is supposed to be looking at. Alternatively, the artist can misapply distortion to convey the wrong message — for example, an overly erotic representation of the female figure, as seen in advertising and superhero comics. This quality of heightened eroticism is communicated as much by the style of the painting as by the pose that the figure adopts.

Too much naturalism, as we see in the style known as ‘photorealism’ (which I consider a misnomer for the reason stated above), often produces a cold sterility that fails to convey the full Christian understanding of what it means to be a person, including the presence of an immortal soul.

Christian figurative art has always navigated a course between these two poles. Because doing so is genuinely difficult, the Christian artist is wise to conform to traditional, tried-and-tested styles and to depart from established stylistic conventions only when the needs of a particular community or time clearly require it. This principle is sometimes called the ‘hermeneutic of continuity’, and can be summarized simply: don’t change things unless you have to.

Pope Pius XII addressed this balance directly in his 1947 encyclical, Mediator Dei. (In the passage below, Pius is using the word ‘realism’ to refer to what I would call naturalism, and ‘symbolism’ to refer to the degree of abstraction or idealization):

Recent works of art which lend themselves to the materials of modern composition, should not be universally despised and rejected through prejudice. Modern art should be given free scope in the due and reverent service of the church and the sacred rites, provided that they preserve a correct balance between styles tending neither to extreme realism nor to excessive ‘symbolism,’ and that the needs of the Christian community are taken into consideration rather than the particular taste or talent of the individual artist. (Mediator Dei, 195)

Most of the recognizable artistic styles that have developed since the beginning of the 20th century depart radically, in my opinion, from the traditional balance of naturalism and idealism — but that should not surprise us, since most modern artists had no intention of conforming to Christian tradition, actually quite the reverse; and they have a different understanding of the human person and the world around us. To consider two examples: photorealist painting, at one extreme, reflects a denial of anything beyond surface appearances. By reproducing the visible world with photographic precision and deliberate emotional flatness, it presents the human figure as a mere object among objects, stripped of any evident interior life or soul and seen as having no greater value than a cigarette butt on the sidewalk. Abstract Expressionism, at the other extreme, largely abandons the material world and the body as meaningful subjects. It instead seeks to convey pure inner states — emotions and feelings — through gesture, color, and non-representational form. For many of these artists, the essence of humanity lies in thoughts, feelings, and subjective experience rather than in the embodied person. Abstract Expressionist art, such as that of Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko, although it seeks to communicate essential aspects of human nature as they see it, does not convey any sense of the human body. There is no figure shown that we would recognize as having two arms, two legs, and so on. Each approach runs contrary to the Christian understanding of the human person as a unity of body and soul.

The three authentic traditions of liturgical art

In his book, The Spirit of the Liturgy (p. 129), Pope Benedict XVI identifies three authentic traditions of liturgical art. Each in its own characteristic way strikes the balance between naturalism and abstraction that Pius XII called for. Here is an introduction to them and to what unites or distinguishes them from one another.

The first is the iconographic tradition. This style developed in the early centuries of the Church, reaching a distinctive form around the 4th century AD. It remained the dominant form of Christian sacred art, albeit in many different variations, until the 12th century, and continues to characterize the sacred art of Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox churches to this day. When we speak of ‘icons’, the images of Russian and Greek Orthodox churches naturally come to mind first — for example, the holy icons from the Monastery of St Catherine on Mt Sinai dating to the 6th century, or the works of Andrei Rublev and Theophanes the Greek in the 14th and 15th centuries. However, it is less well known that the iconographic style is also part of the Western, Roman tradition. In the West, after the style’s first development in the 4th century, all artistic styles up to and including the Romanesque remained fully consistent with the same iconographic prototype. The figurative art of the Book of Kells, made in Ireland in the 8th century, and the Celtic style, for instance, conform to the iconographic prototype. Though they may look very different from a Russian icon, they share the same underlying principles that define iconographic art.

[Image: An 8th-century illumination of St Mark in the Celtic style from the Gospel of St Gallen. It looks very different from a Russian icon, yet the two share the underlying principles of the iconographic tradition.]

The second authentic tradition is the Gothic. This term is generally applied to a style that emerged in the Western Church around the 12th century, replacing the earlier Romanesque style, and died out by the 16th century. Duccio, the 13th-century Italian painter, is a representative example: his work is characterized by greater naturalism than the iconographic tradition, though it remains highly abstract in comparison with later Western styles. Over time, the degree of naturalization steadily increased, while maintaining the essential formal elements of this newly established Gothic style. I would include artists such as Fra Angelico and Flemish painters such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden in this category, considering them late-Gothic.

[Image: Crucifixion Diptych by Rogier van der Weyden, 1460]

One explanation for this transition from the iconographic Romanesque style is the influence of the ideas of Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher of the 4th century BC, whose works were rediscovered and incorporated into Christian thought by the medieval scholastics beginning around the 12th century and gathering pace thereafter — among them St Bonaventure and St Thomas Aquinas, who lived in the 13th century AD. Through this renewed study of Aristotle, integrated into Christian thought by these great medieval figures, there was now greater confidence in the senses’ capacity to yield reliable knowledge and a deepened appreciation of the created world, which could be accurately observed and understood through the information they provide. It was not a wholesale reversal of earlier assumptions — Christians had always trusted the senses to some degree and believed in the reality of the world around us — but rather a significant shift of emphasis. As a result of this greater stress on the intelligibility of the natural world, there was a greater curiosity about it and a desire to understand the order that pervades it. An outcome of this is an increased naturalism in art. Artists studied and copied nature more rigorously than before. Many today associate high naturalism in Christian art with the Italian High Renaissance, with artists such as Leonardo and Michelangelo, but the development of naturalistic art did not begin with them. Rather, it is the culmination of a process of systematic observation of nature that began much earlier, in the Gothic period. A second outcome of this movement toward a more intensive and systematic study of nature and the natural order, incidentally, was the emergence of what would eventually become modern natural science and the scientific method.

The third tradition considered authentically liturgical and sacred is the Baroque — or, as Benedict XVI puts it, the Baroque ‘at its best’. This is the strongly naturalistic style that developed in Italy as part of the Catholic Counter-Reformation and characterizes the art of 17th-century Western Europe. The artists who established it include Federico Barocci and Caravaggio; other well-known Baroque painters include Velázquez, Georges de La Tour, Zurbarán, Van Dyck, Rubens, Guido Reni, and Ribera. Though strongly naturalistic, the style employs a carefully worked-out, if subtly applied, abstraction. Later commentators, drawing on Platonic terminology, would call this partial abstraction ‘idealization’ in connection with Baroque art.

[Image: St James the Greater, by the Italian artist Guido Reni — an example of 17th-century Baroque sacred art.]

These, then, are the three traditions: the iconographic, the Gothic, and the Baroque. We have seen what unites them — each strikes, in its own way, the balance between naturalism and abstraction proper to sacred art. What we have not yet seen is what accounts for the differences between them, and why these three, and not others, are the traditions Benedict identifies. In the next of these two articles, I will turn to that question, drawing on the anthropology of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, and will explain why the High Renaissance, so often regarded as the summit of Catholic art, does not belong on the list.

I was recently made aware of this remarkable collection of English medieval illuminations through Hilary White’s Sacred Images Project Substack, and I was immediately struck by the quality of the draughtsmanship. Looking at these images, it became clear to me that these are among the finest models I have encountered for artists who wish to learn to draw and paint in a style appropriate for the renewal of sacred art in our own time.

The Sarum Use and Its Living Descendants

Before turning to the images themselves, it is worth pausing to consider what this Psalter actually is - it is significant in a way that resonates today.

The Sarum Use was a distinctly English form of the Roman Rite, developed at Salisbury and prevalent across much of England throughout the medieval period, right up to the Reformation. This particular Psalter belongs to that tradition.

This gives these illuminations a particular resonance with Christians in the Anglo-American world. The Psalter from the Book of Common Prayer, called the Coverdale Psalter - after Miles Coverdale, who translated the text into English in the 16th century - is a liturgical descendant of the Sarum Use of the Roman Rite. It is the Psalter that generations of Anglicans have prayed, and which continues to be prayed today. It is approved for use by Catholics (in the 1928 revision used by the Anglican Ordinariates), Orthodox, and many Protestant denominations. All share a living connection to the liturgical world that produced the images shown here. To look at this Psalter is, for many of these Christians, to encounter a visual companion of their contemporary daily worship.

The School of St Albans — Broadly Understood

I have referred in the past to the tradition these images represent as the School of St Albans, though I use that phrase in a more generic sense than art historians might. Strictly speaking, the School of St Albans refers to the English illumination of the early Gothic and late Romanesque period — particularly the work of the 13th-century monk Matthew Paris, who worked at St Albans Abbey. His style can be seen in manuscripts such as the Westminster Psalter and in the wall paintings that still survive in English churches.

This Psalter was likely not produced at St Albans — it comes from elsewhere in England. The Cambridge Digital Library, which provided the images, suggests that it is likely elsewhere in southeast England, either Lincoln or East Anglia. But it still contains the essential elements of the style as I have described it: the primacy of line in describing form, a limited palette, and an emphasis on flat coloration rather than blended tonal modeling. Whether we call it the School of St Albans or simply the English medieval tradition, this manuscript is a full expression of it!

These limitations in stylistic features, which distinguish it from naturalistic forms of art, are its strength. As a result, the style sidesteps what I consider the blight of so much modern sacred art: sentimentality. When you cannot render every gradation of light and shadow, you are forced to think clearly about form, about meaning, and about what is essential. Line demands clarity, while tonal naturalism invites sentiment. The School of St Albans offers artists today a discipline that might hold sentimentality at bay!

What to Notice in These Images

As you look at these beautiful reproductions from the Psalter, there a couple of points I would make:.

Consistent with the broader Western tradition of sacred art, there is a heavy emphasis on beautiful, ornate patterns in the borders, backgrounds, and across the surface of the image. This richly ornamented flatness is distinct from what we encounter in much contemporary Byzantine iconography, for example, which tends toward greater austerity in those areas that could be decorated.

At the same time - and here is an example of how the English tradition converges with the Byzantine - the content follows traditional customs. Notice, for example, how the Nativity is depicted. St Joseph is portrayed as significantly older than Our Lady: by tradition, he was a widower, and is depicted in imagery as set apart from the Virgin and Child in the Nativity. This deliberate distancing signals his temporary doubt about the Virgin Birth. Contemporary depictions of St Joseph in the Roman church, on the other hand, tend to portray him as a young and vigorous man.

There are twelve folios of this type, which can be seen at the Cambridge University Digital Library site. In addition there are twelve calendar pages that list the feasts of each month along with border decoration.

And decorated letter pages for each of the eight Hours, as well as for the Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The following one is for Matins. You can see the letter ‘D’ which begins the opening lines, Deus in adiutorium mean intende. Domine, ad adiuvandum me festina.

How Artists Can Learn This Today

It struck me that these images can be a resource for any artist serious about working in this tradition and making it their own today. The goal is not a simple imitation, but to reestablish a living tradition that develops organically over time so that it simultaneously participates in the tradition, while always being fresh and new, and speaks to contemporary people.

The practical path forward for those who are interested, I suggest, begins with the Writing the Light program, which I have written about before: the wall-painting and icon-drawing courses offered by the master iconographer George Kordis. This is a two-year, part-time hybrid program that combines online instruction with in-person workshops — see my recent post for more details. The program is rooted in the Greek tradition of iconography, which provides the foundational skills of the craft: the discipline of line, the understanding of light, and the visual grammar of sacred art.

Students who want to make the School of St Albans specifically their own should supplement this formation with systematic personal study of past works — particularly artists such as Matthew Paris himself, and now, I am suggesting, these images from the Use of Sarum Book of Hours. The principle at work here is an ancient one in artistic formation: imitate a style until it becomes your natural expression.

This is exactly how the great artists of the High Renaissance made the ancient world their own. Michelangelo and Raphael did not simply admire Greek and Roman statuary — they copied it, systematically and persistently, alongside drawing and painting from life. Through that double discipline of copying the masters and studying nature, the classical ideal became their natural artistic language.

The same path is open to artists who wish to make the Gothic style their own. Learn the craft’s skills through a rigorous program like Writing the Light. Study works from life. And alongside both of these, copy and contemplate works by the masters of the English medieval tradition. It will require students of ability and drive in the first instance — but it is most certainly possible. This is how traditions are retrieved.

You can read more at WritingtheLight.com.

A Word to Patrons

There is another challenge here, and I address it directly to those with means and a heart for sacred art renewal: consider sponsoring a talented artist from your own parish or community to undertake Writing the Light’s formation. The retrieval of this tradition will not happen through institutions alone. It will happen one artist at a time, formed with patience and supported by people who understand what is at stake. You could be part of that!

All images are from the University of Cambridge Digital Library, made available for download and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC 4.0).

I want to take up that thread here and follow it further, because I think the connection is not just a historical coincidence but a matter of theological necessity. Images and Mary are bound together in the roles they play in the Christian faith and in Christian culture, and understanding why is to understand something important about how Christian culture is built and how it decays.

The argument is an old one, and it was worked out over the first eight centuries of the Church. Cardinal Schönborn, in his book God’s Human Face, describes the trail of logic that led to the conclusions of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, the council that concerned itself with sacred art and the veneration of holy icons. What he shows is that the conclusions of the first six councils were necessary to the deliberations of the seventh. The defense of the image was not an afterthought. It was the culmination of everything the Church had so far learned to say about God and man.

The chain runs like this. The Church had first to establish the doctrine of the Trinity, three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and to articulate what a person is. Then it had to articulate an adequate Christology for the second person of the Trinity, the Son, one person in two natures, fully God and fully man. Then it had to articulate an adequate Mariology, establishing that Christ received his human nature from Mary, and that Mary was therefore the mother who bore the person of Christ, and so was the Mother of God and worthy of the title Theotokos, the God-bearer.

Only then could the council reach its conclusion about images. If Christ is the image of the invisible God, the Father, as St Paul says, then during his historical presence on earth man was able to see the person of Christ as man, and in seeing him to see the image of the Father, and so to worship the Father through the Son in the Spirit. This is what Christ himself meant: “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” By extension and by analogy, we can worship Christ through images of him when we venerate an icon of Christ.

Worship is due to God alone. But we venerate Mary and the saints, as distinct from worshiping them, when we venerate images of them, kissing them, praying before them, and so on. The veneration passes to the one represented; it does not stop at the wood and paint.

Notice what this means. The defense of the icon depends on the doctrine that Christ is fully man, which depends in turn on the doctrine that he received a real human nature from a real human mother. Take away Mary and the whole structure becomes unstable. If Christ’s humanity is obscured, the ground for the image is cut away, and if the image goes, so in time does the vivid sense of Christ’s humanity that the image served to keep before our eyes. The icon and the Mother hold each other up.

How we apprehend the beauty of the cosmos

There is a further step that carries us from theology into the experience of beauty. The cosmos bears the pattern of Christ, the Creator, for through him all things were made, as St John tells us:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” (John 1:1–3, cf. Colossians 1:16)

This was affirmed by the Church in its formulation of the Nicene Creed as well.

The cosmos is beautiful to us when we behold it because it bears that pattern in its underlying order, an order we perceive and delight in when we appreciate its beauty. This is true even for those who do not yet love Christ, for the pattern of Christ is imprinted on every human heart at conception and purified through baptism and the sacramental life. We instinctively connect the pattern of the cosmos with the one imprinted on our hearts each time we apprehend the beauty of the cosmos.

But the fullest appreciation of the beauty of the cosmos does not come from appreciating it as it now is. Beautiful though it is, fallen nature is not yet fully what it ought to be. We grasp the beauty it would have in its perfection, and will have on the last day, only to the degree that we grasp the beauty of Christ himself. Though that pattern is imprinted on our hearts at conception, it can be distorted by our sin, which also clouds our inward gaze.

To purify our recognition of the perfection toward which beauty points, we need to purify our hearts through participation in the life of faith and the sacramental life, and crucial to this grasping of the beauty of Christ is the veneration of his icons. This is not to claim that the holy icon bears a perfect representation of Christ. Rather, the icon is fashioned by a tradition designed to work in harmony with prayer and worship, so that through it we have a deeper and richer encounter with Christ in heaven and with Christ present in the Blessed Sacrament.

That encounter imparts to our hearts a deeper grasp of who Christ is and a greater love for him, so that we begin to intuit the idealized pattern of the cosmos even when we look upon its fallen version. And this greater appreciation of the beauty of the cosmos leads us in turn into a yet greater grasp of the beauty of Christ, for we see more clearly how the beauty of the world speaks of the One who made it. It is an upward spiral, a positive feedback loop in which the apprehension of beauty and the love of Christ feed one another.

Because holy images, and through them the fullest possible grasp that Christ is truly man, are necessary to this dynamic, it follows that if we do not venerate holy images of Christ and worship him and the Father through them, with the help of the Spirit, our love for Christ and our appreciation of the beauty around us will tend to decline. This is in part why, one may speculate, the Seventh Ecumenical Council went so far as to argue that the veneration of images is a necessary component of the expression of our faith, not an optional devotional extra.

And given that Mary’s role in the Incarnation is essential, for it was she who gave Christ his human nature, neglect of Mary will, in time, lead to neglect of her Son as well, and to a diminished capacity to see Christ in the world and in the people around us.

This, I think, is what Harrington either alluded to or glimpsed without fully spelling out. The Reformation’s suspicion of images and its de-centering of Mary were not two unrelated reforms. The Reformation’s suspicion of images and its de-centering of Mary were not two unrelated reforms. They were two parts of the same change, and they stand or fall together.

What, then, has all this to do with culture?

As I have written about extensively in my books such as The Way of Beauty, man’s capacity to create a beautiful culture that is Christian, and for those of us in the West that Christian culture is the same as traditional Western culture, rests in his being able to co-create with God, to form matter, under God’s inspiration, into a beauty that speaks of the idealized cosmos, which is to say the beauty of Christ in heaven. To the degree that he succeeds, his work surpasses the beauty of fallen nature. This requires grace and the disposition to respond to grace, the instinct to manifest the pattern of Christ in our work. That pattern was imprinted on our hearts at conception, and the instinct to manifest it grows with our love for the One who placed it there, for as that love grows we see him more clearly in ourselves, in others, and in the cosmos, and we begin to see how each creature ought to be in its perfection.

That creative capacity is therefore stimulated by love of Christ and love of his Mother, in whom love of the Son is bound up, for she directs us to his human nature, which then opens the door to loving the whole person, God and man. And that love is itself stimulated through a life of prayer to Mary and to Christ, and through the veneration of icons of each. The formation that does this work is not principally a formation of the intellect, by which we understand the principles I have been laying out, useful though that understanding may be. It is primarily a formation of the heart, a formation in love. It is through devotion to Mary and worship of Christ that we grow in love, and it is from that love that beautiful Christian work proceeds.

Why focus on Mary and on images?

A word on why I single out these two things. Mariology is necessary to the faith but not sufficient on its own. As I am a convert to the Catholic faith, I can see why we need every link in the chain: trinitarian theology, Christology, the understanding of the human person, Mariology, the theology of images, and the other necessary aspects of Catholic dogma.

It strikes me that it is important to focus on Mary and the image because they are the two aspects often neglected by many Protestants. The veneration of images might remain an obstacle for ecumenism, but Mariology need not be so great a barrier as it might first appear, because it is part of the Protestant inheritance too, as I argued in the previous essay; the Reformers retained the core Marian dogmas even as they grew wary of certain devotional practices, a concern which Catholics have addressed in pastoral documents.

If we want a unified Christian response to the pressures now bearing on believers, we should seek to establish a shared foundation across as many aspects of the faith as we can. And it may be that, as has happened before in the history of sacred art, the Catholic Church, the Orthodox, and those fewer Protestant communities that retain the use of sacred art in their worship, such as the Lutherans, the Anglicans, the Episcopalians, the more liturgical churches generally, will lead the way. Othat others will then build on what they do in the wider culture.

As I detail in my book The Way of Beauty, this was the historical pattern, for example, in the Baroque and the neo-Gothic revival, where renewal began in the worshipping community and spread outward from there.

Liturgy as the wellspring of culture

This points to the conclusion that Christian culture is, in fact, renewed. A Christian culture does not grow first in the academy, the gallery, or the public square and then work its way inward to the altar.

It grows the other way round. Liturgy is the wellspring. It is in the worship of God, and supremely in the Eucharist, that the love I have described is kindled and sustained, and it is from that worship that the impulse to make beautiful things, and to order a whole society toward beauty, flows out into the world.

This is why it is the liturgical churches that have historically driven the evangelization of culture, for they possess the wellspring that nourishes culture. Among the liturgical churches, those that elevate the role of sacred art within worship itself, that do not confine the image to private devotion and personal prayer but give it a place at the very center of their public worship, will tend to be the most fruitful, because in them the dynamic of beauty and love I have traced is most fully at work.

And among these, the Catholic Church, which possesses the fullness of truth and the fullness of the sacramental life, is uniquely placed to be the source of a renewed Christian culture. Not because Catholics are more talented or more devout than their neighbors and brothers in Christ, but because the Church holds, intact and unbroken, the whole chain of doctrine that makes the icon possible and the whole sacramental order that makes love grow.

The icons are coming alive again, as Harrington aptly discerned, is one message that emerges from When Mary Calls. Harrington clearly perceives that Clayton’s book about Mary is about much more than Catholic devotion. Margarita Mooney Clayton, who is my wife, also correctly directs our attention to liturgical forms of Marian devotion that are often overlooked, and suggests a broader cultural renewal can emerge through devotion to Mary.

Icons will draw their life from the liturgy, and it is from the liturgy—including art and music for the liturgy—that a broader Christian culture, if we are to truly see one in our time, will rise.

And if such a renewed Christian culture is to rise from the ashes of icon desecration, Mary will be crucial. For it is through Mary that we come to her Son, and through him to the beauty that a Christian culture exists to make visible.

In When Mary Calls, Margarita Mooney Clayton (who is, I should disclose, my wife) gathers seven personal accounts of encounters with the Mother of God, drawn from Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, and secular lives, including her own perilous work among religious dissidents in her mother’s native Cuba.

She leads with these testimonies, hooking readers through the often unseen and untold drama of finding and deepening faith. Theology is not missing but rather embedded within the narrative of each story. In unique ways, each story emphasizes that the Christian faith is not about a dry grasp of dogma but about dogma in service of a deep personal relationship with Christ, with Mary, and with the saints, whose mission is to lead us to Him. The stories show Mary drawing seekers into deeper relationship with her son and into the living community of faith, which they need to journey from questioning to belief, where unique and extraordinary encounters with Mary are transformed into the sustained practices of a life of faith shared in community.

Mary Harrington is not, on the face of it, the sort of reader one would expect to be moved by a book of Marian testimony. She is an academic by formation, secular in background, a feminist who came to public attention, especially in Britain, where she comes from, through a critique of progressive feminism rather than through any religious commitment. Published in 2023, her book Feminism Against Progress argued that feminism has done little to help most women.

Five years ago, one suspects, the idea that she, or anyone in the world she occupied, would write a warm and deeply considered review of a book about the Virgin Mary would have seemed improbable to me. And yet here she is, not merely tolerating the subject but finding in it something culturally significant, even personally affecting.

Harrington has been sharing her journey with her followers, in which her critiques of progressivism and secularism are leading her not just to critique feminism but also to attend an Anglican church.

When a thoughtful female philosopher, one who, at least in the past, was resolutely secular, turns to a book on Marian devotion and finds those deeply personal encounters with Mary not embarrassing but compelling, one wonders whether something has shifted in the wider culture.

Harrington herself seems to sense this. The stories Margarita has gathered, Harrington observes, are not confined to Catholics. They include people who were once seekers, not people raised with faith, who are now Greek Orthodox believers, mainline Protestants, and Catholics, each of whom was drawn to Mary’s presence and, through it, to healing, transformation, or inspiration.

A young Protestant man was healed at a holy well in Ireland. Our Lady of Guadalupe speaks to a frightened pregnant woman and saves her life. Tammy Peterson, wife of Jordan Peterson, who had rejected Christianity as a teenager, makes her way through cancer in her 50s and begins praying again, eventually converting to Catholicism. These are not the testimonies of cradle Catholics confirming what they already believed. They are accounts of surprise.

The mother-shaped blind spot

Harrington reads When Mary Calls through the prism of a theme she has written and spoken about elsewhere: what she calls the cultural erasure of motherhood, the way the modern world quietly eliminated the maternal role and instincts from its understanding of what it means to be a woman.

The marginalization of Mary in the Anglophone world, she suggests in response to reading this book, was not incidental to the Reformation but close to its center. The purging of icons, relics, and pilgrimages, set in motion in England by Thomas Cromwell in 1538, meant, in practice, the radical setting aside of Marian theology in favor of something more verbal, less visual, less sensory and more abstract.

Harrington does not spell out the insight by which she connects the rejection of icons and devotional practices to the eventual decline in devotion to Mary herself and the theological truths bound up with her role in the Incarnation, but I think she is correct. A lack of appreciation for Mary, she suggests, led, in time, to the situation in which the visible, embodied, mother-centered spirituality of the medieval world gave way to something cooler and more cerebral, what one person profiled in the book called a “rational, disenchanted worldview” that had made its way into Christianity.

Was it a coincidence, Harrington wonders, that this spiritual marginalization of Mary was followed, albeit slowly over centuries, by the material and technological marginalization of women in the modern project? She draws on Ivan Illich, who argued that modernity had the displacement of women (at least women as women, not the same as men, and women as mothers) baked into its worldview.

One need not endorse every link in her argument to say that it is significant that a scholar formed by feminist philosophy is suggesting that the loss of Mary and the loss of the valuing of motherhood may be outward signs of the same error. An error, I would add, that only leads to misery for all if lived out. On this point, Harrington has won many followers precisely for admitting that the modern world never prepared her for the most incredible part of her life: becoming a mother. Motherhood changed her, setting her on a journey toward more than progressivism and feminism had given her.

What the Protestants forgot

Here I want to add something that Harrington’s account seems to invite, though she does not quite say it. We are accustomed to speaking of the Reformation as a rejection of Mary. But it may be closer to the truth to say that in many cases Protestantism forgot Mary rather than rejected her. Woven throughout When Mary Calls, and explained in the book’s appendix, is something I didn’t know: the Reformers themselves did not reject fundamental Marian doctrines such as the Virgin Birth or the Mother of God (Theotokos).

Rather, the apparent hostility to the Mother of God comes from questions about improper forms of devotion to Mary. Luther and Calvin were concerned about medieval devotional practices that had grown up around Mary, which they feared had displaced the honor due to Christ alone. Over time, this in turn led to the neglect of Mary herself.

The icons coming alive

Harrington’s title is well chosen. “The icons are coming alive again,” she wrote, and not because anyone has mounted a campaign to revive them, but because people who had no particular reason to look for Mary are finding, it seems, that she calls them by their name, she lets them know in their hearts, as she told Saint Juan Diego on Tepeyac Hill five centuries ago “I am your mother.”

Two chapters of When Mary Calls I would particularly commend to artists and to anyone who thinks about the making of beautiful things. The first, specifically referred to by Harrington, features the composer Sir James MacMillan, whose words about Mary as a model for creatives Margarita puts into dialogue with a Promethean model, where the artist is defiant and human-centered, in which the artist seizes the fire and turns away from God to assert his own sovereign making.

And there is the Marian model, drawn from the Annunciation, which MacMillan describes, in which the artist receives rather than seizes, saying fiat to an inspiration that comes from beyond himself and extending the incarnational moment into the work of his hands. This is not a sentimental contrast. As an artist myself, I find that MacMillan offers a genuine account of where creative work comes from. Drawing our attention to Mary’s cooperation with God as an inspiration for creatives, it reframes the whole question of artistic vocation in a way that a secular age, perhaps exhausted by its own self-assertion, may be more ready to hear than it was a generation ago.

The other chapter from When Mary Calls that I recommend for artists is the story of the conversion of my own icon-painting teacher, Aidan Hart, and his journey from a young seeker to a mature man of faith and master iconographer. He speaks of devotion to Mary not as a doctrine held at arm’s length but as something that has guided his personal journey, both as a Christian and as a maker of sacred images.

The icon painter does not invent his subject. He receives a tradition and submits to it, and in that submission finds, one might say, not constraint but greater freedom. There seems to be a direct line between the fiat of the Annunciation and the discipline of the practicing iconographer, and Hart’s own path, from a secular beginning through testing a monastic vocation to a life as married man a working artist, could in many ways be considered a living illustration, one might even say icon, of the very pattern MacMillan describes of openness to inspirations of the Holy Spirit.

The clever title of Harrington’s article refers as much to images of Mary as to Mary as an icon in the more modern sense of the word, a figure who has become emblematic of an idea or a movement, someone the culture recognizes and reaches for. That the two senses, the painted image and the cultural emblem, should converge on the same word is itself a small instance of what Margarita’s book on Mary is about. The icon on a chapel wall and the icon in the imagination of a secular readership may be nearer to one another than many are aware.

What it means to venerate again

Harrington closes by wondering what it might mean, culturally and spiritually, if people were once again to regain the desire and capacity for veneration — the willingness to kneel before a figure like Mary and ask for her help. She rightly describes Margarita Mooney Clayton’s book as a gentle, careful work of ecumenical restoration.

I am inclined to put the point more strongly. The capacity for veneration is part of what it means to be fully human. The widespread loss of this capacity to venerate Mary, outside the Catholic and Orthodox churches and perhaps some Protestant churches, has cost us dearly. To venerate the Mother of God is to acknowledge, at the deepest level, our need for a model of love and self-giving, and for Christ Himself as the ultimate source of all that is good. In her fiat, Mary herself recognized this truth: “Ecce ancilla Domini: fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum” (“Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it done to me according to thy word”). As a pastor recently observed in a homily I heard, these may be the most important words ever spoken by any human being aside from those of Christ Himself.

That a secular feminist scholar can see Mary as an icon in the religious and cultural sense of the word, and write about it with such elegance and care, is astounding. When Mary Calls is a book for Catholics, certainly. But its deeper interest perhaps lies in the people it reaches who are not Catholic or Orthodox, but Protestants and seekers, who seem to be discovering that the figure their culture set aside was waiting for them all along.

The icons are indeed coming alive again. We would do well to pay attention to who is noticing.

When Mary Calls: Surprising Encounters With the Mother of God by Margarita Mooney Clayton is published by Odysseus Books

Below is a YouTube presentation by Margarita Mooney Clayton about her book, delivered at the Catholic Information Center in downtown Washington, DC.

David Clayton is Dean of the Faculty of Sacred Arts at www.Pontifex.University and Artist in Residence of www.ScalaFoundation.org

Using Line and Tone to Represent Form

When we look out of a window and take in a view, we distinguish one object from another through visual contrast in their shapes. A person standing in a beam of light against a dark background is clearly visible; the three-dimensional form of his face is legible because of the variations in light and shadow across its surface - a bulbous nose, sunken cheeks, the curve of the jaw, and so on.

An artist can represent this contrast in two ways. The first is to represent the boundary between a light shape and a dark shape as a line.

In this portrayal of a knight by the English monk Matthew Paris, from the 13th-century Westminster Psalter, we see a skilled use of line to depict form. Paris controls his line with enough assurance to give it a graceful, flowing quality - a beauty comparable to fine calligraphy. Notice also how he varies the width and darkness of his lines. He does this for two purposes: first, to direct the viewer’s eye toward the parts of the composition he considers most important, since a thicker, darker line draws attention more strongly; and second, to indicate the degree of contrast between an object and its background. Where a light shape sits against a much darker one, the contrast is high, and a bold line is appropriate; where a pale shape sits against a slightly darker background, the contrast is low, and only a thin, pale line is used. Where there is effectively no contrast at all, the skilled artist will allow the line to disappear entirely, even though he knows the edge of an object is there. The less skilled artist tends to put the line in anyway, because he knows intellectually that the edge exists, and this will overrule what his eyes are actually telling him. Line drawing is easy to do poorly - it is how most children begin - but demands genuine subtlety to handle well.

Where line represents contrast by marking a boundary, the second approach represents it by painting tonal values directly, as the eye sees them. This is harder than it sounds. Most people must be trained to observe what the eye actually sees rather than what the mind constructs after processing visual information - and what the mind constructs is always conditioned by memory and prior knowledge of the object. Consider this self-portrait by Rembrandt:

Here, there are no lines at all. Everything is a tonal value, and any apparent edge is simply the junction of a lighter and a darker area. This allows Rembrandt to convey the shape of the face without an outline. He is also willing to let edges dissolve where the tonal contrast is low - the right side of the figure here is barely distinguishable from the background. This points to a deeper distinction between the two approaches. Line tends to show edges and discontinuities; tonal painting can express the gradually changing internal variations of a three-dimensional surface, which is why it lends itself more to high naturalism.

In practice, most artists combine the two approaches, with one playing a supporting role to the other. Matthew Paris is a good example: predominantly linear, but with enough internal tonal variation to suggest the three-dimensional character of the forms. Having considered line and tone, we can turn to the third element - color - which brings its own particular difficulties.

Color

Color can also be used to describe form, but it is the most difficult of the three elements to handle well, for reasons that are easy to overlook.

Consider a grayscale image of something colored in nature. Red and yellow can generally be distinguished, since red tends toward a darker tonal value in monochrome, but red and blue are much harder to tell apart. I can remember watching Liverpool and Everton soccer matches on a black-and-white television in the 1960s: Liverpool in deep red, Everton in deep blue - indistinguishable from the waist up. Fortunately, Everton wore white shorts and Liverpool red, which settled the question. (I am a Liverpool supporter, incidentally.)

The reason this matters to the painter lies in how the eye works. The human eye reads both monochrome and color simultaneously, using different receptor cells - rods and cones - in the retina, and the brain can assess three-dimensional form from tonal and color variation in combination. But while the mind processes this information with ease, it is extremely difficult for the artist to represent it faithfully. Colors do not simply become darker or lighter in shadow - they may shift toward blue in shade, or toward yellow and green in bright sunlight, even though the actual color of the object has not changed. This means that to paint color accurately, the artist must observe what his eye receives rather than what his intellect tells him the color ought to be.

There is a further complication: colors shift not only with light and shadow but also with distance, through what is called color perspective. The green of leaves becomes progressively bluer the further away they are, which is why mountain ranges always appear blue on the horizon - hence the song about the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Tonal contrast also decreases with distance, so that those blue mountains become not only bluer but lighter the further away they are. The skilled naturalistic artist must hold all of these variables in balance simultaneously, and few manage to do so well.

Here is one who did:

In Vermeer’s The Art of Painting (c. 1666), notice the large draped curtain pulled to one side. We judge the actual color of its pattern by looking at the mid-tones - the areas neither bleached by direct light nor lost in deep shadow. Vermeer has shifted the colors so that what is blue in full light becomes reddish in the shadow, and vice versa; yet the eye reads the fabric as a consistently colored pattern, because the brain instinctively compensates for exactly this kind of variation. To do this in paint, Vermeer had to observe the colors as his eye received them rather than as his intellect classified them - suppressing the very interpretive process by which we normally make sense of what we see. This capacity is rare. Most Baroque masters simplified the problem by concentrating on tonal variation and applying Vermeer’s kind of color sensitivity only at the main focal points.

Closely related to the handling of color and tone is the question of how the artist represents distance itself - not just the color shift of distant objects, but the whole problem of conveying size and space on a flat surface.

Judging Distance and Size

If we see a figure in a painting, we may estimate his height by comparing him to familiar objects nearby - a door, a table, another figure. But we also judge distance by the resolution of detail: when something is far away, we cannot distinguish its finer features as clearly as when it is close. A good artist knows this and uses it. One of the most common errors of beginners is to paint distant objects with as much detail as near ones - every leaf on a distant tree painstakingly rendered. This creates an image that is somehow mentally exhausting, overloaded with information the eye would never actually receive at that distance. Both the Pre-Raphaelites and the modern photorealists can be guilty of this, and in different ways the results share a quality of incongruity: the painting is the product of technical accomplishment, but somehow we sense, even if we do not know why, that something is visually wrong.

Yet this same principle, once understood, can be turned to deliberate and powerful effect. Artists who consciously heighten detail at apparent distances and, in doing so, deliberately override natural perception can imbue their images with a symbolic or heavenly quality. In heaven, to behold something fully is to know it fully; heightened detail across an entire picture plane suggests a mode of seeing that is not bound by natural distance. Gothic painters such as Duccio and iconographic painters such as Andrei Rublev understood this and used it consistently. Their images carry a sense of participation in a different order of reality - one where the ordinary limits of perception do not apply. There is a skill in using this as a visual tool: for the break from naturalism to work, everything else present in the painting must support the idea that we are looking at heaven, so that the heightened level of detail no longer strikes the viewer as incongruous.

Putting It All Together

The artist composes his picture as a whole by weighing and combining these elements - line, tone, color, detail - in different proportions and with different emphases. The resulting balance between naturalism and abstraction, between depicting the visible world as it appears and representing realities that transcend it, characterizes the style of a given work and the tradition to which it belongs.

It is commonly said that a good artist knows the rules, and a great artist knows when to break them. I do not think this is quite right. These are not arbitrary rules but principles grounded in how images actually work, and the genuinely skilled artist does not break them - he applies them differently depending on what he is trying to represent. The same principle of detail and distance is applied one way when painting the natural world, where detail diminishes with distance, and another way when painting heavenly subjects, where it does not. What looks like rule-breaking is usually the consistent application of a different set of governing assumptions about the nature of the subject. The failure of the Pre-Raphaelites and photorealists is not that they broke the rules but that they applied naturalistic conventions to subject matter and compositions that would have been better served by something else, producing an incongruity they did not recognize and could not resolve.

Perhaps a distinction in motivation should be made here between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Photorealists. The Pre-Raphaelites were generally Christian in motivation and sought to reestablish the late-Gothic style of artists such as Van Eyck, who preceded the Italian Renaissance exemplified by Raphael. This is was part of the broad Victorian neo-Gothic movement that was connected with Anglican and Catholic Christianity in England in the 19th century. What was a very successful movement architecturally was, in my opinion, less successful artistically for the reason I gave above. However, even with this handicap, many examples of their art can still be striking and beautiful and are redeemed in my eyes because the symbolism and choice of subject are handled well and are otherwise in harmony with a Christian worldview. Certainly, it is preferable to much contemporary art!

The Photorealists, however, are materialists who deliberately pack their images with detail in order to reflect their false assertion, from a Christian point of view, that what they represent has no meaning or significance, and they reject the idea that a man is anything more significant than a collection of atoms that we happen to call a man. For them, the collection of atoms we call a man has no more significance than the collection of atoms we recognize as a cigarette butt on the floor.

This framework - line, tone, color, medium, and the handling of detail and distance - is the vocabulary that all visual artists share. The three great traditions I will be exploring in subsequent posts, the iconographic, the Gothic, and the Baroque, each represent a coherent and internally consistent way of deploying that vocabulary. An artist working within one of those traditions handles the elements in broadly the ways characteristic of that tradition, and this is what makes the tradition recognizable. At the same time, the greatest artists within a tradition are recognizable as individuals: Velázquez, for instance, is unmistakably a Baroque painter, yet equally unmistakably himself. Some elements of his handling - his way with tone, his restraint with line, his management of color perspective - are shared with other Baroque painters; others are distinctively his own. Understanding the vocabulary makes it possible to see both things at once.

The Visual Vocabulary

Every visual artist, whatever his tradition or period, works with the same basic elements: line, tone, color, and medium. What makes one artist instantly distinguishable from another is the characteristic way he handles these elements — how heavily he relies on line rather than tone, how boldly he uses color, how freely he allows edges to dissolve. At the same time, when artists within a given tradition handle these elements in broadly similar ways, that shared approach is what makes the tradition recognizable to us. Van Gogh is unmistakable among oil painters precisely because his way of deploying line, tone, and color is his own; yet we could also describe, in the same terms, what connects paintings to a particular tradition, such as the Baroque, the Gothic, or the iconographic. One might say that what melody, harmony, counterpoint, and the choice of instruments are to the composer of music, line, tone, color, and the choice of medium are to the visual artist.

We will discuss each of these in turn, starting with the choice of medium, since this shapes and constrains everything else.

Medium

Early in the process, the artist must decide on a medium. Very often, he will have spent years mastering one particular medium and will favor it throughout his career, based on a choice made early in training. The recommendation for an artist seeking mastery is to focus on one medium primarily, and then, once it is thoroughly understood, to adapt what has been learned to other media. The artist who masters egg tempera first will find it easier to incorporate mosaic, fresco, and even carving into his skill set. The very best artists are capable across many media, but some stay focused on their one favored medium throughout their lives.

For the painter — the example I will use throughout this discussion to illustrate points that apply more generally — oil, watercolor, mosaic, fresco, and so on look very different and have distinct qualities that make them appropriate for some works but not for others.

In nearly every type of paint, the source of color is the same. Yellow ochre, for example, is an iron oxide formed naturally and dug out of the ground. To use it, the artist must find a way to get it to adhere to his chosen surface. He does this by placing the pigment in a binding medium that is sticky enough to hold the particles of color and fix them to the surface, and transparent enough for the pigment to remain visible once dry. Placing the pigment into a medium in this way is called tempering. If the medium is egg yolk, the paint is called egg tempera. Oil paint results from tempering pigment with linseed oil. Acrylic paint uses a chemically derived plastic as its binder. For watercolor, the binder is gum arabic. Encaustic suspends pigment in warm liquid wax, which solidifies as it cools. In mosaic, pigment is held within small solid lumps of ceramic or glass — called tesserae — which are embedded in wet plaster to create a pixelated image. In fresco, pigment is suspended in water and applied directly to wet plaster; as the plaster dries, it bonds chemically with the pigment, making the painting part of the wall’s structure. In every case, regardless of medium, the color yellow ochre is produced by finely ground particles of yellow iron oxide. These are some of the more traditional media; new ones are constantly being developed.

Each has distinct practical properties related to the binding medium, and those properties determine what a given medium is suited for. To begin with, each medium interacts with and reflects incident light differently, and this profoundly affects how it looks. We can easily distinguish yellow ochre watercolor paint from yellow ochre oil paint, for example, because their optical properties differ: one looks pale and colors subtly, letting the paper substrate show through, while the other looks rich and deeply colored.

These optical differences also determine how far a given medium allows the artist to create the illusion of depth — and this also has a direct and powerful bearing on style. When Rembrandt layers multiple thin, transparent glazes of dark-colored oil paint over a surface, he creates the illusion of a deep, rich shadow into which we almost feel we could walk. The same technique applied in egg tempera produces nothing comparable — the result tends to look more like soot on the surface. Rembrandt almost certainly did not understand the physics that explain this difference, but he could see it, and that is what mattered to him. The icon painter, by contrast, wants his image to remain resolutely two-dimensional. He does not choose oil but opts instead for egg tempera, mosaic, or fresco, because the flat, stylized quality of those media serves the symbolic purpose of his image.

Alongside these optical properties, the purely physical characteristics of a medium also shape the choice. Mosaic and fresco are durable and permanent, but are fixed to the building’s structure, so they cannot be moved. Egg tempera is equally permanent and, because it can be applied to wooden panels, is well suited to portable images, such as icons carried in procession. Encaustic is more delicate because the melting point of wax is low, but, like tempera, it does not lose its color over time and can also be used for portable works. Oil paint is durable and, unlike the other media mentioned, flexible, so it can be applied to canvas, making paintings comparatively light and easy to transport; however, it is less permanent than other media because the binding medium tends to brown over time. When a 300-year-old oil painting looks dark and dingy, it is usually not dirty — it appears so because the linseed oil is no longer transparent.

All of this raises an interesting historical question. It is often said that the invention of oil paint in the 15th century enabled the development of naturalistic painting. I doubt this is quite right. Both eggs and linseed oil had always been readily available to artists who, until the 19th century, made their own paint (linseed oil, made from flax, is thought to have been in use for around 8,000 years). There is no particular technical difficulty in tempering pigment with either. Artists in any working studio would likely experiment with available materials and soon discover their different properties. As long as the intention is to paint in a highly abstracted style that minimizes the illusion of depth — as in iconographic and early Gothic art — there is no advantage in using oil. Only when an artist wants to paint more naturalistically does oil become the obviously superior choice. But I suggest the desire to paint naturalistically preceded the change in medium. It was the philosophical developments of the era — a changing worldview that sought a new kind of image — that prompted artists to reach for oil and set aside egg tempera. Technique follows philosophy, not the other way around.

A good artist chooses his medium to suit the kind of image he intends to make.

Next week: line, tone, and color — the three elements by which artists represent the visible world, and the choices that determine whether a painting is naturalistic, symbolic,

Martin Earle’s paintings are available at martinearle.com

This is the second of two articles responding to the Catholic theoretical particle physicist Stephen M. Barr on the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics. The first article set out what I take to be the more easily understood (for someone whole does not have a deep knowledge of quantum mechanics) part of his argument: that quantum mechanics rules out physical determinism and is incompatible with a purely materialist account of mind, and that this opens a genuine space for free will understood as a non-physical cause acting in the physical world. I added my own suggestion that, since quantum indeterminacy is universal rather than confined to the human brain, God, as First Cause, is the natural candidate for the agency that selects quantum outcomes throughout all of creation.

[To read that first article, follow this link to go to the “Science” tab on the toolbar at the top of the homepage.]

This article takes up more speculative questions. I find Barr’s arguments compelling and will try to summarise them here, but I want to add three arguments of my own. It should be said that my arguments rest on an acceptance of both the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and of Barr’s “traveling minds” hypothesis, which is proposed in his essay Does Quantum Physics Imply that Materialism is False?, published in 2025 to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the discovery of quantum mechanics. I should point out also that I am at the limit of my understanding of both the science and the theology that underpin this, and I offer these thoughts in that spirit – not as conclusions but more as questions.

My thesis, held tentatively, is this: Barr’s Traveling Minds Hypothesis provides a coherent alternative to the materialist Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the difficulties it raises about objective reality find a natural resolution in the Catholic understanding of divine omniscience. Moreover, the same conclusion – that God is the universal observer on whom the definiteness of reality depends – is reached independently by a quite different route: the Thomistic account of beauty. Quantum mechanics, Thomistic philosophy, and classical aesthetics, while approaching the question from entirely different directions, appear to point in the same direction.

This article also contains the fuller explanation of the physics that the first article deliberately kept brief. In particular, I explain the Schrödinger equation, the Born rule, and the Many-Worlds Interpretation – all of which are needed to understand Barr’s Traveling Minds Hypothesis – and I discuss the notable fact that Heisenberg himself reached for Aristotle’s concept of potency and act as the most accurate philosophical description of the quantum state before measurement.

The Physics in More Detail

The first article described the central strangeness of quantum mechanics: that at the level of individual particles, physics can tell us only the probability of an outcome, never the outcome itself, whereas at the scale of everyday objects, classical Newtonian physics holds, and outcomes are in principle fully predictable. This section looks more closely at how quantum mechanics actually works, because these details matter for the discussion that follows.

Quantum mechanics describes physical systems through mathematical equations called wave functions. A wave function encodes all the possible states a physical system might be in, together with a quantity associated with each – not a probability directly, but something from which a probability can be calculated. These wave functions evolve over time in a continuous, orderly, and perfectly deterministic manner, governed by the Schrödinger equation, named after the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. There is no randomness in the Schrödinger equation, no jumps or unpredictability. If you know the wave function at one moment, the equation tells you with perfect precision what it will be at any future moment – as smooth and predictable as Newton’s equations for planetary motion.

The difficulty is that the wave function, for all its mathematical precision and predictability, cannot tell you what you will actually observe in an experiment, only what you might observe as governed by statistical probability. What the wave function gives you are quantities called amplitudes – attached to each possible outcome. To get from an amplitude to an actual probability, you apply a separate rule: you take the amplitude for a given outcome and square its absolute value. This procedure is called the Born rule, after the physicist Max Born, who proposed it in 1926. If the wave function gives an electron an amplitude of 0.6 for being in one place and 0.8 for being in another, the Born rule says the probability of finding it in the first place is 36 percent and in the second is 64 percent. All the probabilities must add up to 100 percent, and that is what scientists compare with laboratory results.

The Schrödinger equation and the Born rule belong to entirely different logical categories. One describes how the wave function changes continuously over time between measurements; the other is a separate rule for extracting probabilities at the moment of measurement. Crucially, no one has yet succeeded in deriving the Born rule from the Schrödinger equation. Physicists have tried for a century and failed. They are two independent postulates, and quantum mechanics comes into contact with observable reality only when both are used together. The significance of this independence will become clear when we come to Barr’s argument.

Before the Schrödinger equation produces a definite outcome – that is, before the Born rule is applied and a measurement is made – the system exists in what physicists call superposition: all possible outcomes are simultaneously encoded in the wave function. It is worth pausing on what this actually means. I do not use the phrase ‘simultaneously encoded’ to mean that the particle has literally adopted all outcomes at once, as that would be a straightforward logical contradiction – a thing cannot both be and not be in the same respect simultaneously. The particle is not secretly in one state while we remain ignorant of it, but neither is it literally in all states. It is in a condition of genuine unresolved possibility – or, to use classical terminology, of potency rather than act.

I am not the first to use this language, and I should acknowledge that perhaps the most distinguished scientist to have done so was Heisenberg himself — one of the principal architects of quantum mechanics. In his 1958 book, Physics and Philosophy, he explicitly used Aristotle’s concept of potentia to describe the pre-measurement quantum state, finding in it the closest available philosophical equivalent to the wave function. Heisenberg was not a Catholic philosopher trying to fit modern physics into a medieval framework to bolster traditional metaphysics; he was a theoretical physicist seeking the most precise language he could find to describe what he thought his own equations were saying. That he found it in Aristotle is, I think, striking.

The Measurement Problem: Why a Knowing Mind Cannot Be Avoided

The indeterminacy of quantum mechanics raises a question that goes beyond physics into philosophy: what actually fixes the outcome when an observation is made? Before anyone checks on our radioactive atom, its decay is genuinely undetermined. The moment a physicist looks and finds that it has – or has not – decayed, the range of possibilities collapses to a single definite fact. Something has resolved the indeterminacy. But what?

The traditional answer in quantum mechanics – associated with what is called the Copenhagen interpretation – is that it is the act of observation by a conscious observer. At the moment the observer learns the result, the indeterminate possibilities resolve into a single definite outcome. As Barr puts it, quoting the great physicist Sir Rudolf Peierls: the quantum-mechanical description is a description of knowledge, and knowledge requires someone who knows.

This is where the materialist – the person who holds that everything in the universe, including the human mind, is ultimately just physical matter – runs into serious trouble. If everything is physical, then the observer himself – his instruments, his sensory organs, his brain – is itself a physical system subject to the same quantum indeterminacy. Then, including the observer in the physical description does not resolve the indeterminacy; it merely extends it. You are back where you started, with all outcomes still in play and no definite fact emerging.

But for an event to actually happen – to become a settled fact rather than a range of probabilities – requires someone who knows that it has happened: a genuine knower, not merely another physical object caught up in the same indeterminacy. This is a problem for the materialist who does not acknowledge that thought and knowledge are not physical phenomena, unlike the Christian.

It is worth noting here that, in my experience, many scientists who are materialists have little interest in the philosophical implications of what they do. If challenged on these points, they are as likely to refuse to engage as to answer. That is their right, of course – there is nothing that says scientists are bound to be philosophers concerned with metaphysics as well as physics, no matter how much I think they ought to be. But it should be said that this category of scientist is, in effect, a materialist by blind faith – one who simply adopts and asserts the belief with no apparent interest in justifying it further.

The Many-Worlds Interpretation and Its Difficulties

Materialists who accept the force of the measurement problem but who are unwilling to accept a non-physical observer have a limited number of options if they wish to account for it. The most widely discussed is the Many-Worlds Interpretation, first proposed by Hugh Everett in 1957.

The Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) holds that the wave function never collapses. Instead, every time a quantum event occurs, the universe branches into parallel versions of itself, one for each possible outcome. All outcomes actually happen, but in separate branches of reality that can never interact with one another. There are branches where Schrödinger’s cat is alive, others where it is dead (to draw on the hypothetical case developed by the famous physicist); branches where you are reading this article, others where you are doing something else entirely. All are equally real in this Interpretation. Because these branches lose the ability to interfere with each other very rapidly, we never experience more than one of them, which is why the world appears to us as though definite outcomes occur.

Barr’s objection to the MWI relates to the fact that it insists that everything – including the act of observation – is governed solely by the Schrödinger equation. But as we have seen, the Born rule cannot be derived from the Schrödinger equation. The Many-Worlds Interpretation, therefore, has no coherent place for the Born rule and no mechanism for converting probability amplitudes into actual probabilities. A theory that cannot generate probabilities cannot predict anything, and as a consequence, has lost all contact with experimental reality. I have heard another objection, in a talk by philosopher Robert Koons, who argued that if every possibility occurs, then every possibility is 100% certain to happen, which seems to undermine the fact that the math assigns probabilities to each event, all of which are less than 100%.

Barr’s Traveling Minds Hypothesis

Barr’s response, offered in his paper, is his Traveling Minds Hypothesis. He agrees that the wave function of the universe continues to branch perpetually, without ever collapsing. Every possible outcome of every quantum event continues to exist in the world of mathematics. But he argues that the Born rule is not a law about the physics of these branches. It is a law that governs which branch the conscious mind travels down. All consciousness in the universe travels together down one branch, and the Born rule gives the probability for which branch it will be. The rule of probability, says Barr, governs minds, not matter.

This reconciliation offered by Barr preserves the understanding of a knowing mind that is nonphysical, thereby undermining the philosophy of physical materialism. The branches that consciousness does not travel down are real in a mathematical sense, but have no mind associated with them and therefore no one to experience them. They exist, to borrow Aristotle’s (and Heisenberg’s) language, as potentials that are never actualized.

God as the Ground of Objective Reality

There is a further difficulty with the Copenhagen interpretation that Barr acknowledges but, to me, does not fully resolve. If wave functions represent the knowledge of particular observers, and different observers have different wave functions that collapse at different moments, what becomes of objective reality? One seems to be left with a patchwork of partial perspectives rather than a single world that is what it is, independently of who is looking at it. Barr quotes Sir Rudolph Peierls, another physicist who contributed greatly to the field of quantum mechanics, who, when pressed on this, said simply: “I do not know what reality is.” This is an uncomfortable place to end up for anyone who, like me, believes that the cosmos is an objective reality, and it has led some philosophers and physicists who do not hold to a materialist view to doubt the Copenhagen interpretation, without necessarily offering a viable alternative.

Before proposing a solution, it is worth being precise about what we mean by saying that a quantum event requires an observer. There is a popular way of putting this that slides into something philosophically untenable – the suggestion that things do not exist at all until someone looks at them, as though the human observer were conjuring reality out of nothing. That is not the argument. A quantum system in superposition is already real – it genuinely exists, it is not nothing. But it exists in the mode of potency (picking up from Heisenberg), as a range of genuine possibilities, none of which has yet been settled. When an observer makes a measurement, the system does not leap from non-existence into existence. Rather, it moves from being real but in a state of potential, what one might call indeterminately real, to being determinately actual: fixed as this outcome rather than that one. The observer does not create the thing. He brings it from potency to act, in classical terms. The argument I make is that God, as First Cause, is the one who continuously brings every potential in creation into existence, and then into actuality – who, at every moment and in every corner of the universe, completes the movement from the indeterminate to the definite that physics itself tells us cannot be completed from within physics alone.

What occurs to me here is that perhaps the solution to the problem of objective reality comes from theology rather than from physics. If divine consciousness is taken to be the primary and ultimate observer – omniscient, not dependent on making discrete measurements, knowing all things wholly and simultaneously rather than partially and successively – then the objective state of the world at every moment is simply what God knows it to be. Reality is mind-dependent and fully objective at the same time, because the mind on which it depends is infinite.

The objectivity of the single real branch – the one actually experienced – is not guaranteed by any finite observer, but by the omniscience of a God who knows all things without limitation. This resolves the worry, raised by various critics whom Barr discusses, that the Copenhagen interpretation slides into subjectivism – the view that reality is merely what individual minds make of it. It also coheres naturally with Catholic thought: God does not know things because they exist, as we do; things exist because God knows them. His knowledge is not a response to reality but constitutive of it – one of the ingredients that form and compose reality, not a reaction to something that would be fully determinate without him.

The human observer is not, therefore, observing anything in isolation, but is accorded the privilege of co-observation with God, and in so doing acts as a co-creator who participates in one aspect, at least, of the creative work of God.

There are other beings possessed of intellect and will who may participate in this co-observation, too, and perhaps to a greater degree. The angels, whose knowledge is not discursive and successive as ours is but more immediate, would on this account be co-observers of a higher order, present to the quantum level of creation in a way that surpasses human perception. The saints in heaven, who participate in the divine nature through the beatific vision, would share in this still more fully — drawn into God’s own knowing, and so into his continuous act of holding creation in being. If this is right, then the act of observation that quantum mechanics requires is not a lonely or merely human affair. Creation is, at every moment, beheld: by God wholly and without limit, by the angels and saints in a participated and creaturely way, and by human beings partially and successively, each according to the measure of their knowing. We are not necessary to this order of things, but are accorded the privilege by a loving God who allows us to work with him, so to speak, in his work.

An objection can be raised against this line of argument, it seems to me, and it is worth addressing. If God is the omniscient observer whose knowledge is constitutive of reality, and if his knowledge is total and simultaneous, then it might seem that nothing is ever truly in a state of potentiality from God’s perspective. Everything is always already known, and therefore always already actual. But the whole quantum argument depends on genuine potentiality – on outcomes being genuinely indeterminate until observed. If divine omniscience simply eliminates that indeterminacy from the outset, we have not resolved the problem; we have dissolved it by a different route, and in doing so have undermined the very framework of potency and act that the argument was drawing on.

I think this objection, while serious, can be answered. We can distinguish between God’s eternal knowledge and the temporal existence of creatures. God knows all things in an eternal present, outside time. But creatures exist in time and genuinely pass from potency to act within the temporal order. God’s timeless knowledge of an outcome does not mean that that outcome has already occurred within created time; it means that the whole of time – including the moment of potency and the subsequent moment of act – is present to God simultaneously, each in its proper mode. He knows the potential thing as potential and the actual thing as actual, not by collapsing the distinction between them but by comprehending both perfectly from outside the temporal succession in which that distinction is real.

The potentiality is therefore genuine at the level of created, temporal being. The quantum indeterminacy is a real feature of the physical world as it unfolds in time. God’s eternal knowledge does not flatten that succession or pre-empt it; it holds it whole. What God does, on this account, is not eliminate potentiality by knowing the outcome in advance, but bring each potential into act at the right moment within the temporal order – which is, in my understanding, the Thomistic account of how primary causation works continuously through secondary causes without overwhelming them. Divine omniscience and genuine creaturely potentiality are not, therefore, in competition. They operate at different levels: one eternal and constitutive, the other temporal and real.

Beauty, Being, and the Universal Observer

There is a further convergence, it occurs to me, between quantum mechanics and classical philosophy — one that approaches the question of the universal observer not from physics but from the traditional understanding of beauty.

Aquinas defines beauty as id quod visum placet: that which pleases when seen. Beauty is one of the transcendentals — a property that belongs to all that exists, to being as such. The definition contains a word that warrants attention: "seen". Beauty, on this account, is not merely a property that things possess in isolation. It is a property that is realized in relation to a perceiver. This suggests an analogy with the quantum argument I have been making. Just as a quantum system exists before measurement in a state of genuine potency — real, but not yet determinate — so too, I want to suggest, a beautiful thing that has never been perceived might be understood as beauty in potency: genuinely there, genuinely beautiful in its constitution, but not yet fully actualised as beauty until it is known, apprehended, received by a mind capable of recognising it for what it is.

On this reading, the act of perception does for beauty what the act of observation does in quantum mechanics: it does not create the thing, but it brings it from potency to act — from being beautiful in capacity to being beautiful in the full and realized sense. And just as the quantum argument ran into the problem that most of the universe has never been observed by any human mind, the same problem arises here. Most of creation has never been seen by human eyes. If beauty requires a perceiver to be fully actualized, and if God is the omniscient observer whose knowledge is constitutive of reality, then it is God in whom the beauty of all creation is always and completely received. He is not merely the observer who covers the gaps left by finite human perceivers. He is the one in whom the beauty latent in everything He created is, at every moment, perfectly and wholly known.

The parallel can be extended further. In the quantum argument, I noted that human observers participate in the creative work of God as co-observers, and that other beings possessed of intellect and will — the angels, whose knowledge is not discursive as ours is, and the saints in heaven, who participate in the divine nature through the beatific vision — may share in this co-observation to a greater degree. The same applies here. The beauty of creation is received, in varying degrees of fullness, by every mind capable of apprehending it: by human beings partially and successively, by the saints and angels more fully, and by God wholly and simultaneously. Creation, on this account, is perpetually beheld; its beauty is perpetually actualized; nothing that exists goes unseen.

The second foundation for this argument concerns claritas — the third of the three conditions Aquinas identifies for beauty, alongside integritas (wholeness) and consonantia (proportion or harmony). Claritas is the quality by which a thing shines forth as what it is, radiating its intelligibility outward. It is not merely a passive capacity; it is an active orientation toward being known, an intrinsic directedness of the thing toward an intellect capable of receiving it. A thing possessed of claritas is not simply available to be known if a knower happens to come along; it is, in its very nature, I suggest, ordered toward being known. And if things are constitutively ordered toward being known, then there ought to be a mind toward which they are ordered — one adequate to receive the full intelligibility they radiate. Here is the parallel with the quantum argument: just as the Copenhagen interpretation requires a conscious observer for a definite physical state to exist, so too the Thomistic account of claritas requires that every existing thing be ordered toward a mind capable of knowing it fully.

I should say that the traditional Thomistic account of beauty does not, to my knowledge at least, in itself, assert that beauty requires an actual observer present to every beautiful thing at every moment, nor does it use the language of potency and act in quite the way I am applying it. The standard reading is that beauty is an objective property of the thing — a real capacity to please a suitably disposed perceiver — whether or not any creature happens to be perceiving it. In invoking Aquinas here, I am not claiming to report the tradition faithfully as it stands. I am extending it in light of the quantum argument, but I believe the extension is consistent with the tradition and does not undermine it. It draws out an implication that the tradition, developed long before anyone had heard of quantum mechanics, had no particular reason to make explicit. The reader should weigh it accordingly.

Conclusion

The argument of this article, as I said, is held tentatively and has three parts.

The first is Barr’s: his Traveling Minds Hypothesis provides a coherent alternative to the Many-Worlds Interpretation, giving the Born rule a natural home as a law governing consciousness rather than matter, and preserving the reality of a single experienced world without requiring an infinite proliferation of equally real parallel selves.

The second is my own extension of Barr: divine omniscience, understood in the Catholic tradition as constitutive of rather than responsive to reality, provides the ground of objective existence that finite human observers alone cannot supply. God is the ultimate observer whose continuous and total knowledge is what makes the one real branch real. The objection that divine omniscience eliminates genuine potentiality is answered by consideration of the distinction between God’s eternal knowledge and the temporal reality of creaturely existence: potency and act are genuinely distinct within created time, even though both are held simultaneously in the eternal divine mind.

The third approaches the same conclusion by a different path entirely. The Thomistic account of beauty as a transcendental property of being, and in particular the notion of claritas as an active orientation of things toward being known, implies that a mind adequate to receive the full intelligibility of creation must exist. For the vast majority of creation, that mind can only be God (or perhaps God, and his angels and saints in heaven).

The hypotheses presented here are not scientifically provable; science is only equipped to offer solutions within the realm of the physical and material. Nevertheless, I suggest they are more reasonable explanations than those the materialist can offer. The Aristotelian and Thomistic account of the order of the natural world I draw on was not developed to address a difficulty in explaining quantum mechanics. It is a coherent worldview that already existed, has been tested across many other fields of inquiry, and – Catholics would argue – has been validated by human experience for centuries. Quantum mechanics, metaphysics, and aesthetics, therefore, as presented here, do not prove the existence of a knowing God. But they do, I think, point towards one.

I recently read a paper by the Catholic theoretical particle physicist and Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Delaware, Stephen M. Barr, titled Does Quantum Physics Imply that Materialism is False? on the philosophical implications of quantum physics. It was published in 2025 to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the discovery of quantum mechanics. I encourage you to read his work directly. My main reason for writing is, beyond presenting my own thoughts, to draw attention to Barr’s writing, which I think deserves a wider readership. I ask the reader to at least take the trouble to read Barr’s work, even if you find mine unsatisfactory!

I am responding more directly to Chapter 20 of his book Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, which I first read several years ago and re-read recently, in which he argues that quantum mechanics is incompatible with physical determinism and philosophical materialism — philosophies that leave no room for free will or the mind as a spiritual entity that knows and desires. He goes further, arguing that quantum physics is consistent with the traditional Catholic understanding of free will as something capable of initiating thought without a physical or material cause.

This is the first of two articles. The second takes up the more speculative questions raised by Barr’s “traveling minds” hypothesis in his essay — his proposed alternative to the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics — and explores two further arguments of my own: that divine omniscience resolves a problem about objective reality that quantum mechanics raises but cannot on its own terms answer, and that the classical Thomistic account of beauty, approached from an entirely different direction, points independently toward the same conclusion. The second article also contains a fuller explanation of the physics, including an account of the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics and Heisenberg’s (one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics) striking use of Aristotle’s concept of potency and act to describe the quantum state (in ways that I hope non-mathematicians - of whom I am one - can understand). I encourage readers who want that background before proceeding here to consult Barr’s book and the article referred to above.

My thesis in this post is this: Barr is right that quantum mechanics rules out physical determinism and is incompatible with materialism, and right also that this opens a genuine space for free will understood as a non-physical cause acting in the physical world. But I think his argument, which focuses on the human brain and the human mind, does not go far enough. Quantum indeterminacy is universal. Most quantum events in the universe have nothing to do with the human mind at all, and it seems to me that something must be selecting those outcomes, too. I want to suggest that this is God, understood in the tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas as the First Cause and Unmoved Mover — the intelligence that continuously sustains every event in creation. This is not, I should stress, a God-of-the-gaps argument of the kind materialists rightly criticize, in which God is invoked to fill a hole that science might eventually close. The gap I am pointing to is one that physics (or quantum physics at least), by its own account, tells us cannot be closed from within physics. That distinction matters, and I return to it below.

I should say at the outset that I am very much an amateur in both physics and philosophy. I studied materials science at university many years ago and covered quantum mechanics as part of my degree, though I was never the best student in the room. I offer what follows as speculation, and I invite those better qualified than I am to raise any objections I have not anticipated.

What Quantum Mechanics Tells Us

Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics that describes the behavior of matter and energy at the very smallest scales – the scale of atoms and the particles from which atoms are made. It has been tested with extraordinary precision for a hundred years and has never been found wrong. Everything in the physical world, at its most fundamental level, is governed by it.

The central and deeply strange feature of quantum mechanics, for the purposes of this article, is this: at the level of individual particles, physics can only tell us the probability that something will happen, never that it definitely will or when. Consider a radioactive atom. Quantum mechanics can tell us that, for example, there is a 50% chance it will decay within a given period. What it cannot tell us is whether this or that particular atom will decay or when it will decay. No physical measurement, however precise, and no refinement of the theory can supply that information. It is not that we lack the tools; it is that quantum mechanics itself tells us the answer is genuinely indeterminate. Only the probabilities are fixed; the individual outcome is not.

This is deeply counterintuitive because it is not how physics behaves at the scale we can see and touch. At the level of everyday objects – billiard balls, bridges, and planets – classical Newtonian physics holds, and outcomes are in principle fully predictable from prior causes. It is mysterious that a world of individually unpredictable quantum events gives rise, at larger scales, to the orderly, predictable world of classical physics. That transition is one of the genuinely unsolved puzzles of modern science. I remember in high school being struck by how strange it was that, from a simple statement of the probability of radioactive decay, we could so easily calculate the half-life of the whole sample - the time it takes to reduce by half - and the smooth graph for the predicted pattern of decay of that sample of trillions and trillions of atoms could be generated. For our purposes, the key point is simply that at the most fundamental level of physical reality, there is genuine indeterminacy – a causal gap that physics itself cannot close because of the pattern of decay at the level of individual particles is mathematically inconsistent with a physical cause (the second article explores the nature of the pattern of this mathematics that reflects this in more detail).

Quantum Indeterminacy and Free Will

Barr makes a further argument that follows naturally from this. Because quantum events are irreducibly probabilistic — because no physical cause determines their outcomes — the physical processes underlying neural activity in the brain and which also originate at the quantum level are, he argues, not fully determined by prior physical causes. To see what this means in practice, consider a radioactive sample again. If we observe a large number of radioactive atoms over time, we can predict with great precision what proportion will have decayed after any given period. But we cannot say when any particular atom will decay. This is not simply a gap in our knowledge that better instruments might one day close. The pattern of decay observed at the level of individual atoms is mathematically inconsistent with any pattern that would indicate an underlying physical cause driving each event. Quantum mechanics does not merely leave the cause unknown; it tells us there is no physical cause to find. Some interpret this as meaning the event is simply uncaused — an event that just happens for no reason at all. But others, including Barr, draw a different conclusion: the absence of a physical cause does not mean the absence of any cause. It means the causal gap is real, and that something other than a physical process could in principle be filling it — a cause of a different kind altogether. And for the quantum events that drive the thought process, he is suggesting that this cause is spiritual, that is, free will.

The dogmatic materialist will have to acknowledge this gap, but, as with the problem of the non-physical observer, will more than likely not engage with it. Barr addresses it directly. A non-physical will, he argues, could operate through precisely this gap, selecting among quantum possibilities in the brain’s neural processes in ways that produce real physical effects without violating any law of physics. The pattern of choices made by free will might be statistically consistent with quantum distributions, yet governed by reasons, intentions, and moral considerations that, while ordered, physics cannot see or describe mathematically.

I find this argument convincing. But I wonder if Barr stops too soon. He focuses on the human brain, but quantum indeterminacy is not a special feature of neural tissue. It is universal. Every physical process – whether activity in a star in the far reaches of the universe, or the movement of a single atom in a rock at the bottom of the sea – involves quantum events whose outcomes are not determined by prior physical causes alone. Either something is selecting those outcomes, or they are genuinely uncaused. But an uncaused event is not a random event in any ordinary sense; it is simply an event for which there is no explanation. And a universe full of genuinely inexplicable events at its most basic level is not the rational, ordered creation that both science and theology assume.

The more coherent picture, I would suggest, is that God selects outcomes that are not initiated by the will of a knowing creature. What we call the laws of nature would then describe the habitual statistical patterns of divine activity, while the irreducible indeterminacy at the quantum level is not a flaw in creation but the very medium through which God continuously sustains and directs it. This is not a God-of-the-gaps argument, in which God is invoked to fill a gap that science has not yet closed. It is the opposite: physics itself tells us the gap cannot be closed from within physics. The quantum level is, by physics’ own account, causally open. To say that God acts there is not to invoke the supernatural to patch a failure of science; it is to offer an alternative rational explanation rooted in a broader understanding of existence than materialist philosophy can provide.

I am not arguing that God is the sole cause of quantum events. Rather, I am saying that God and creatures are both real causes of the same effect at different levels – if we assume that God is continuously engaged with the life of his creatures, which is precisely the Thomistic, Christian account of how primary and secondary causation relate.

Conclusion

The argument of this article has two parts. The first, which is Barr’s, is that quantum mechanics rules out the physical determinism that has long been used to undermine belief in free will, and that it is inconsistent with a purely materialist account of the mind. At the most fundamental level of physical reality, there is genuine indeterminacy; resolving that indeterminacy into definite facts requires a genuine knower, and no physical system, however complex, can fill that role from within physics alone.

The second part is my own extension. If a non-physical mind can act through quantum indeterminacy in the human brain, then the same logical space exists throughout the universe, in every physical process at every scale. Something must be selecting quantum outcomes everywhere. I suggest that something is God, the First Cause of Aristotle and Aquinas – not a God who intervenes occasionally to override the laws of nature, but the intelligence whose continuous activity is what the laws of nature describe. The irreducible openness of the quantum world is the signature of a creation that is, at its most fundamental level, held in being by a Mind.

A second article will take up the more speculative questions raised by Barr’s traveling minds hypothesis, by the problem of objective reality in quantum mechanics, and by the classical account of beauty – all of which, I want to suggest, point in the same direction.

He currently has a show at a gallery in Texas, and he has generally offered to donate 50% of the proceeds to one of his landscapes to Scala Foundation. This means that if you buy this landscape, you support the artist, the gallery, and the Scala Foundation in our work.

Steve is also a donor who supports the Scala Foundation and its mission, and has participated in the spiritual exercises of our Way of Beauty process, so it a great supporter and contributor to our mission in more ways than one! When we did this last year, the painting sold in one day, so we are hoping for a similar response this time

Here is the work, one of his ‘nocturne’ landscapes painted in situ in oil. It sells for $950; without the frame, it is 10’ x 8’. It comes framed, and the price does not include shipping costs. To buy it contact the gallery: Charles Morin Fine Art, Fredericksburg, TX. Phone is 830-307-3019

I am particularly fond of his ‘nocturnes’. Nocturnes are paintings that capture the mood of a landscape at twilight, dusk, or in full darkness, evoking a sense of mystery and serenity. As an art form, it was pioneered by the American artist James McNeil Whistler in the 19th century. Like Whistler, Talley paints en plein air, but whereas Whistler painted scenes of London and the River Thames from a rowing boat, Talley paints with his feet firmly on the ground of Texas and New Mexico. He told me that of the paintings he sells, around 65% are nocturnes.

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Here is the painting that he sold through us last year, also a nocturne. It is called “Milky Way Night”. It is 5” x7” unframed.

The Church teaches, through the decisions of past Councils and Canon Law, that sacred art is not merely permitted in churches; it is mandatory. Furthermore, in the past, people understood its importance and were prepared to die defending the principle. Think about this: people have been prepared to die for insisting upon the use of images in churches, especially in connection with our worship of God.

Here, we will examine not only the theological arguments that justify the use of sacred art but also the reasons it is imperative that we do so.

The Seventh Ecumenical Council and the Iconoclastic Controversy

The Seventh Ecumenical Council, which closed in AD 787, was the culmination of a long-running, steadily growing disagreement over the validity of sacred art for Christians. It was characterized by two opposing points of view: one of the iconoclasts (from Greek: εἰκών, eikṓn, ‘figure, icon’ + κλάω, kláō, ‘to break’) and one of the iconodules (from Greek: εἰκόνα – icon (image) + Greek: δοῦλος – servant, meaning ‘one who serves icons’).

The iconoclasts, who sought to destroy (or break) images, argued that the veneration of images was idolatry, which was forbidden by the Ten Commandments. This argument has been repeated by Christian iconoclasts since then.

The iconodules, who venerated icons, argued that because God became man, it is legitimate to represent the person of Christ as man. When we look at Christ as man, he is the ‘image of the invisible God’, their argument runs. Then, through his image as man, we can respect the person of Jesus Christ, as God, and through Him, the other persons of the Trinity. This argument establishes the principle of showing respect to a prototype through an image and by extension to other images.

In venerating sacred art, we can offer our love or respect to the person depicted. Furthermore, in showing respect to saints or to Our Lady, whether directly or through an image, there are different degrees and kinds of respect or love appropriate to the object of our love, reflecting its place in the hierarchy of being. Worship (latria), the highest form of love, is for God alone, and veneration (dulia) is for the saints, with the highest form of veneration (hyperdulia) being reserved for Our Lady. This hierarchy of respect arises from the recognition of a hierarchy of being, with God at its pinnacle. The general principle is that those higher in this hierarchy deserve greater respect than those lower. This does not encourage disrespect for anyone; rather, it affirms that all are respected, but that respect takes different forms appropriate to the person.

Here is an excerpt of what the Council said (my emphases added):

“We define that the holy icons, whether in color, mosaic, or some other material, should be exhibited in the holy churches of God, on the sacred vessels and liturgical vestments, on the walls, furnishings, and in houses and along the roads, namely the icons of our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ, that of our Lady the Theotokos, those of the venerable angels and those of all saintly people. Whenever these representations are contemplated, they will cause those who look at them to commemorate and love their prototype. We also define that they should be kissed and that they are an object of veneration (dulia) and honor (timitiki proskynisis), but not of real worship (latreia), which is reserved for Him Who is the subject of our faith and is proper for the divine nature, ... which is in effect transmitted to the prototype; he who venerates the icon, venerated in it the reality for which it stands.” The Council of Trent in the 16th century, incidentally, repeated much of this text and actually commanded ‘that images of Christ, the Virgin Mother of God, and other saints are to be held and kept…’

Through the veneration of something material and visible, the painting, we can, by a leap of our imaginations, give worship or veneration to the real person in heaven. This practice develops the faculty within us for analogical thinking so that, when we encounter visible signs, symbols, and images, our imagination naturally moves more readily to the object signified, which we can’t see, and ultimately to God. Analogical thinking here means thinking by way of analogy — using something concrete and visible as a bridge or stepping-stone to grasp or connect with something higher, invisible, and spiritual. It’s not mere symbolic interpretation or metaphor; it’s a disciplined imaginative leap that becomes second nature through practices such as venerating icons or religious images.

When this faculty is highly developed, anything that is beautiful or any aspect of God’s creation can take us, by a leap of imagination, to the One who created it or who inspired its beauty, that is God who is Beauty itself. This is a powerful force for establishing and retaining faith, for when this faculty within us is highly developed, all that we can perceive directs us to the reality of things we can’t.

The Seventh Ecumenical Council didn’t immediately halt iconoclasm because there was a dispute over what constituted a holy image worthy of veneration. A clarification was provided by a 9th-century theologian, St Theodore the Studite. According to St Theodore’s definition, an image that bears the person’s name, written on the painting legibly, and captures the essential characteristics of the likeness is worthy of veneration. It is not so much a portrait that is required as the inclusion of accepted features and attributes of the person, as held by tradition. For example, by tradition, St. Paul is always bald, and St. Isaias has tongs, a piece of hot coal, shaggy hair, and a beard.

St Thomas’s 4th Way and How it Helps to Explain the Importance of the Veneration of Images

To understand even more deeply just how important it is that we venerate holy images in conjunction with the worship of God, we can consider St Thomas’s 4th Way, which is one of his so-called ‘five ways’, or five proofs (of a sort) for the existence of God.

Here it is as described in the Summa:

The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. Among beings, there are some more and some less good, true, noble, and the like. But “more” and “less” are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest; so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as it is written in Metaph. ii. Now, the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore, there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God. [Summa Theologiae I q. 2, a. 3 C, fourth argument in whether God exists]

Put another way: we observe degrees of perfection of properties found in beings (good, better, better still...etc), and by analogy, this establishes a hierarchy of beings with that property, and this hierarchy indicates to us that there is something at the top of the tree, - the best - which might not be otherwise known, but which is the greatest in each property. In turn, and again by analogy, we see that the best in all categories exists in a single being that contains all attributes of being in perfection, namely Being itself. All lesser beings owe their existence to that greatest possible Being and are said to ‘participate’ in that fullness of Being.

The fourth way of St Thomas might well be the most powerful of the five ways in engaging the contemporary person. However, rather than thinking of the 4th Way as a rational argument intended to persuade people to convert, it is useful to think of it as describing a natural mode of thinking among those who already have faith, and which can be cultivated in those who do not have faith. It is the Way of thinking analogically (that is, by way of analogy). Those who think analogically perceive naturally that all things are interrelated and that both the parts and the pattern as a whole point to the existence of an invisible pinnacle of existence, which is God.

Similarly, those who think this way look at the beauty and order of the created world and instinctively attribute them to a Creator. They look at beautiful artifacts made by man and his loving and graceful actions, and they recognize that all are inspired by One who is Goodness and Beauty itself. They see the natural hierarchies that exist in creation and delight in them, for they point to the pinnacle of Being itself. So, for example, one who thinks analogically will recognize a hierarchy of being in the flora and fauna around him. He will intuitively recognize that all that is living is greater than that which is inanimate, and so animals are greater than plantlife; and that man is the greatest of all animals and distinct from them because he has an intellect and will. Recognizing this scale of perfection in the things we can see will increase our natural aptitude for faith in God, whom we cannot see, and who is the pinnacle of that scale.

Furthermore, natural hierarchies of authority exist in a good society: children respect their parents, students listen to their teachers, subjects listen to their rulers, and so on. Those who, by first inclination, respect these natural authorities and even delight in good parents, teachers, and leaders, are more likely to be people of faith than those who don’t, for these hierarchies of power and authority indicate to them, again, by analogy, that there is One who has all power and ultimate authority.

Most who respond this way, what we might call 4th-way thinking, do so naturally and effortlessly in response to the world around them. They may not be able to articulate how they think or define the terms in such a way that would make a philosophy professor happy, but it doesn’t mean that they are not thinking in that way.

It seems to me that those who naturally think analogically and respond to beauty and the other properties that manifest a hierarchy of being around us are predisposed to be faithful. And it is as much cause as it is effect. This being so, the more effectively we can stimulate this mode of thinking in people who are otherwise not inclined to do so, the more likely they will be receptive to the idea of God. This is how we cultivate faith in God. With such people, the need to argue for the existence of God will be less, for by looking around them at creation, they will respond with awe and wonder and, upon reflection, with a natural desire for God. At that point, it may be necessary for us to present the revealed truth for them to become Christians, but there is every chance that they will be ready to hear the gospel from us. Furthermore, if the faithful in the Church could have this mode of thinking continuously stimulated and nourished within them, they would be far less likely ever to lose their faith.

How, then, can we encourage 4th-Way thinking?

What I am describing here, this 4th-Way manner of looking at things, is an aspect of man’s natural desire for God, which can be cultivated by external influences or suppressed and misdirected.

Contrary to what we may think, it is not easy to suppress and misdirect natural and good instincts. It typically takes a prolonged and aggressively anti-Christian education right up to the graduate level to do so. Our top universities have become specialists in teaching people out of their faith and out of common sense! The simplest answer, therefore, to how we allow this natural way of thinking to flourish, is the maxim, first do no harm. That is, we should eliminate all bad education. All that is directed to undermining the Faith should be purged from education. Second, would be to introduce a good education, rooted in the true, the good, and the beautiful, with the tenets and practices of the Catholic Faith at its heart. And as a vital part of the communication of the Faith, are the practices that follow the directives of the Seventh Ecumenical Council and start venerating and kissing images as part of our worship and devotional acts.

Because Marxist theory has been applied across public and private education, from early childhood through graduate education, eliminating poor education is easier said than done. The goal of so many who run our public schools and are in the grip of this ideology is aggressively to educate common sense out of people and indoctrinate them as political activists.

The best way to avoid bad education today is to avoid public schools and universities and choose very carefully from the privately run institutions available.

However, there are steps that can be taken to encourage 4th-Way thinking in the home. One way is to establish an icon corner and venerate the images within it.

The broad aims of an education that would promote this manner of thinking, would be as follows: We can strive wherever possible to emphasize and promote the natural hierarchies in society; to create a culture that is in harmony with divine beauty; and for each of us to strive to be people whose own behavior speaks of One greater than us, and who inspires great love and self-sacrifice in us.

It is the veneration of holy images, especially in connection to the highest expression of love for God - worship - that we are transformed into people who act and think and act as people of the Light most powerfully. When we venerate an icon, we understand that the respect we show is transferred to its prototype; furthermore, we recognize that there are different degrees and kinds of respect appropriate to it. Sacred art does this so powerfully precisely because it is visible and tangible. Through the material in the form of artistic images, we grasp the spiritual and invisible truths at work in the sacred liturgy to which they point. When we have art in our churches that works in harmony with the liturgy (which is, sadly, rare in today’s Church), it deepens our participation in the liturgy and, in turn, leads us to supernatural transformation, by which we partake of the divine nature. We become walking icons - images - of Christ. We are images of God in our moral, intellectual, and spiritual nature, and images of the person of Christ additionally in our human nature as a whole.

When we cease to pray with images, they become superfluous to our worship, and the likely result is a decline in its authenticity. What might seem at first to be a minor omission opens the way to a chain of events that has direct consequences for us and our faith. What begins as neglect of images can in time become an actual hatred of them, and the result is iconoclasm. This will lead, in turn, to a general rejection of the authority of the Church and eventually to the inversion of our sense of the hierarchy of being, so that we bring ‘god’ down to us, rather than allowing him to draw us up to Him by our partaking of the divine nature. The end of this steady reduction of faith is atheism, which rejects Him altogether.

I believe that many - not all - problems in the Church and society today may be traced to this lack of engagement with images in the liturgy. There are other factors as well, but a crucial step in beginning to evangelize the culture would be for us to change in this regard. We have forgotten how to engage with sacred art in our worship. Until devout Catholics once again engage actively with sacred images in the act of worshipping God, we will not stop the decline in the faith that we see in the West.

One cannot underestimate the importance of this or how far from this ideal we have strayed today. In the Roman Church, it seems, we often give away freely what saints in centuries past fought so hard to defend. Catholics should be aware that this neglect is as present in the celebration of the Extraordinary Form as it is in the Ordinary Form. Even if there is good sacred art on the walls of the church, it is largely incidental to the form of worship, regardless of the Form being celebrated. The result, for the pious, is often an internalized, eyes-closed activity that reduces the role of art and architecture, at best, to a beautiful but irrelevant backdrop.

Each of us should ask ourselves how many times during Mass we look directly at the images as part of our worship. If the answer is “never” or “rarely,” we should remedy the situation through our personal practice of worship. As a simple illustration, when addressing the Son directly in the liturgy, as we do in the Kyrie (‘Lord have mercy’ ) prayers at Mass, we could look at an image of the Son and address him through that image as we might do if we were talking to Him personally. Similarly, when we invoke the prayers of Our Lady or the saints, we can do so while looking at their images, again as we would if we were talking to them personally. How many do this today? Very few, I suspect.

Those who want to destroy the faith seem to understand this better than we do. They systematically destroy images and beautiful artifacts from our churches and all beauty and order from the wider culture. Those who hate the Faith aim to establish the idea in our artists that beauty and image have no place in art; they glorify ugliness, and they destroy all signs of the communities that reflect natural hierarchies and authorities in society - such as the family, the nation, and the Church.

This change can begin with us. Even if we have no influence in the art that is in our church, and no influence to affect political change that bolsters the institutions of a Christian society - family, nation, and Church, there are things we can do in personal lives that in turn affect our personal relationships and so, organically, contribute little by little to the evangelization of the culture. We can create an icon corner at home and pray with images, and encourage our families to join in. If our participation in society extends to considering little things, it can have a similar impact: social graces and good manners are natural modes of behavior that indicate respect for others in accordance with the natural hierarchy and for the dignity of those we engage with. Even the attention to what we wear can send out visual messages. It is right to dress up on certain occasions, and even the seemingly innocent trend of no longer wearing ‘Sunday best’ for church contributes to the destruction of the faith more than we imagine, for it tells others that we don’t respect the Person we encounter in church as much as those who might be in a position to give us employment when we go for a job interview.

In summary, sacred art impacts nearly every aspect of human life and is powerful in propagating and preserving the Faith. This is why the Church commanded us to create and venerate images and why those who hate Christianity seek to destroy them so aggressively!

Above, Allegory of the Faith, by Johannes Vermeer. This devotional rather than liturgical. As such, it is a piece of sacred art that depicts allegories…an allegory of allegories! My internet investigation came up with the following symbolism, for your interest:

The Female Figure: Dressed in blue and white, symbolizing heaven and purity, she personifies the Catholic Faith (or the Church itself). Her hand rests on her heart, indicating that true faith dwells inwardly.

The Spheres:

• Terrestrial Globe: Her foot rests firmly on the globe, signifying the universal dominion of the Church over the earthly world.

• Glass Orb: Hanging from the ceiling, the reflective sphere symbolizes heaven and the divine realm, its mirror-like surface evoking the contemplation of God’s infinite nature.

The Conflict of Good and Evil:

• Crushed Serpent: A large stone (the cornerstone of Christ) crushes the serpent (Satan and evil), with blood flowing from the wound to emphasize victory over sin and death.

• Bitten Apple: Lying nearby, the apple refers to original sin and the Fall.

The Altar Table: A simple domestic table is transformed into an altar bearing a crucifix, chalice, and open missal. This evokes the clandestine practice of the Mass in hidden churches within private homes during the Dutch Republic, when public worship was forbidden.

The chapel was built in the Gothic style and completed in the 1920s. It was not intended to house the Mass - Princeton has a strong Presbyterian history. However, it is interesting to note that the Protestants in the early 20th century, who one might have thought would not have been attentive to such things, were able to create imagery evoking the Eucharist that surpasses what many Catholic churches today can offer.

On sunny days, when the imagery in the stained glass is visible, we can make out an image of the Last Supper, then, working upwards, the Risen Christ, and, above that, the Crucifixion. This speaks of what is taking place at the altar below, especially to those at the back of a very large church, who would not be able to see much of what is going on in detail.

In the window at the other end of the chapel, there is an image of Christ in Majesty, which portrays the Risen Christ to the faithful who have participated in the Eucharist and are partaking of the divine nature and so have ‘put on Christ’.

Recently, the Director, artist Robert Puschautz, asked if I would publish a short article by him about the implementation of what I had spoken about, as he was pleased with its impact on the students and faculty. Of course, I was happy to do so. It is posted below.

He describes how the students taught themselves, based on my original instructions, to chant the psalms. I recommended they do this as part of their spiritual life as Christians, of course, but also as a way to stimulate their creative imaginations as artists and open their hearts to inspiration from God, should He choose to offer it. The musical method that is described in my upcoming book, Musica Domestica, a two-volume book of music for the domestic church, co-authored with Andrew Goldstein of the Vigil Project, and to be published by Word on Fire in late Fall 2026

Robert wrote:

‘At the beginning of the 2025 academic year, David Clayton, Scala Foundation Artist in Residence, Provost of Pontifax, iconographer, and writer, visited the Stabat Mater Studio to offer a series of talks highlighting the essentials of training in visual Sacred Art. He discussed using technical mastery of drawing and painting to serve a Christian worldview, one that points beyond the natural world. He also spent a good deal of time championing the use of chant and a simplified version of the liturgy of the hours. David emphasized that an artist creating work for the Catholic Church’s liturgy ought to be immersed in it daily. After hearing David, a number of students and teachers decided to spend additional time learning his simple method for chanting the psalms in the Gregorian modes.

‘I was skeptical that we could implement much of what David taught us, despite his generous sharing of the psalms and materials. Furthermore, lacking musical training, I didn’t feel confident leading the charge to incorporate the practice. I was surprised, however, to find that some students were eager to take the lead and start our days with a version of Morning Prayer. We started very simply with one mode and one leader, and the remaining students mimicked the same tone on the following verse. It took some time for us to develop the habit of praying consistently and beautifully, but each trimester we improve and have introduced an additional mode for singing. Slowly but surely, it has become an essential part of how we start the morning at our studio.

‘Inspired by the monastic tradition of table reading, we, in addition to our morning prayer routine, read aloud to the students during their lunch hour on Tuesdays and Thursdays from texts relevant to their artistic and Catholic development. Recently, we have been reading through David’s The Way of Beauty. This has led to great discussions afterward about the importance of idealization for sacred artists, the study of geometry, and the necessity of beauty in all aspects of life. Although most of our time is spent developing technical mastery in drawing and painting, we believe that these simple practices of chanting and prayer in community will deeply form students into artists imbued with a sense of the sacred and as part of the Body of Christ.’

For more information on Stabat Mater Atelier and to see Robert’s work, go to stabatmater.org

The Good Samaritan After Morot by Rachel Perry, 35 x 47 oil on canvas, 2025. This was her ‘masterpiece’, the detailed imitation of a great work of the past, done as part of her training

Introduction

There is a widespread assumption that the arts, the sciences, and the Christian faith occupy separate worlds – that a traditional training in music, painting, or poetry is a pleasant supplement to a serious education, but hardly essential to it, and that faith is a private matter with no bearing on the life of the mind. I believe both assumptions are wrong, and what follows is my attempt to explain why. My aim is to show not only that a formation in beauty is one of the primary conditions of human creativity – including scientific creativity – but that a worldview shaped by Christian faith, far from being an obstacle to rigorous enquiry, is in fact the ground from which that creativity most naturally grows.

What makes this argument different from the usual defence of faith and culture is its direction of travel. The conventional approach takes science and reason as the standard and then attempts to show that faith and the arts can meet that standard – that they, too, are rational, that they, too, have their evidence and their logic. I want to reverse the direction. My argument is that science itself rests on foundations it cannot justify by its own methods – it rests on premises accepted by faith – and that those premises are, historically and philosophically, the inheritance of the Christian West. It is not faith that needs to justify itself before the tribunal of science. It is science that, on examination, turns out to depend on faith.

I begin by examining the premises on which the scientific method rests, arguing that because they are historically derived from a Christian worldview, science and the Catholic Faith are not merely compatible, but share a common origin and a common structure, both resting on premises that reason alone cannot establish, and both proceeding by the application of reason to those premises in search of understanding. I then turn to the process of scientific discovery itself, showing that while reason is indispensable to science, the creative moment – the generation of the original hypothesis – is rooted in intuition rather than discursive reason. That intuition, I argue, is the same faculty developed by a traditional formation in beauty: a formation that comprises both the appreciation and the creation of beautiful art forms. This formation, I argue, should include the study of the traditional mathematics of beauty, which was part of the Western educational tradition for centuries until the modern era and which, for scientists and mathematicians especially, will serve as a natural bridge between science and faith.

To strip a formation in beauty from education is not to produce more rigorous scientists; it is, I would argue, to produce less creative ones, less fully human ones, and less joyful ones. I make this argument in the context of a discussion of science education, but what I say applies to all education and to every vocational specialization within it. To live a life rooted in beauty and creativity is to live life gracefully and joyfully.

The founding premises of science derive from a Christian worldview

The scientific method rests on several foundational premises: that the natural world is real and that we can perceive it through the senses; that it has an intelligible order which we can discern through the application of reason to what the senses give us; and that mathematics is the most powerful language yet discovered for expressing that order, even where it does not capture it fully. Further, this order is assumed to be universal – unchanging across time and space, operating identically both in the laboratory and at the far reaches of the universe.

It may surprise many people to learn that these premises are historically derived from a Christian worldview and are incompatible with many other philosophical and religious traditions. The explanation lies in the recovery of Aristotelian philosophy in the medieval West – its translation, study, and gradual integration into Christian thought, above all through the work of the mendicant orders of the 13th century: Dominicans such as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, who argued that reason and revelation illuminate rather than contradict one another, and Franciscans such as Bonaventure and Roger Bacon, the latter of whom is often credited as one of the earliest advocates of systematic empirical investigation. It was this synthesis – Greek confidence in the rational intelligibility of the natural world, united with the Christian conviction that a personal God had created and ordered it – that provided the intellectual milieu in which the scientific method could take root and eventually flourish. It is no accident, therefore, that modern science developed in the Christian West.

For most people living in today’s secular world shaped by science and technology, these premises will likely never have been explicitly articulated, not even in science education – they are simply absorbed as the invisible background of educated life. I speak from experience: I have two graduate degrees, in metallurgy and materials science, but was never once presented with them in this form.

The portion of the population who almost unknowingly take these axiomatic truths for granted, which is the vast majority of the population, includes many working scientists, who accept them unquestioningly even when they profess a view of reality – such as scientism – that would, if examined carefully, undermine the very premises on which their work depends. However, such a scientist, when carrying out science, behaves as though these premises are true, often not pausing to ask whether their declared philosophy of life permits them to do so.

Scientism is the belief that the scientific method is the only reliable path to knowledge, and that any claim which cannot be verified by it – that is, cannot be scientifically proven – is therefore meaningless or merely subjective. Crucially, the premises upon which the scientific method is based cannot themselves be tested by the scientific method. To attempt to do so would be to commit the logical fallacy of circular reasoning – using the means of testing to validate the very assumptions on which that testing method depends. This is why scientism, which many people today claim to adhere to, is internally contradictory.

There is a deeper point here that is worth making explicit, particularly for readers who hold the Catholic Faith. Catholic theology teaches that faith is not simply a conclusion reached by natural reason, but a gift – a grace by which God moves the intellect to assent to truths that appear reasonable precisely because he causes them to do so. If this is so, then the premises of the Faith and the premises of the scientific method are not merely compatible; they share a common origin. Both ultimately rest on foundations that, traced far enough, lead to the same source: God, who is the author of both the natural order that science investigates and the faith by which we receive the worldview that makes that investigation possible. And both share the same fundamental movement: the acceptance of premises that reason alone cannot establish, followed by the application of reason to reach understanding – what St Anselm called fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. In this sense, science depends on faith as much as theology does. They are not merely compatible. They are, at their roots, reflections of the same gift and the same movement of the human mind toward truth.

The scientific method tests hypotheses against reality

Given these foundational premises, the scientific method proceeds by developing a hypothesis about the order of the natural world. But the process by which a hypothesis is formed and then validated has two quite distinct stages, and conflating them leads to confusion about the nature of scientific creativity.

The first stage is the formation of the hypothesis itself. This typically begins with an intuitive leap – a moment in which the scientist senses, one might say, rather than deduces, that a particular explanation might be correct. From this initial intuition, reason and mathematics take over: the scientist asks whether the assumptions embedded in the idea are internally consistent, whether they are consistent with already established science, and whether they can be expressed in mathematical form. This process of internal testing – working out the logic of the proposal – may involve many steps of discursive reasoning before anything is ready to be tested against the world. But the first step in the development of the hypothesis, more often than not, is intuitive rather than logical.

The second stage is validation of the hypothesis, so that it becomes a theorem. Recognizing that human reason is fallible, that data can be wrong or incomplete, and that assumptions embedded in the testing logic may be inaccurate, a hypothesis is not considered scientifically proven until it has been tested against reality. The traditional validation is to ask: does the natural world, in some domain not yet tested, behave as the hypothesis predicts – and does it do so repeatedly? This is the moment of descent from the elevated world of abstract ideas and mathematical expression in which the hypothesis exists, to the world we observe with our senses. Only when this condition is satisfied does a hypothesis – something that is possibly true – make the transition to a theorem – something that is probably true. This is the highest level of scientific proof - probably true. A theorem, though considered more reliable than a hypothesis, is always open to revision or rejection if fresh data appear inconsistent with its predictions. This has happened many times in the history of science.

It should be noted that this classical account of the scientific method describes an ideal that is not always honored in practice. In the softer sciences, especially, where controlled testing is difficult and mathematical description is partial, the bar for transition from hypothesis to theorem is sometimes set lower than rigor demands; and even in the harder sciences, the very human temptation to want one’s ideas to be correct – combined with institutional and professional pressures – can lead to the premature adoption of hypotheses as ‘settled’ science. Some scientists happily admit that they are departing from traditional methodology and refer to it as ‘post–normal’ science. We should always be more cautious about claims that have not been subjected to this full standard of testing, and more alert to the ways in which natural reason, however powerful, remains fallible and self–interested.

It is worth pausing on what that means in practice. Ultimately, a theorem is not validated by peer consensus or review, institutional authority, or the elegance of its mathematics, but by whether it actually works in the world. The first test, ideally, is whether the validating experiment is repeatable in the laboratory, many times, by different hands. The final test is whether it holds in the world at large: whether bridges stand, medicines heal, and computers compute useful outcomes. It is the power of natural science to affect our lives materially that convinces so many people of its validity. As one good scientist put it to me memorably: “It’s technology that keeps science honest.” It is for the same reason – the effectiveness of natural science in delivering working technology – that people have mistakenly overestimated the power of science by adopting scientism.

Scientific creativity is one of intuition rather than discursive reason

The distinctive contribution of the creative scientist whose work increases scientific knowledge is the generation of an original hypothesis. As I described above, hypotheses are not typically generated by reason alone; they arise from an initial intuitive step – an insight that explains the pattern in the data through a perception of symmetry, harmony, or underlying order.

The work of physicist Murray Gell–Mann was a striking example. In the early 1960s, he noticed that a plot of the properties of nine subatomic particles, called hadronic particles, would form a perfect triangular pattern if a tenth particle were present. Starting from this intuition, he set out to find the tenth particle with the properties that would place it at the apex of the triangle in the plot – and he succeeded. Reason was indispensable in testing the hypothesis, but the hypothesis itself arose from an aesthetic perception, not from any logic arising from physical understanding of the behavior of hadronic particles: something was missing, and its absence was felt as an incompleteness. This, I would argue, is a general pattern. An idea presents itself as an explanation, and then reason is employed to test it. The moment of creativity is not propelled by discursive logic, but through intuition.

The intuition for beauty that drives scientific creativity is formed by tradition

Where does this creative intuition come from? In my view, the capacity to “complete the picture” arises from a cultivated sense of what ought to be – that is, the product of an aesthetic sensibility which seeks to complete and account for patterns of data. This intuition is the result of a capacity for apprehending beauty, which is an intuitive grasp of the underlying order of the cosmos rooted in awe and wonder at its beauty. It is cultivated by an immersion in and contemplation of the beauty of the natural world, and with the products of the culture of man, a canon of great and beautiful works, which is likely traditional forms that derive their beauty from that of the cosmos. This development of appreciation for natural beauty should be complemented by the stimulation to create beauty through a creative pursuit. In principle, this can be any fine art or craft. It usually means the pursuit of a traditional form of practice that developed at a time when it was taken for granted that the goal was to form something in harmony with the beauty of the natural world, and that rigor and discipline were necessary in order to do so.

The person does not need to be especially talented in their chosen pursuit; the primary goal here is not so much to create a professional artist as to stimulate the person’s God–given creative faculty, which will then naturally inform all other human activities. The person with such a formation will be more inclined to be creative in everything they do. This is the essence of a traditional formation in beauty. It comprises both the appreciation and the practice of creating beauty.

For the scientist, this aesthetic sense informs and complements a deep awareness of the corpus of existing scientific knowledge – it is highly unlikely that someone who knows nothing about science will be a creative scientist, however finely formed their aesthetic sensibility may be. What we are describing here is a formation that enriches and complements a good and conventional scientific education.

This formation in beauty naturally informs all human activity, and so ought to be part of everyone’s general education. Its greatest impact will be felt in domains where a person combines deep engagement with some natural talent, whatever it may be, since it is there that each person’s potential for creativity and originality is greatest. Those who are gifted scientists, for example, will therefore benefit most from this formation precisely in the field of science.

This is why I believe the argument for arts education is not merely that it enriches life or develops the whole person, though it does both. It is that a formation in beauty is one of the primary conditions under which creative insight, in any field, becomes possible. Within the formation of beauty, time should be given to the study of traditional harmony and proportion – the mathematics of beauty. I will describe it here, as it is virtually unknown in contemporary education and particularly relevant to those with a talent for math and physics.

Beauty, like natural science, has a discoverable mathematical order

The mathematics of beauty deserves particular attention here, not least because it serves as a natural bridge between scientific investigation and the life of faith – especially for those formed in mathematics or physics, who will find in it a discipline that articulates its conclusions in the language they know best. Like the natural sciences, it begins with premises that are proposed rather than proven, proceeds by the analysis of data drawn from the natural world, and tests its conclusions against human experience; yet its object is beauty, and its fruit is the formation of the creative and contemplative imagination that finds expression in art, architecture, and music.

Its roots in Western culture go all the way back to the ancient Greeks. Its development began with the premise – supported by broad and enduring consensus – that people find the natural world beautiful, and therefore that it most likely is beautiful. Then, just as the scientist does today when investigating physical properties, it was assumed that the property of beauty is related to an order underlying the structure of the cosmos we observe. We then study nature for the mathematical patterns that seem to underlie that beauty. Having identified such patterns, they are tested against reality, as with the scientific method. That test involves creating human artifacts that incorporate the proposed mathematical patterns of beauty, then asking: Do people generally find them beautiful? If they do, and do so repeatedly across cultures and generations, we have something analogous to a theorem.

The standard of beauty is a broad and enduring consensus, not expert opinion

As with all things derived from human reason, and again recognizing the weakness of human reason, we should be ready to consider the possibility that any account of the mathematical order of beauty is likely to be incomplete – a useful simplification of the true situation, good but not perfectly accurate. We should not expect, therefore, the same degree of consensus about beauty in human artifacts as we find about the beauty of nature.

So, when considering whether something is beautiful, we look for the broadest possible consensus – one that transcends individual eras and generations. Without that breadth, we cannot rule out that fashion or social pressure is driving agreement. What we cannot rely upon is the assertion of a small group of experts or academic specialists: the appeal must be common, enduring, and multigenerational. G. K. Chesterton called the verdict of the preferences of many generations the “democracy of the dead.”

A simple example may help to make this concrete. Every year, millions of people visit Florence or Oxford – and have done so for generations. It is worth asking which buildings they come to see, and why. They do not, on the whole, come for the modern buildings on the outskirts. They come for the Duomo, or for Magdalen College, for the streets and squares whose proportions seem to satisfy something deep in the human eye. They may not be able to articulate why these buildings move them, but they feel it unmistakably. My argument is that what they are responding to is precisely the mathematics of beauty – the traditional principles of proportion, harmony, and order that governed the design of these buildings and that, once lost from our educational and cultural tradition, we have largely ceased to reproduce. This is the democracy of the dead speaking: a multigenerational, cross–cultural consensus by which people vote with their feet.

There is another word for it, and that is tradition. It is not a perfect standard, but it is generally a good one and, in my view, the best available. We look to tradition, as far as possible, in any form of art, as a guide to what is good and beautiful. This is why I recommend studying a traditional form of fine art as part of this education, as it is more likely to be beautiful.

It is also worth noting that tradition does not rule out innovation or creativity, as some who are hostile to tradition have asserted. Rather, the underlying pattern that defines any tradition sets the standard by which the goodness of innovation is measured and guides us in creating new and original forms today. We can see this in the history of culture. Across the centuries, there were many, many different styles of art, architecture, and music that conformed to traditional patterns; the potential has not been exhausted – in fact, it is infinite and inexhaustible.

The study of the mathematics of beauty is not the only discipline within a traditional formation in beauty. An artist also develops their intuitive sense, painting, for example, through imitation, copying nature directly, and imitation of the works of great masters – painting landscapes and portraits, studying the human figure, studying the works of great artists of the past, such as Velázquez or Bernini, for example. But the mathematics of beauty is a core discipline within this formation, one that informs creativity across all the arts and, crucially, one that is almost entirely absent from any artistic training today. It is, therefore, something that all creative people – including scientists – should actively seek out and incorporate into their formation, alongside practice in a fine art such as painting or music. Those who wish to explore this further may find Pontifex University’s Mathematics of Beauty course, or my book The Way of Beauty, a useful starting point. Scala Foundation’s Way of Beauty program encapsulates the essentials of a formation in beauty for those who wish to experience it.

The mathematics of beauty was transmitted through the Christian tradition – and rejected by modernism

Some may wonder why the mathematics of beauty is so little known today. As a discipline, it has a long history. Its roots in Western culture lie in ancient Greek philosophy and are associated with figures such as Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle. It was brought into the Christian intellectual tradition by prominent figures of the Late Antique period, such as St Augustine and St Boethius, and it remained foundational in art, architecture, and musical composition for centuries. However, it was consciously rejected by Enlightenment philosophers, who undermined the intellectual foundations on which it rested. Influential thinkers such as Burke and Kant argued, in different ways, that beauty could not be grounded in any objective, mathematical order present in the object itself. These ideas took time to permeate the culture, but really began to take hold with the modernist movements in art, architecture, and music at the turn of the 20th century, and by the mid–20th century, this tradition had effectively been banished from schools of art, architecture, and music altogether. Our task, therefore, is to reintroduce this discipline to the world.

Conclusion

My conclusion is this: the arts – that is, both the appreciation and the creation of beautiful art forms – are not a decorative supplement to education, nor a leisure activity for those with time and talent. They are a primary means by which the human person is formed to perceive order, pattern, and meaning – the very perception on which creative thought in every field depends.

The recovery of the mathematics of beauty – transmitted through the Christian tradition, embodied in its art, architecture, and music – is therefore not merely an aesthetic project. It is an educational one, and I believe also a civilizational one.

Underlying all of this is a deeper unity that I hope the essay has made visible – and one that runs in the direction I signaled at the outset. The conventional defense of faith and the arts attempts to justify them on science’s own terms, arguing that they too are grounded in reason and evidence. That is a case I believe can be made, but it is not the one I have made here. Instead, I have argued the opposite: that science itself, examined honestly, rests on foundations it cannot establish by its own methods – on premises accepted by faith – and that those premises are the inheritance of a Christian civilization. Science, faith, and the pursuit of beauty are not competing or contradictory accounts of reality. They are reflections of the same fundamental movement of the human mind: the acceptance, whether by the grace of God or by reasonable trust, of premises that cannot themselves be proven, followed by the patient application of reason and intuition in search of understanding. This is what Anselm meant by fides quaerens intellectum – faith seeking understanding. It is the animating impulse of the Catholic intellectual tradition, of natural science, and of the traditional formation of artists through the study of the mathematics of beauty alike. And I would argue it is equally, if less consciously, the animating impulse of every scientist who has ever looked at the order of the natural world and felt awe at its grandeur and beauty.

One final thought, which returns us to the opening. I began by speaking of education that engenders creativity and a joyful life. The connection between beauty and joy is not incidental. St Thomas Aquinas defined beauty as id quod visum placet – that which pleases when seen or known. The pleasure he describes is the calm delight of the intellect beholding proportion, clarity, and integrity in what it contemplates. This contemplative joy is available to anyone and is stimulated in those formed to perceive beauty – in a piece of music, in the structure of a mathematical proof, in the order of the natural world. And because God is supreme Beauty, such apprehension has the character of a foretaste of heaven: it draws the soul, quietly and without compulsion, toward its ultimate end. A formation in beauty does not merely make us more creative. Leads us to a joy that points beyond itself – for the beauty we perceive in this world is for all its glory, no more than a shadow cast by a greater Light. A formation in beauty does not merely make us more creative. It makes us more fully human by opening a window in this life onto the next – for in created beauty we perceive, as in a ‘glass darkly’, a reflection of the uncreated Beauty that is God himself, and are drawn quietly toward the face–to–face vision of that Beauty which awaits us in eternity.

@YouTube

Here is a presentation that I gave with Andrew Goldstein of the Vigil Project about our forthcoming book, Musica Domestica, to be published by Word on Fire Publications in November 2026. It was at the invitation of the Institute of Human Ecology, which is concerned with cultural transformation and is based at the Catholic University of America. I begin by describing the concept and its origins. I talk of the importance of the Domestic Church and family prayer and song in the evangelization of culture. I focus especially on the singing of the psalms and on why I believe the Coverdale Psalter, a traditional English translation (in the 1928 revision) used by many Protestant denominations, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians, can serve as a principle of cultural unity and regeneration in America.

Then, at the 20-minute mark, Andrew discusses the musical content and describes how the book guides families in chanting the psalms. He tells us how we can involve the whole family, and even describes how his youngest child, who can’t read yet, joins in by humming along with the drone note. You can hear Andrew and his wife chanting the psalms in the Musica Domestica way.

Here is my opening statement: “You have heard it said that culture is downstream of politics. But we could also say that faith is downstream of culture, and worship is downstream of faith. If we worship well and in harmony with beautiful art, music, and architecture, we are supernaturally transformed into faithful Christian culture creators who can influence others through the joy and beauty of our lives. If we look to God first, all else follows. It is a generational task, but inevitably, if we take responsibility for our own lives and relationships, with God’s help, we will create a society that reflects the beauty of God, one personal relationship at a time.”

Above is a convent that looks like a prison, and here is a Victorian prison, Lincoln Castle Prison, now a listed building, which looks like a palace. The nuns’ cells seem less appealing than those of the prisoners!

Beauty and Utility

It is common for people with traditional tastes to criticize modern architecture as ugly. Its ugliness arises, they say very often, because it is designed on utilitarian principles in accord with the common slogan, ‘form follows function’. The architectural style that developed from this idea in the 20th century is known as functionalism, and it is the movement from which modern architecture emerged. Its most famous proponent was the Franco-Swiss architect Le Corbusier.

The problem with this approach, so the common criticism goes, is that the architect has not considered how to make his design beautiful, as he is only interested in creating a building that serves its function.

For example, imagine a newly built library in a contemporary utilitarian style. Many people with more traditional tastes will likely think it is ugly. The reason for that ugliness, they would say, is that the architect considered only how it could house and provide people with access to books - its ‘utility’ - and made no effort to incorporate a beautiful design. Such critics typically argue that the architect ought to have made it both beautiful and useful.

I would very likely dislike the appearance of such a building too, but would argue the case slightly differently. I would say that when any human artefact with a good purpose is made well, it is necessarily beautiful. Beauty is not an add-on to usefulness. Rather, when the library is designed for optimal utility, it is inevitable that it will be beautiful. Beauty, as I see it, is intimately bound up with utility (properly understood), because when it has integrity, everything about it is in conformity to its purpose.

The problem with our imagined ugly library is not that the architect was a strict utilitarian who considered only how the building would be used. Rather, the problem is that he had a diminished understanding of the true utility of a library. Because he only considered the narrow material needs of those who might read its books, he did not understand the full purpose of a library. If people are to be at ease and able to read in peace and tranquility, the building must be a beautiful environment for reading.

These additional functions of a beautiful library relate to our spiritual needs, which, for the Christian, unlike our hypothetical atheist, materialist architect, are even more important than our material needs. Any information that we read and which is grasped by the intellect will impact our spiritual lives, too. It is important that the environment predisposes us to be open to both spiritual and intellectual formation through what we read.

We can look to church architecture for inspiration here. Traditional church architecture fosters contemplation of God. The main focus of the design of churches is as a place of worship, and the activity of worship properly includes the engagement of the intellect through the reception of information that is imparted to us via both the written and spoken word. It is appropriate, therefore, that the design of a library should draw on that of a church so that we learn what we read in such a way that it raises our hearts to God even in the library, just as it does in the church. Traditionally, this is precisely what we observe. It is no accident that the libraries of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges are adaptations of church architecture, built, for example, in the Gothic style, which originated as a style for churches. The design of a college library is not identical to that of the college chapel, as it is appropriate to the function of a library, but it is closely related to it.

This does not suggest that every human activity has a spiritual component. Rather, it is saying that, since the human person is a unity of body and soul, even activities directed primarily towards the good of the body must also affect the soul.

Take, for example, the most mundane activities, say, cleaning our teeth. I brush my teeth daily because I want to be healthy, and I don’t want my breath to smell bad. I cannot, for the life of me, see how I can brush my teeth spiritually. I doubt that a Christian mystic and an atheist materialist Communist will brush their teeth any differently. However, physical health contributes to my well-being and, in an indirect way, to my spiritual health, thereby enhancing my capacity to undertake the work of the Lord. While it is possible to overcome ill health and remain of sound mind and spirit through grace, it is nevertheless an aid to my spiritual health to be physically sound as well. As something that is God-given, I should do all that I can to maintain bodily health. So even something as mundane as a toothbrush suited to its purpose will, therefore, have a beauty that speaks of this greater picture of the benefits of cleaning our teeth. Its beauty will work in harmony with its primary purpose and will incline us to use it for the good of our health. This is the utility of beauty in a toothbrush! Therefore, it would be reasonable to incorporate traditional proportions, rooted in the beauty of the cosmos, into toothbrush design.

When, unlike a toothbrush, the object we are considering does have a direct impact on the spiritual life, such as on how we pray, as is the case with a church building, then it is all the more obvious that its beauty, which directs us to God, has a direct impact on our ability to carry out that activity well. The beauty of sacred art that hangs inside the church also plays a direct role in raising our hearts to heaven. This means that while ugly toothbrushes are unlikely to lead us to hell, the environment’s impact on worshippers’ souls should be considered of paramount importance. Therefore, everything associated with the liturgy, for example, the art, music, architecture, and vestments, must be appropriately beautiful to serve its purpose well.

Is Beauty Worth It? Doesn’t It Cost Too Much to Make Beautiful Objects?

First, as a general principle, it is not a given that it is more expensive to make something beautiful than it is to make something ugly. Overall, the beauty of artefacts is a function of design. Mass production and industrialization, which lead to lower production costs, are not, contrary to what is commonly asserted, necessarily processes that automatically produce aesthetically undesirable products. It is as easy to mass-produce something beautiful as it is something ugly. The ugliness of today’s culture is driven as much by poor design principles as it is by economic considerations.

A large basilica built in modern design is typically even more expensive than one built in, say, a traditional Romanesque design, as evidenced by the recent building of the neo-Romanesque church of St Mary in Kansas, which comes in at significantly less cost than the ugly modernist Los Angeles Catholic Cathedral despite being on a similar scale.

While this is not automatically the case, as stated, sometimes creating something beautiful can cost more than its ugly equivalent. Even when the cost is higher, it is an investment that yields economic returns. For example, houses built to traditional proportions typically command higher prices on the open market, which more than offsets any additional construction costs. These buildings cost more, incidentally, not because designing beautifully is intrinsically more costly, but because the current templates of mass production of house parts, for example, window dimensions, do not reflect traditional harmony and proportion. As a result, window frames have to be made individually. If they were mass-produced, the costs of building houses in traditional, harmonious proportions would come down.

I would argue that if we wish to consider the souls of those who use what we create, then we must endeavor to make beautiful objects and do so in a cost-effective manner. An ‘investment’ in the souls of men will pay off.

When faced with the dilemma of whether to spend money on beautiful churches and sacred art, a common objection is that it would be better to give it to the poor. This is an old but false argument (one that goes back to Judas!) that I would counter as follows:

Consider the gospel account of Martha, Mary, and Judas (Luke 10:38-42). Many will be aware of this story of the two women acting as hostesses, in which Mary washed Jesus’s feet with expensive nard while Martha attended to the other guests’ needs and complained to Jesus that she was doing all the work. Judas, the keeper of the apostles’ funds, also complained that the money spent on expensive nard would be better spent on the poor. It is common to interpret this story by focusing on the contrast between Martha and Mary’s attitudes. However, we can also contrast Mary’s attitude with that of Judas. Here is a lesson about the allocation of resources:

Mary made the right choice, we were told, in choosing Christ even before giving to the poor. There is an equivalent choice facing us today whenever we have to decide whether to have beautiful churches and art, intricate vestments, ornate, jewel-studded chalices, and so on. Is it right to direct money to these things when there is poverty? The answer is yes, when these things, through the liturgy, elevate the souls of the faithful to Christ. Directing wealth toward the creation of beautiful churches and church artefacts is a more noble use of resources than giving it directly to the poor, which, in fact, will result in greater benefits for them. Why would we say this?

First, all of us, rich or poor, can go to church, and we all need our souls saved. So, in church, the poor benefit spiritually as much as the rich do. Beauty is a common good equally available and equally beneficial to all who encounter it, rich and poor alike.

Second, the poor will benefit materially as well. Faith inspires charity and will directly inspire the rich to give to the poor. Furthermore, it will enable greater wealth creation for the benefit of the poor, thereby elevating their dignity. This is a result of the principle of superabundance at work. Superabundance is the creation of something out of nothing, or of more from less. The Christian life lived according to the principle of love is always fruitful in so many ways—and when it is, God works through us, and it invokes the principle of superabundance.

Benedict XVI addresses the principle of superabundance through charity in the economic sphere in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate (CV). He argues that love may be present even in the ordinary economic transaction. When it is, it not only creates wealth, as all voluntary economic transactions do, but also builds the dignity of all concerned, for even economic transactions suffused with love are raised to a level beyond the material. This interaction contributes to the creation of a community that, through every interaction, including economic ones, builds the dignity of those involved and, in turn, generates greater material wealth by encouraging more economic activity, because a culture of trust and love encourages people to trade with one another.

Benedict explains it as follows:

“Because it is a gift received by everyone, charity in truth is a force that builds community; it brings all people together without imposing barriers or limits. The human community that we build by ourselves can never, purely by its own strength, be a fully fraternal community, nor can it overcome every division and become a truly universal community. The unity of the human race, a fraternal communion transcending every barrier, is called into being by the word of God-who-is-Love. In addressing this key question, we must make it clear, on the one hand, that the logic of gift does not exclude justice, nor does it merely sit alongside it as a second element added from without; on the other hand, economic, social and political development, if it is to be authentically human, needs to make room for the principle of gratuitousness as an expression of fraternity.

“In a climate of mutual trust, the market is the economic institution that permits encounter between persons, inasmuch as they are economic subjects who make use of contracts to regulate their relations as they exchange goods and services of equivalent value between them, in order to satisfy their needs and desires. The market is subject to the principles of so-called commutative justice, which regulates the relations of giving and receiving between parties to a transaction. But the social doctrine of the Church has unceasingly highlighted the importance of distributive justice and social justice for the market economy, not only because it belongs within a broader social and political context, but also because of the wider network of relations within which it operates. In fact, if the market is governed solely by the principle of the equivalence in value of exchanged goods, it cannot produce the social cohesion that it requires in order to function well.” (CV, 34-35)

A Church whose liturgy inspires holiness will foster the atmosphere of mutual trust that Benedict speaks of, thereby generating increasingly productive economic activity.

During his papacy, Pope Francis made headlines with regular calls for charity toward the poor, citing St. Francis of Assisi as a model. To this day, the Franciscan order is characterized by a mission of charity for the poor. But it should not be forgotten that God commissioned St Francis to rebuild Christ’s Church, and the Franciscan order responded by ministering to the poor and by building grand and beautiful churches. Consistent with the principle that Benedict later cites, the Franciscan order did not regard investment in beautiful churches as contrary to its mission to help the poor. They became the great patrons of the art of their age, and many of the great artists from the time of St Francis were third-order Franciscans or were commissioned by Franciscans to work on their churches - Giotto, Cimabue, Simone Martini, Raphael, and Michelangelo. There is no austerity in the Franciscan churches of the past—the Basilica at Assisi is richly decorated from floor to ceiling.

If we are to help the poor in America, we begin, as the Franciscans did in medieval Italy, by striving to transform the Church through beautiful liturgy, art, and architecture. This will, in turn, evangelize the culture and change all men’s hearts, making them more inclined to help the poor in their own community. It will also create a national culture that fosters mutual trust, by which, as a by-product, the economy will grow, so that many will have jobs and greater dignity to support their material needs and aid them in their pursuit of holiness.

This is the third in a four-part series exploring a Christian philosophy of art and beauty. In the first post, I examined what art is and what makes it good and Christian. Last week, I looked at the traditional process of artistic creation and the effect that beauty has on us when we apprehend it - how it wounds us with desire for something beyond itself, ultimately for God. This week, I take up what is perhaps the most contested question in all of aesthetics: how do we know whether something is beautiful? Is beauty subjective - merely in the eye of the beholder, or is it an objective quality that can, at least in principle, be discerned and judged? Or is it a bit of both? I argue that while individual judgments differ, tradition provides the most reliable collective measure of what is truly beautiful, far more reliable than the fashions of any single generation or person (…even me!) or the opinions of university elites.

Next week, I will conclude with the practical questions of beauty and utility and consider whether or not the creation of beautiful things is simply too expensive to justify.

How Do We Know What is Beautiful?

This is not always easy to answer with certainty, so we must look to tradition for help here.

We follow the traditional assumption that when we apprehend beauty in the world around us, we are discerning a property that belongs to the objects regarded. Consistent with this, we call beauty an objective quality. The subject—the person who views the object—makes a personal judgment on its beauty. To categorize beauty as an objective quality is not to say that everyone makes the same judgments. Clearly, there is a varying subjective element to the apprehension of beauty, as we all know, because there are differences of opinion about what is beautiful.

There is no contradiction in recognizing that there may be a differing subjective response to the same objective quality. There are several reasons two people might look at the same object and differ in their sense of its beauty. It might relate to the proper functioning of the senses: someone who is colorblind will very likely have a different sense of the beauty of something than someone who differentiates colors well.

A second reason concerns legitimate differences in the perceived goodness of the object. Some things can be good for one person but bad for another. The sound of a babbling brook, for instance, has the beauty of the sweetest music to the man who is dying of thirst, but is horrifying to a man who is drowning and sees the water level in the pond rise due to that brook.

A third reason relates to the person’s attitude toward God. Given that beauty is a sign of the divine, someone who hates God will hate beauty also and so be disinclined to accept that it is beautiful. The power of beauty to delight any particular person depends on whether or not God delights or repels him. It is important to note, therefore, that when we stated earlier that it is intrinsic to beauty to delight us, the assumption is that the person is properly ordered in his desire for God, which, in practice, will not always be the case.

Nevertheless, these subjective responses do not undermine the principle that beauty is an objective quality too. The fact that we may have differing abilities to apprehend that quality does not change the fact that we are responding to a reality - the form and appearance of the object itself. It is just as with any physical property that might be investigated by natural science. For example, two different scientists determine an object’s mass differently depending on the quality of the equipment they use to measure it, but that doesn’t mean the object has two different masses. It simply means that it is difficult to determine the mass precisely. So it is with beauty. The fact that it is difficult to know for certain that something is beautiful doesn’t undermine the principle of objective beauty.

Until the modern era, very few people dissented from the idea of beauty’s objectivity. For example, the philosopher most often cited by Catholics on the nature of beauty is St. Thomas Aquinas, who consistently treats it as an objective quality.

According to St Thomas, to be able to apprehend the beauty of an object, we need to know certain things about it:

First, we must know what we are looking at (if we are discussing visual beauty) and its purpose—this is called clarity. If we look at something and have to ask, ‘What is it?’, then it lacks this property of clarity, and we will struggle to determine whether it is beautiful.

Once its purpose is clear to us, we intuitively judge how well suited it is to that purpose and how good or noble that purpose is. When we judge whether something is well-suited to its purpose, we are considering a property known as integrity.

Then, we judge how appropriately its various parts are arranged within it to have high integrity—this is called due proportion. When it has a due proportion, all the parts are arranged within the object so that it can be well suited to its purpose.

The assumption here is not that people systematically consider these elements, one after another, before deciding whether something is beautiful. On the contrary, people just react instinctively and instantaneously to what they see, and in a moment, they see beauty, or they don’t. What St Thomas is describing through his own observation is what properties are present in things that many people, in general, see as beautiful. Similarly, knowing that beauty consists of these sub-categories does not help us to ascertain by reason what is beautiful, for in judging each aspect - clarity, integrity, and due proportion - we are still making personal judgements in regard to each sub-category. We can be no more certain in our judgment of these sub-categories than we can in our judgment that the whole is beautiful.

So, where can we look in order to ascertain what is beautiful? Is there any authority that we can trust? The traditional approach to resolving this difficulty is to seek a broad consensus. So, we can begin to create a measure of beauty that might be accepted by all by considering the common reaction to beauty. When we fully apprehend something as beautiful, we delight in it because we can see its goodness in the context of God’s purpose. St Thomas Aquinas observed this phenomenon and then based his definition of beauty on it. He told us that pulchra dicuntur quae visa placent, which means ‘things that give pleasure when they are perceived are called beautiful’. Here, he is telling us the ‘common sense’ of beauty. There is no assumption here that all people individually form the same opinion when observing a single object or react in the same way when they see something beautiful. Rather, he is describing the ideal that emerges from the general pattern of observation of many people.

This description of the essential elements of beauty assumes an interrelatedness between the observer and the observed object. Accordingly, for someone to be able to observe an object, that object must radiate information about itself to us so that we can perceive it with our senses. For this reason, beauty is often defined alternatively as the radiance of being.

When something is lacking in one or more of these things, we take less delight in its appearance, and we might call it ugly. Ugliness is considered to be a ‘privation’ of beauty. So when viewed in this way, ugliness is not actually a property that anything possesses; rather, something is ugly when it is not as beautiful as it ought to be. Ugliness is, therefore, a sign to us that the object is not fully what it ought to be.

There are various reasons something might be judged ugly.

The object might be distorted or damaged somehow, and so lacks due proportion and integrity because it cannot fulfill its intended purpose. Alternatively, it might be that it can fulfill its intended purpose, but that purpose is evil.

It might be that we are not fully apprehending the object, and it lacks clarity. Perhaps the object is not radiating sufficient information about itself to us, as might be the case in the dark. Alternatively, our senses may be impaired. A blind man cannot appreciate the beauty of a painting.

Even if the object is beautiful and our senses are good, we might misunderstand what we are seeing. This can be, for example, because our intellects are not fully equipped to process information from the senses, or because, even with our sinful natures, we misjudge or reject the good we see. (All these considerations become particularly complex in the judgment of the beauty of people, and we will discuss this later.)

In the properly ordered world, all things would be as they ought to be, and we would have the capacity to recognize this. In such a world, all would be beautiful, for all things exist and are made by God or man to contribute in some way to His glory.

However, we live in a fallen world in which many things are not perfect, and our capacity to judge such things is also impaired, so there appears to be much ugliness in the world. Nevertheless, an imperfect object is still good, even if not as good as it should be. It is still beautiful, even if not as beautiful as it should be. Notwithstanding these imperfections, all aspects of Creation can serve as signs that point us toward the good and our role in the world. We are called to participate in God’s creative work and direct our efforts to the perfection of all things through cooperation with grace. To the extent that we achieve this, we will be good stewards of the world, elevating the natural world by fashioning matter into beautiful art and architecture, and by creating beautiful gardens, farms, homes, and cities. To the degree that we achieve this, contemporary culture will also be beautiful, surpassing even the beauty of the wilderness - the natural world untouched by humans - for we are raising the wilderness up to something higher.

The Importance of Tradition to a Culture of Beauty

I have argued that beauty is an objective quality but that people can, for various reasons, differ in their ability to apprehend it. This, in turn, leads to different opinions about what counts as good art and what counts as bad art. When there is a difference of opinion, one might ask, “How do we know who is right? What standard is there to help us make such a judgment?”

This is not an easy question to answer. In another context, if we were considering the morality of someone’s action, for example, we might look to the Magisterium or to scripture directly for an authoritative judgment. Murder is wrong, for example, because Scripture tells us so.

However, God has not revealed an equivalent ‘Ten Commandments of Beauty’. As a consequence, rational arguments that one thing is more beautiful than another or that my judgment is more accurate than yours are usually fruitless because there is no accepted visible standard to back up such a claim.

Some might ask: what about the criteria already mentioned—integrity, clarity, and due proportion—can I apply them to obtain a definitive answer?

These can help to a degree, but the difficulty here is that we still have to make a personal judgment on the degree of integrity, clarity, and due proportion that the object possesses, and so are effectively left with the same difficulty, except multiplied by three!

The capacity of unaided human reason to judge beauty is so variable that we cannot be sure of the validity of any single judgment.

All is not lost, however. Just because it is difficult to be sure that any single human judgment is good, it doesn’t mean that we have no measure at all. We know that human nature is drawn to beauty just as it is to the common good; thus, we can examine the broad patterns of most people’s likes and dislikes over time in society to consider what is beautiful. We might term this the ‘common taste,’ analogous to concepts such as common sense, common law, and the highest of these, the common good.

The common good is not a physical good that is to be divided up so that a small part is given to everyone; rather, it is a metaphysical principle, the Good, which is ultimately God, to which we are all drawn naturally - although we can exercise free will in rejecting the call of God. It is termed the common good because when someone does what is good, it is good for the person and, simultaneously, good for society as a whole.

The ‘common taste’ or, put another way, the common sense of what is beautiful, is that standard that emerges over time and in consideration of most people in a society. It is a tradition that preserves and passes on this common taste over generations. As cultural phenomena, artistic traditions can vary across societies, even while retaining universal principles. For example, within the iconographic tradition of sacred art, each national church tends to develop its own style, so that Greek icons are distinct from Russian icons, which are distinct from English Romanesque icons. These are different traditions of iconography, each beautiful in its own way.

Therefore, the best way to determine whether a work of art is beautiful is to ask what tradition tells us about it. That is to say, if something has been considered beautiful by many people for a long period of time, then there is a greater chance that it is beautiful than for those objects that people appreciate for a short period of time. Tradition is not an infallible guide, but I suggest a more reliable guide than a panel of elite intellectuals in a university art department…or even, dare I say it, sacred art writers on Catholic blogs!

In consulting tradition, we consider the society for which a beautiful object was intended. So we would say that the cosmos was made for all men to behold. If we want to consider whether or not the cosmos is objectively beautiful, we ask ourselves if men have generally thought that it was.

Similarly, in sacred art, the best guide to the goodness of the style is its impact on the worshipers for whom it was intended. Does it, overall, draw people to God as intended? The pool of people to draw on in this latter category is much smaller than ‘all men’, and so the reliability of the judgment of the effect will be less certain, but it is still the best that we have.

Popular Culture vs Tradition

This appeal to general opinion will likely disturb some readers who, sensing that popular art and popular culture are low-brow and superficial, worry that it is an overreliance on democracy and popularity. Doesn’t this just tend to the lowest common denominator, rather than an elevated common taste, one might ask? In the short term, the answer is, very possibly yes. However, if we give at least as much weight to the past as to the present, we have a chance, at least, of overcoming the vagaries of fashion. The next generation will not know much of what is popular today. However, some popular items will remain known and appreciated in subsequent generations, and these are more likely to be truly beautiful. Chesterton called this approach of considering past and present opinions the ‘democracy of the dead’. The more we look at the art that transcends its own time and has been considered beautiful by many people in the society for whom it was intended, the greater chance we have of being able to choose the best.

I would argue that we should be so respectful of tradition that, in judging the best art, we should adopt a general principle referred to by Benedict XVI as a ‘hermeneutic of continuity’1. By this principle, the default position is always with tradition. We assume that tradition has the best answer, content, and style unless we have compelling evidence to the contrary. If current needs are identical to those of the past, we conform to tradition. Where needs differ, we may respond accordingly and adjust accordingly to the extent those needs are met. The artist’s whim is not considered here. This principle was articulated by Pius XII in the encyclical Mediator Dei when he said the following:

What we have said about music applies to the other fine arts, especially to architecture, sculpture and painting. Recent works of art which lend themselves to the materials of modern composition, should not be universally despised and rejected through prejudice. Modern art should be given free scope in the due and reverent service of the church and the sacred rites, provided that they preserve a correct balance between styles tending neither to extreme realism nor to excessive “symbolism,” and that the needs of the Christian community are taken into consideration rather than the particular taste or talent of the individual artist. (Mediator Dei, 195)

These principles guide our judgment. There is room for much variation, individual expression, and taste while remaining in conformity with the principles Pius articulates. This is true of all artistic traditions. A tradition is not defined by unbending rules that cannot be adapted to different situations. Rather, every identifiable tradition, such as the Baroque, Gothic or iconographic traditions in art, conforms to core principles that characterise it unwaveringly, but those principles can be applied differently according to different needs. Indeed, it is the mark of a living tradition that it can always adapt to contemporary needs without contravening the principles that define it.