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.

The Traditional Process of Art Creation

Because I am a painter and painting is what I know best, these discussions will focus, for the most part, on visual art - paintings, sculptures, and mosaics, for example, which are created to engage and appeal to us through their visual appearance. For such words of art, if they are good and Christian, their beauty is intrinsic to their purpose and to the reason for their creation by a good artist. For example, an icon might be painted to direct our thoughts to contemplation of a saint’s life during prayer, but if it is not beautiful, it will not fulfill this purpose effectively.

The beauty of such objects can arise from a number of different things, as we shall discuss shortly, but typically we call a work of art beautiful when we delight in its appearance because we recognize the skill used by the artist, the grace and beauty he employs in its creation, the goodness of any message it communicates to us, the goodness of its overall purpose, and how well it fulfills that purpose.

The traditional understanding of the process by which a good work of art is created is as follows: The original idea arises in the mind of the artisan or artist—that is, the one who makes art—and, deciding that he has good reason to do so, he fashions matter at his disposal in conformity to that idea.

In this sense, all art is representative, as it represents an idea or image that first occurs in the artist’s imagination or in his mind’s eye.

Where do good ideas come from? The primary source of the idea is information derived from the senses, usually something the artist has already seen and remembered, or something viewed directly. This might be a landscape that he is looking at as he paints, or another image or painting that he is copying. But the aspect of the imagination is never absent from the production of art. Even when a painting is based on reality—for example, a portrait or a landscape—the final product will be an integration of the reality before the artist and memories of similar experiences and images, presented through the artist’s imagination. The way images from memory are integrated into the painting shapes their individual style. Therefore, in traditional artist training, when the goal is to form an artist to paint in a particular tradition, say iconography, copying the works of past masters is always part of the program of study. The intention is to fill the student’s memory with images deemed artistically desirable or useful and to influence the imagination.

Figurative, Abstract, and Decorative Art

We have said that all art must represent an idea or image that existed first in the artist’s mind. Sometimes this idea is based on a prototype, a material entity that we would recognize instantly, such as a man or a landscape. We might call this figurative art. Sometimes, however, the art may be more abstract and can manifest ideas of spiritual or non-material truths through symbolism and signs.

There is a longstanding tradition of Christian ‘abstract’ art that is highly decorative and beautiful, containing a carefully worked-out symbolic language. An example of this is the geometric-patterned art on a Gothic church floor. Such geometric patterns embody mathematical symbolism that, for example, speaks to the prototypes of scripture. An octagon, for example, can symbolize Christ as the ‘eighth day’ of Creation.

Not all abstract art is so symbolic. Even non-figurative decorative art, intended to delight through its beauty and without explicit symbolic content, directs us to God simply because it is beautiful. The beauty of this decorative art arises from its resemblance, through the combination of shapes and colors, to the beauty of the cosmos.

Beautiful Christian decorative art is ‘abstract’ in the true sense of the word. It manifests the underlying order of the cosmos, which has been abstracted, that is, drawn out from the matter in which the order was observed, and represented in some other way in the design of the art.

More about Beauty: Beauty is the Light of Christ, and It is a Sign of Him

Beauty is a quality that calls us to itself and then beyond to the source of all beauty, who is God. In this sense, it wounds us by creating a desire for something we cannot have. When we observe a beautiful sunset, we admire it, but part of us remains dissatisfied, wanting more. We become aware in some sense that something is missing, something that is even more noble and beautiful than the sunset.

This desire for something more is, in its purest expression, a desire for God which has been awakened in us by the beauty of the created world. Recall our picture of the gradually darkening rings of light in the mandorla in our discussion of the Transfiguration icon in a previous post (see The Icon of the Transfiguration as the Symbol of Cultural Transformation). The rings of the mandorla encircle Christ like the concentric layers of an onion. All that is beautiful, but which is not Christ himself, sits, figuratively speaking, somewhere on one of these rings and directs our attention inwards towards Christ, who either created or inspired this beauty. A beautiful work of art, by virtue of its beauty, always directs us to Christ, the Beautiful One. Even if a work of art is not an image of Christ Himself, it directs us to Christ if it is beautiful, because Christ is the perfection of that beauty. For example, a painting might draw us to the beauty of the cosmos by depicting a landscape, and, in turn, reflecting on it, we might be moved to praise the Creator who made it.

Beauty always speaks to us of another world and another time, and simultaneously, of all time and all worlds, for it speaks of heaven and eternity. It is a perceptible sign of the invisible God.

Over these four posts, I hope to lay out a coherent Christian philosophy of art and beauty, drawing on classical thought, the insights of St Thomas Aquinas, and the living tradition of the Church. This week, I begin at the beginning: with the question of what art actually is. It sounds almost too simple to ask, and yet we live in an age that has quietly abandoned any agreed answer — with consequences that surround us on every side. I will also consider what distinguishes good art from bad, and what makes art distinctively Christian, arguing that a work need not carry an explicitly religious subject matter to be genuinely Christian in spirit.

Introduction

We live in an age that has largely lost confidence in its own artistic tradition—an age that fills galleries with objects whose claim to be “art” rests not on beauty, skill, or purpose, but on the artist’s assertion alone. To recover a culture of beauty, we must begin at the beginning: with a clear understanding of what art actually is, what makes it good, and what makes it distinctively Christian. This long article sets out to do precisely that. Drawing on the ancient traditions of both Greece and Rome, on the philosophical insights of St. Thomas Aquinas, and on the living wisdom preserved in the Church’s artistic heritage, we will explore art not as an arbitrary exercise in self-expression, but as a purposeful act of making—one rooted in skill, ordered toward beauty, and capable, at its highest reaches, of drawing the human soul toward God. Along the way, we will consider how beauty is known and judged, why tradition is a more reliable guide to it than individual taste or critical fashion, and why the creation of beautiful things is not a luxury to be weighed against other needs, but a form of participation in God’s own creative work that pays for itself.

What is Art?

The word ‘art’ can have a variety of meanings today, and it might be impossible to come up with a definition that all will accept, but here we will focus on ideas of art that are likely to appeal to the traditionally minded Christian and for which we might find a consensus amongst non-Christians also.

Looking to traditional understandings in Western culture, we find that the ancient Greek techne and Latin ars both denoted “skill,” “craft,” or “technique”—a learned proficiency in creating or producing, encompassing all practical trades, such as carpentry, as well as what today we might call the fine arts, such as poetry or painting. An “artefact” is the product of techne in action, and the artisan is the one who creates an artifact. When we speak of an “artist” today, we typically have in mind someone who creates works of fine art.

But how precisely would we define fine art today? How does the mainstream art world define it? We want to answer this question if only to be sure that when we discuss art with others, we at least know what they believe it to be.

One might think that the major art galleries would provide a definition, given that their whole raison d’être is the exhibition of art. However, a review of the websites of major art galleries such as MoMA, Tate, and the National Galleries of England and America doesn’t provide much help. In fact, I couldn’t find any definitions. Perhaps they assume we all know what art is and that a definition is unnecessary; or perhaps they hesitate to put anything in words because they struggle to find a definition that applies to all the artifacts they show in their galleries.

The British Museum, which is more traditional in its outlook, provides (albeit buried in a training program newsletter) a good working definition of what we would call fine art, closer to the ancient idea of art as the product of techne, as described above. This can be a good working definition for us. It says:

“The definition of art can vary depending on the context and the cultural, social, and historical background in which it is created. However, art in general can be defined as a creative expression of human skill and imagination that aims to communicate an idea, emotion, or message to an audience. This can include a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, music, literature, film, and other forms of artistic expression.”1

Good Art and Christian Art

For Christians, adopting this working definition from the British Museum and building on it, we might then ask: what constitutes good art? And, what constitutes Christian art?

In response, I would say that good art is art (as defined above—“a creative expression of human skill and imagination”) that fulfills a good purpose well. We define a good purpose as one consistent with a Christian worldview. This means that art can be Christian even if it does not explicitly express a religious theme or message. For example, a beautiful landscape that communicates the beauty of Creation is a work of Christian art, even if the artist had no explicitly religious intention in painting it and was not a Christian himself.

We would further say that all art is a manifestation of an idea (which might also be an emotion or a message) or an image that first exists in the artist’s imagination before being fashioned into material form. This picture in the artist’s imagination is, in traditional Christian anthropology, taken directly or assembled as a composite from information gained through sensual experience.

The creation of art, from the Christian perspective, is bound up with the creation of something beautiful. Art requires beauty to fulfill its purpose—if a work is not beautiful, it is not good; this might seem a strange proposition given that there is a place for the representation of ugliness, evil, and suffering in art. However, if the art is to portray a Christian understanding of these things, it must also communicate the purpose of these evils within the economy of grace. God must permit evil in the world for good reason, and it is the responsibility of the Christian artist to communicate that message, too. Otherwise, he is not communicating the full truth

For the Christian, even in the face of evil, suffering, and ugliness, there is hope. When infused with hope, the portrayal of these otherwise ugly realities becomes beautiful. This is exemplified by depictions of the Crucifixion. A well-executed Crucifixion is a beautiful work of art. This beauty is created through the artist's treatment of the image—through skillful choices in line, tone, contrast, and composition, for example. In this way, a good artist presents the greatest crime ever committed without diminishing the profound evil it signifies, but rather by infusing the work with Christian hope—a hope that surpasses all the evil and suffering depicted.

To depict suffering or evil without simultaneously offering hope is, for a Christian, not the full truth. It presents an incomplete picture that can lead to despair. It is through beauty that Christ’s hope is communicated to us, for beauty naturally speaks of God's love (more on beauty later).

Sacred art is the highest form of art, characterized by an explicitly sacred or religious purpose. Liturgical art—created to help us worship God—is the noblest form of sacred art, since worship of God is the highest expression of love for Him and the greatest human activity.

For Christians, the creation of art is intertwined with the pursuit of beauty and divine inspiration. When we recognize the goodness of a work of art, we call it beautiful. As such, good art serves as a sign of the divine—beauty in good art is a visible sign of the work of the unseen God, either as Creator, as seen in the beauty of the universe, or as the God who inspired its creation, through human effort. Therefore, beauty tends to awaken in us a desire for something greater than what we see—the source of that beauty, who is God Himself.

Above: mock-ups of the proposed re-ordering; below: the cathedral as it is now.

This major project builds on Martin Earle’s award-winning Crucifixion and establishes a well-conceived template for the layout of sacred art that could serve as a template for churches of the Roman Rite elsewhere. The result is a proposal that is a harmony of imagery, form, and materials rooted in the Church’s ancient traditions, yet particular to its place, which Catholics around the world should follow closely.

Read more about this project and see images of the proposed art and reordering at www.beautyforgod.org. The images of the proposed reordering come from this website. The key elements are:

• A redesigned altar, ambo (lectern), and bishop’s chair crafted from Scottish elm and stone

• A new tabernacle in wood, metal, and stone as the devotional focal point behind the altar

• A new painted mural on the East Wall by award-winning artist Martin Earle

• A new sanctuary floor with colored granite from across North-East Scotland

• Conservation of the Rose Window

I came to know Bishop Hugh of Aberdeen, who commissioned this work, through his years as Abbot of Pluscarden Abbey, a community of Catholic Benedictine monks (which is in the diocese of Aberdeen), where I am an Oblate. He was called to the episcopate by Pope Benedict. I am delighted to see what he has planned here. Many years ago, he commissioned a double-sided San Damiano crucifixion from me, which still hangs in the abbey. More recently, when he asked me to repeat the commission for St Mary’s in Aberdeen, I told him I was unable to take it on, but recommended Martin Earle to him as the best artist I know for such a commission. And what a spectacular job he did!

Many of you will already know Martin’s work (martinearle.com). He is an English Catholic iconographer who works in fresco, egg tempera, gilding, wood and stone carving, and mosaic. The nine-foot hanging Crucifix he completed for St Mary’s — the first phase of this grand vision — was awarded the Grand Prize in the Catholic Art Institute’s international sacred art competition in Chicago in 2023. Phase 2 now builds upon that foundation.

When I talked to Martin about it, he was at pains to emphasize how a team is working together on this project. First of all, he spoke of Bishop Hugh’s vision and initiative in bringing it about. Then Martin worked with fellow UK artist Jim Blackstone (dunstanicons.com) (and another old friend of the Scala Foundation), on the design of the wall painting. He also told me how important it was to work closely with the architect, David Chouman (dcarchitect.co.uk), who leads and coordinates all the moving parts in the project, and even the stone masons who worked hard to comb the diocese for suitable and interesting stone to create the inlaid pattern work on the floor, altar, and ambo.

Emphasizing the team is important. In a project like this, all these people contribute creatively to the final outcome. The lesson here is that such a commission is rarely simply the vision of one person.

At the heart of the new composition on the east wall behind the altar will be a large-scale wall painting of Pentecost. The design creates a single vertical axis that visually connects Christ on the cross, Our Lady, the tabernacle, and the altar, which represents the Body of Christ and bears the Agnus Dei on its front face. High up on the wall, the Trinitarian symbolism of the design at the center of the rose window crowns the whole. Notice how the arc of the arrangement of the apostles echoes that of the lower curve of the rose window, creating a resonance between the artistic and architectural forms. The tabernacle doors bear the image of the Annunciation, echoing, albeit on a smaller scale, the typical imagery of the Royal Doors of the iconostasis in the Eastern tradition, which are opened during the Divine Liturgy to reveal the altar. A procession of sheep moves toward the tabernacle, recalling the famous mosaic program at San Clemente in Rome, and integrating naturally with the Agnus Dei below it on the front of the altar.

Considering the composition in more detail (and drawing heavily here on the write up on the website, beautyforgod.org), we begin to see how it mirrors the Liturgy itself — making visible what happens invisibly when the Word is proclaimed, and the Eucharist is celebrated. We begin with the Church on earth, gathered at Pentecost: Mary at the center, the Apostles around her, the descent of the Spirit visually linked to the Crucifix above the altar and Christ’s final giving up of his Spirit. Moving upward, we see the heavenly liturgy: the Lamb of God standing on the mountain from which flow the four rivers of Paradise, angels ministering around him, and the hand of the Father blessing from above. The depiction of the Lamb on the heavenly mountain is reminiscent of the Ghent Altarpiece, where the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb unites the heavenly and earthly realms in a single act of worship. By such visual devices, the point is made By such visual devices, the point is made that the earthly liturgy does not stand alone — it is the Church’s participation in the ideal and unceasing worship of her heavenly worship, so that what is offered at the altar below and what is offered before the Throne above are not two acts of worship but one: the single, unbroken sacrifice of the whole Church, in heaven and on earth..

The Prophets and Apostles frame this mystery. Isaiah receives the burning coal; Ezekiel eats the scroll — each prefiguring the Eucharist and the proclaimed Word. Paul and John carry the mission forward after Pentecost, and one could say that rivers of grace flow through their books, nourishing the faithful as the lambs below process toward the tabernacle.

A word about the images: do not be misled by the light, pastel tones of the watercolor mockup. Martin’s finished palette will be rich and vibrant. However, the description of form will be by color rather than by tonal contrast. The Crucifixion, which is intended to be at the heart of the schema, uses both color and tonal contrast. To explain, imagine a grayscale photo of the final color image. The grayscale image of the painting that uses tonal contrast as well as color contrast will be discernible as a black-and-white photo; whereas the greyscale image of the painting that relies on color contrast alone will not, so red and blue, for example, will be barely distinguishable in the black-and-white version. In this context, as Martin told me, the image on the east wall will rely “more towards a Castelseprio style, where forms are gently described and modeled using contrasting cool and warm colors (rather than leaning into tone). And not all forms will be outlined with dark lines. The idea is that the east wall will set off, rather than overwhelm, the cross, which will remain the central image of the sanctuary, with the altar the true axis mundi that connects heaven and earth. All other images in the sanctuary are derived from and direct us to the meaning of the cross and altar.”

What emerges, taken as a whole, is a layout that is distinctly Roman and Eucharistic in its logic — yet one that will be familiar to anyone who has prayed before the image program of a Byzantine Catholic or Orthodox church, in which we see angels, prophets, apostles, Our Lady and Our Lord (both in glory and suffering), ordered to the same theological and liturgical principles. This makes the design not merely an image appropriate for Aberdeen, but also genuinely Catholic in the fullest sense.

The reordering also addresses the architecture itself. The bishop’s cathedra will be moved from its current position in the center. The floor will be laid in different colors of Aberdeen granite — a fitting material for a city known as the Granite City, and one that speaks also of the permanence of the Rock upon which the Church itself is built.

When complete, the harmony of art and architecture at St Mary’s will, I believe, make the cathedral a worthy site of artistic pilgrimage for generations.

As a postscript, for those who think that the strong visual emphasis on Christ suffering on the cross is much more a Roman than a Byzantine presentation: it is true that in the traditional schema of the Eastern iconostasis plays down emphasis of Christ on the cross visually is the sense that it is of a small size compared to what we seen in Roman Rite churches. However, the cross is typically placed centrally and at the apex of the iconostasis, thereby ordering the whole schema in the mystery of redemption. Further, the emphasis in the liturgy on the importance of the cross in our redemption is stressed very strongly in other ways: by playing down the size of the cross visually, the impact of the sacrifice, the passion, death, and resurrection as re-presented on the altar becomes stronger; and through the repetition of troparia (liturgical hymns that emphasize the Holy Cross. Both approaches are sound, differing in emphasis in the means by which the same end is achieved.

I am also reminded of the brilliant book by the Chair of Theology at Notre Dame University, Khaled Anatolious, who is Melkite Catholic (one of the Byzantine Catholic churches), called Deification Through the Cross: An Eastern Christian Theology of Salvation.

Margarita has been honing her love of beauty by giving tours of the spectacular Gothic Princeton University Chapel. She will explain the content and the symbolism of the spectacular stained glass and the images depicting the unity of human reason and supernatural knowledge. I will talk to the young musicians on the faculties of creativity and co-creation with God in the creative process in art and music for the liturgy.

SAVE THE DATES! June 13 and June 19

We are particularly pleased to once again welcome the musicians to the chapel at Princeton Theological Seminary for a free lecture and performance on Saturday, June 13th, at 11:30 am.

A second public concert with talks will take place at 7 pm, Friday, June 19th, at St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Princeton, NJ.

More details forthcoming, but save the date for this incredible public event!

APPLICATIONS NOW OPEN

Please share this incredible opportunity with young musicians—applications are open until mid-April.

Conducting Institute with Dr. Timothy McDonnell – June 7-13, 2026

Composition Institute with Sir James MacMillan – June 14-20, 2026

Choral Institute with Gabriel Crouch – June 14-20, 2026

In-depth information about each program can be found on the CSMP website. Peter will be in touch with more details about each program soon, but for now, please look at the programs to see if you would be interested in applying, and forward the information to any musicians you know who may be interested.

sacredmusicproject.org

The following first appeared as an interview in The Catholic Herald. Jan Benz, who conducted the interview, teaches at Blackfriars College, Oxford.

Jan wrote:

For many Catholics, the experience is familiar and disquieting: newly built churches that feel more like conference centres than places of worship, stripped of ornament, symbolism and the Holy. The question of ugliness in modern church architecture is often dismissed as a matter of taste or nostalgia. Yet for David Clayton, artist, educator and one of the most articulate contemporary defenders of traditional Catholic aesthetics, the issue runs far deeper. At stake is not merely style, but theology: how the Church understands worship, the human person and the relationship between beauty and truth.

In this conversation, Clayton argues that modern ecclesial ugliness reflects a loss of Catholic inculturation, a failure of formation, especially in seminaries, and a philosophical rupture that predates the Second Vatican Council by more than a century. Drawing on Benedict XVI, classical harmony and proportion and the liturgical traditions of East and West, he makes the case that beauty is not decoration but necessity: a formative power that shapes belief, prayer and even faith itself.

Jan C. Bentz (JCB): Many modern churches appear deliberately resistant to beauty, ornament and symbolic density. Do you think this widespread ugliness is primarily a failure of taste, or does it reflect a deeper theological, or even anthropological, confusion about what a church actually is?

David Clayton (DC): It is, I would say, a combination of all three. There is certainly a failure of taste, but that failure itself is rooted in something deeper: a loss of awareness of Catholic tradition and of how that tradition is inseparable from theology and anthropology, specifically, the Church’s understanding of what man is and what worship does to him.

We have become dislocated from our own inheritance. That rupture is largely the result of inadequate education and formation among Catholics today, and unfortunately this includes the formation of priests in seminaries, where these questions are often not given the attention they deserve. One of the most significant gaps is a lack of understanding of form, by which I mean not simply what is depicted, but how it is depicted. Style, proportion, harmony and architectural language all express a philosophical and theological world-view.

When this connection is lost, architecture and art are reduced to matters of personal taste. And taste, when it is not properly formed, becomes highly susceptible to contemporary trends and cultural fashion. People end up liking what they think they ought to like, rather than judging according to universal principles. At that point, beauty no longer refers to reality but to preference. That, I think, is at the heart of the problem.

JCB: You mentioned formation, especially in seminaries. Do you think there is an active lack of education in these areas? Should seminaries be more intentional about teaching beauty across architecture, art and music?

DC: Yes, very much so. Seminarians may encounter aesthetics in a philosophical sense, but what is really needed is a deeper Catholic inculturation. They need to be formed within a living tradition, not simply taught concepts in isolation. If you look at Orthodox or Byzantine Catholic priestly formation, the contrast is striking. Their clergy are required to understand what icons belong in a church, how iconographic schemas function and how art, architecture and liturgy work together as a unified whole. They are formed liturgically in a very concrete way. By comparison, Roman seminaries often teach what the liturgy is without sufficiently explaining how architecture, music and visual art are ordered towards it. There is, in short, a significant gap in formation. Without that integration, priests are left unequipped to make informed decisions about church buildings, and the results are all around us.

JCB: Do you see a connection between this loss of formation and a post-conciliar loss of confidence in symbolism, transcendence and tradition more broadly?

DC: Yes, but it is essential to be precise here. This is not the fault of the Second Vatican Council itself. Rather, the Council was used as a pretext by those who already wished to introduce changes, often in ways that directly contradicted what the Council actually taught.

Following Benedict XVI, especially in The Spirit of the Liturgy, I would trace the deeper roots of this problem back to the early nineteenth century. The real issue lies in a distorted understanding of worship itself and in the separation of liturgy from the artistic forms that properly belong to it.

Architecture is not merely a neutral container for worship. The church building actively forms those who worship within it. Its structure, orientation and beauty guide the faithful towards participation in the liturgy. When this formative role is forgotten, worship becomes increasingly internalised and cerebral, almost purely intellectual.

As long as liturgical structures were fixed and immovable, they exercised a kind of corrective force. But once change was permitted without sufficient theological grounding, the floodgates opened. What we saw after the Council was not a sudden rupture but the acceleration of a trajectory long in the making.

JCB: Turning to architecture more directly: are modern movements such as functionalism or Brutalism fundamentally incompatible with Catholic liturgical theology?

DC: Yes, because these movements are grounded in materialist philosophies. They fail to acknowledge the metaphysical and spiritual dimension of the human person. Ironically, they are not even functional in the fullest sense, because they do not fulfil the true function of a church, which includes nourishing the spiritual life of those who worship there.

Utility has been reduced to purely material concerns: keeping out the rain, ensuring audibility and accommodating bodies. Those things matter, of course, but they are not sufficient. Beauty is not optional. It is essential, because it raises hearts and minds to God.

And not just any beauty will do. A railway station can be beautiful, but beautiful as a railway station. A church must be beautiful as a church. Its form must be ordered towards worship, towards encounter with Christ in the Eucharist.

Brutalist architecture, in particular, quite literally brutalises man by reducing him to a creature with purely material needs. Designing a church according to such principles is therefore incoherent.

Traditional harmony and proportion presuppose that beauty is objective, that it is rooted in reality itself, even though it is perceived subjectively. This assumption was undermined by Enlightenment philosophy, especially by Kant’s separation of perception from reality. Once that happens, beauty becomes merely emotional response.

Those ideas eventually filtered into architecture schools. By the mid-twentieth century, traditional harmony and proportion were no longer taught. Interestingly, many architects understood they were rejecting Christianity long before Christians themselves recognised it.

JCB: Defenders of modernist simplicity often argue that it fosters humility and prayer. How would you respond?

DC: Accessibility is important. People should not need a university education to respond to beauty. Traditional forms achieve this remarkably well, but they are not simple. They are complex, in the same way that the cosmos is complex: immediately accessible, yet inexhaustible.

The claim that complexity distracts is ancient. It goes back at least to the iconoclastic controversies, and even figures such as St Bernard worried that beauty might draw attention to itself. But authentic beauty does not trap the gaze; it draws us beyond itself, towards its source, who is God.

Experience overwhelmingly confirms this. The forms that have endured in Christian worship are not simplistic designs but richly ordered ones, capable of forming the soul precisely because of their depth.

JCB: Finally, on a practical level: if a parish or diocese were to build or renovate a church today, what principles should guide the project?

DC: The first principle is to find the right architect, someone deeply immersed in tradition. Whether classical or Gothic matters less than whether the architect truly understands a living tradition. But it is equally important not to reproduce the past uncritically.

Here I follow the guidance of Pius XII and Benedict XVI’s hermeneutic of continuity. We do not change forms unless we must. Modern elements may be incorporated, but only if they genuinely serve the needs of the worshipping community.

The liturgy is the wellspring of Catholic culture. Architecture, art and music must flow from it. Only then can the Church engage modern culture discerningly, rejecting what is harmful and integrating what is good.

If we begin with worship, grace will do the rest. Beauty will attract. And from that beauty, a truly Catholic culture can once again emerge.

Andrew is choirmaster at The Chapel of the Cross Reformed Episcopal Church since 2013, Dittman composes sacred music for weekly liturgical performances. His work is rooted in traditional forms and sung in English and Latin. He draws on a range of influences, including plainchant, Renaissance and Baroque counterpoint, creating compositions that are both timeless and approachable. Like Paul Jernberg (who composes for the Roman Rite) and Roman Hurko (who composes for the Byzantine Rite), Dittman represents a new generation restoring sacred music to its proper place.

Historically, high culture and popular culture were not divided—composers like Mozart and Beethoven drew from a shared cultural font rooted in the sacred, resonating with both aristocracy and ordinary people. To restore this unity, we need fresh creativity in traditional forms of music that is both timeless and speaks to the current age, with sacred music within the liturgy reclaiming its role as the pinnacle of artistic expression. Andrew exemplifies a return to this ideal.

The collection is called Kyrial and is available on Spotify, Amazon or Pandora. You can also listen to his work on YouTube at youtube.com/@aldittman

And here’s a recommendation for patrons - those choosing and paying for art for churches: if you want to have an impact on the liturgical engagement of your congregations through art—something vital for the revival of Catholic culture—the most cost-effective way is to introduce a planned full schema of art, floor to ceiling, on the apse or back walls of the sanctuary. Ideally, this would be like the iconostasis in a Byzantine church, except as a wall painting behind the altar.

Artists can now learn how to do this. Take the Writing the Light wall painting program and icon drawing program under Master iconographer George Kordis. This is a two-year, part-time hybrid program (a combination of online and in-person workshops)—see a recent post about it here. The program focuses on the Greek style of iconography, but students who want to make the School of St Albans style their own should supplement it with personal study of past works by artists such as Matthew Paris. The key is to imitate that style until it becomes your natural artistic expression. This process of copying with understanding is how, for example, artists of the High Renaissance, such as Michelangelo and Raphael, made the ancient Greek ideal their own. They systematically copied Greek and Roman statues as part of their training, as well as drawing and painting from life. So artists who wish to make the Gothic style their own should learn the skills of their craft - Writing the Light will teach them this - as they study both from life and works of past Masters in the Gothic style. It will need students with ability and drive initially, but it is most certainly possible.

Patrons, another challenge for you: consider sponsoring a talented artist from your church to develop these skills through Writing the Light. You can read more at WritingtheLight.com.

What is the School of St Albans?

The School of St Albans is the style of English illumination in the early Gothic/late Romanesque period, particularly the work of the 13th-century monk Matthew Paris, based at St Albans. The style can be seen in manuscripts like the Westminster Psalter and in wall paintings that still survive in English churches.

This is a style that relies on the description of form with line and is restrained in its use of tonal and color variation. These limitations help eliminate the sentimentality of naturalism, which is the blight of so many modern artists.

True to the Gothic spirit, by which classical sources were integrated into cultural expressions. Paris drew and painted not only sacred art for books like psalters and illustrations of the lives of saints, but also figures such as Plato and Socrates. He was also, under the renewed interest in the philosophy of Aristotle, a keen observer of nature who drew many studies of plants and animals.

Why the School of St Albans?

When I discuss reestablishing beautiful sacred art in the Roman Catholic Church, part of what we have to think about is choosing a style from the past and using it as a starting point from which it is believed a characteristic style for today will emerge. Some look at the Baroque, some at iconography. My thought is that we look at this period. The suggestion for the name of the art of this period - the School of St Albans originally came from a student in a class of mine over 10 years ago now.

My experience as a teacher is that Roman Catholics do seem to take to this style naturally and make it their own, even in a single class. You can see the work my students did in a past week-long workshop in this blog post.

When we studied images from this period, the students engaged with them much more readily—they liked them more than Eastern icons and seemed to understand them more instinctively. As a result, some quickly developed a feel for what they could change without straying outside the tradition they were working in. In contrast, most who had not seen it before found the style of Eastern icons slightly alien. In contrast, in classes teaching iconography, they had no instinctive sense of what they could change while remaining within the tradition. This meant we had to copy rigorously to avoid introducing errors. It was a bit like learning words in a language by rote, without understanding their meaning. This is not always such a bad thing—copying with understanding is an essential part of learning art—but at some point the student must apply his understanding in new ways. This latter point seemed to be reached more quickly by these Roman Catholic students when working in the Gothic style than in the iconographic style.

Can This Style Work on a Large Scale?

The style will be most familiar to readers as seen in illuminated manuscripts by Matthew Paris; generally, these are miniatures. Some have questioned whether this style would work on a large scale. I have always thought that it could be adapted to work on the walls of modern churches.

Original medieval wall paintings have been uncovered at St Albans Cathedral. I made a trip there to see them in 2018. The paintings are pale, but as we can see, they are done on a large scale and follow this same basic style—form described by line, with simple coloration. The photographs include St Amphibalus (a convert of St Alban) baptizing converts—note full immersion!—and Euclid and Herman the Dalmatian (a medieval philosopher), above.

Whether or not you are convinced that it is right to use this style today, we can certainly conclude that the artists of the period considered it appropriate for floor-to-ceiling frescoes (this church has a high ceiling). I would encourage patrons and artists to look at these and think about how they could reproduce this style in our churches. I think that it allows for large areas to be covered relatively easily and appropriately.

As a Christian, I hope for and work towards a society in which the ordering principle of the country in which I live, America, is the transfigured Christ, albeit expressed in a characteristically American way. Even beginning such work requires more than knowledge of the principles of the American Constitution and a love for America, although both would be helpful. It also requires a deep appreciation of the cultural milieu from which the Constitution and the principles of the American republic emerged.

How do we form people capable of contributing to this change? Education is important; I have devoted much of my work to it for this reason. But once again, the greatest contribution that each of us can make is to play our own part in being a model citizen, that is, relating to others as good Americans and good Christians (or as one who imitates the way of good Christians, if you are not a Christian).

How can we do this?

It is the Church's worship, the Sacred Liturgy, that is the most powerful influence on the transmission and retention of the Christian faith among its members. It is through right worship, therefore, that we will become the people who can transform society. For Catholics in particular, this means a liturgically centered spirituality in which the Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours are at its heart. The Church Fathers articulate this principle of the preeminence of worship in retaining and transmitting faith with the phrase lex orandi, lex credendi, which means ‘rule of prayer, rule of faith’. This phrase conveys the principle that our prayers, especially those in the liturgy (the highest form of prayer), most strongly shape our beliefs.

People today, who likely have never heard of the phrase, lex orandi, lex credendi, nevertheless instinctively know how important worship is to the Christian faith. This is why fights over the content and style of the liturgy are so emotional and, at times, embittered. This is not a sideshow; it does matter. It is the primary battleground in the fight for Christian faith and Christian culture. Many of those who hate the Church know this, too, and will do all they can to undermine the freedom to worship God and to introduce ugliness and distortion into the culture of worship.

In summary, if we accept that the liturgy has the most significant influence on our faith, and that our faith has the most significant impact on culture, then we can see that it is the liturgy (rather than, for example, socio-economic factors) that has the most significant positive influence on the broader culture. Other factors can influence it too, but authentic worship, as the most powerful influence, is considered the wellspring of Christian culture, and its primary influencer is Christ Himself.

Visual art plays a vital role in our worship.

The fine arts - high culture - are not matters to be considered only by aesthetes; they play a vital role in the well-being of the Church and, therefore, of society as a whole. The Church understands this and teaches that good sacred art, where my personal interest lies, along with liturgical music and church architecture, is an essential part of our worship. Thus, beautiful and dignified liturgy, along with art forms in harmony with it, is a constant need for the well-being of the Church and all Christian nations.

The Purpose of Art

Once we accept the centrality of the liturgy in governing our lives, this informs our understanding of the purpose of art. The purpose of art is to inspire and inform our worship of God, liturgical art, first, and then the whole of our Christian lives, mundane or profane art.

It has been said that all the great art movements began on the altar. This saying suggests that when we get the liturgical arts right, their form and beauty will inform all other art. When we get it right, this will happen naturally and organically in the proper order of things. This is why the liturgy is the wellspring of all Catholic culture.

We can see examples of this. For example, Baroque art originated in Italy as a style of sacred art in the late 16th century, exemplified by painters such as Caravaggio and Federico Barocci.

Once established, the baroque style of sacred art quickly became the template for non-religious art. In addition to liturgical and devotional art, Baroque artists also painted portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. Such was the beauty of these works that artists across Europe started to imitate it. Catholics, such as the Flemish painter Rubens, the Frenchman De La Tour, and the Spaniard Velázquez, adopted it; Protestants also sought to paint in this style. Rembrandt and the Dutch masters were inspired by the new Italian style of Catholic sacred art, which influenced their approach to painting.

The great beauty of baroque art, not forceful arguments made by elites in universities, persuaded patrons to commission works in this style. The same effect was observed in music and architecture, and through this organic spread, the culture of 17th-century Europe became universally baroque, and its style always spoke in some way of Christ, even when the subject depicted was something more mundane.

In England at this time, King Charles 1 recruited Rubens’s most outstanding student, Anthony (later Sir Anthony) Van Dyck, to be the court painter. The long-standing English school of portraiture, with great figures of the 18th century, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Gainsborough, was descended from Van Dyck’s portraiture.

This, in turn, influenced American painters, such as Gilbert Stuart, now known for his portraits of George Washington, who adopted the English style.

The influence persisted until the 20th century. In my opinion, the last great painter in the Baroque style was an American who died in 1925, John Singer Sargent.

The culture that created this great art form was Catholic, but both Catholic and Protestant Christian cultures sustained it. By the time Sargent died, contemporary culture was moving in a different direction, away from Christianity, and the style of modern art followed suit.

To transform American culture, therefore, we American Christians, and particularly Catholic Christians, must worship well, draw others to our faith by our conduct and our love for those with whom we interact personally, and strive for art forms that connect with good worship. The most beautiful art forms that emerge from this will eventually dominate because their beauty will persuade all Christians to adopt them. It will be a supply-side process! This will then become the driving force for a new, contemporary culture that is informed by and speaks to the faith and values of Christianity in a uniquely American way.

In the Office of Readings, one of the Hours of the Divine Office, on the Feast of the Epiphany, the second reading is from a sermon by Pope St Leo the Great. The passage closes with the following words:

‘Dear friends, you must have the same zeal to help one another; then, in the kingdom of God, to which faith and good works are the way, you will shine as children of the light: through our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with God the Father and the Holy Spirit for ever and ever. Amen.’

Our lives and our whole life’s work—and art is part of this—must participate in this Light. If we can move even partially towards this ideal, the effect will be irresistible. In America, as in every nation, it is our Christian worship that drives us forward to the Light and transforms us into people of the Light.

Freedom, love, and the culture of nations

Love is by nature freely given (the moment we are compelled to love, it is no longer love!). Therefore, freedom - the freedom to love God and neighbor - is a necessary condition for a beautiful culture.

What is freedom? Many feel that freedom is simply the absence of constraint and compulsion. That is part of it, but the traditional approach has a deeper understanding. In the traditional understanding, freedom is best understood as the capacity to choose the practicable best. ‘Practicable’ here means what can be put into practice.

Therefore, three components must be present for us to be fully free and to choose the best course.

The first component is the absence of constraint or compulsion; the second is a full knowledge of what is best for us; and the third is the power to act in accordance with what is best.

The good that is best for each of us in the context of a society is known as the ‘common good’. When we act in accordance with the common good, we also do what is best for ourselves. In the proper order of things, the personal and common good are never in conflict. The most obvious guides to seeking the common good are the moral law and the principles of justice prescribed by Christ’s Church. All authentic and beautiful Christian cultures emerge from the freely taken actions of the members of society toward the common good.

It is in the interest of a Christian society, therefore, to promote freedom by a system of laws that are just, and so give security to the individual to act in accordance with the freedom to be moral and good. Such a system of laws would, in part, be directed at restraining people from interfering with others' freedom. The state also encourages the formation of people through an education that will help them to know the common good. The state fulfils its role by enabling effective teachers, especially parents, to teach well. If these conditions are satisfied, a culture of beauty will emerge naturally and organically from the bottom up.

Analogously, and regarding supporting the fine arts, I believe it is better to strive to create the conditions that promote the freedom to pursue art as a career than to impose the elitist vision of what art ought to look like onto people from the top down. In this context, the freedom afforded to an artist is understood as imparting knowledge of what forms of art might benefit society, as well as the skills, means, and inclination to create it. As a general rule, a top-down rigid imposition of artistic standards almost always restricts freedom and undermines the chance of creating an authentically beautiful culture.

A society’s pattern of positive law (those laws created by human government) will inevitably be different from one nation to another, even for nations seeking to create laws for all the right reasons. The truths of the natural law, which inform positive law, are eternal and universal principles. Still, this universality of the principles does not mean that human society immediately and uniformly comes to know and apply them in exactly the same way in all places. Human knowledge must progress slowly, in stages, step by step, and organically, or else it is not a true “human society” at all. It does so through trial and error, gradually seeing what works best. Therefore, until the end times, each society will take a different path towards this knowledge.

The good Christian society recognizes the difficulty of knowing fully and applying well the universal principles of the natural law, and thus, the good Christian society seeks the aid of revealed truth, which is Tradition (that is, Christian Revelation), and the experience of past laws to help guide reason. God revealed truths for two reasons, St Thomas Aquinas tells us, first because some truths are beyond the grasp of reason (for example, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the resurrection of the body); and second, God also revealed moral truths that, although part of the natural law and accessible to natural reason, would “only be discovered by a few, and that after a long time, and with the admixture of errors” (ST Ia Q1,1 co.). Arising from this, there are two important reasons why the pattern of exercising freedom will differ from one Christian nation to another. First, principles that are well understood can still be applied in different ways across societies without contravening them; second, knowledge or understanding of a principle is unlikely to be perfect or complete and will vary from nation to nation, each believing it knows best.

Accordingly, different Christian nations are free to observe the experience of other nations, imitate what is best in them, and adopt what is beautiful and good from them. This way, in the proper order of things, each nation is part of a family of distinct and autonomous nations, each helping the other to find what is best.

As already stated, a culture is a sign of the society’s core values that produce it, and is beautiful to the degree that it is Christian. We should be aware that this is true even in societies or countries that would not think of themselves as Christian. An Islamic nation, for example, has a beautiful culture to the degree that its culture is consistent with an expression of Christian truths, even when those truths are communicated to them by the Koran or through the discernment of natural law.

Furthermore, the Christian characteristics of different cultures connect them to one another, and the national expressions of that Christian faith, manifested in characteristic patterns of loving interaction and free behavior, distinguish these cultures from one another.

So, for example, the United States began as a nation that adopted and then adapted a system of law from the English constitutional tradition. The English constitutional tradition is a system of laws, rooted in Christian values yet expressed in a characteristically English way that is quite different from that of its neighbor, France. Over time, the American legal system developed its own national characteristics, while still owing much to its English origins, but now expressed in a characteristically American way. If American culture is to be transformed so that it may be once more one of beauty, it will assert the importance of America as a distinct nation with characteristic values that are simultaneously Christian and of a particular American-English expression. As such, one would expect similarities between English and American cultures, and a natural tendency for developments in one nation to inform those in the other. We see, for example, that in the latter part of the 19th century and early 20th century, American churches and universities were modelled on the English neo-Gothic style. They even hired English architects to build them, but an American character quickly emerged in their neo-Gothic architecture. While we can see similarities between Princeton and Oxford universities, there are also differences. One reflects America, while the other reflects England.

In citing the above example, I should clarify that I am referring to the Princeton and Oxford buildings constructed before the widespread rejection of Christian values in American and British culture, which took hold strongly after the Second World War. In both nations, many institutions, especially universities, lost a sense of the importance of the Christian faith and rejected traditional forms and Christian culture generally. Many of the newer buildings on the campuses, reflecting this anti-Christian worldview, are ugly in my opinion.

Oh dear…here is Princeton University Art Museum, which opened in November 2025