The Spirituality of Sacred Art

St. Thomas Aquinas

Summa Theologica

"Art is a product of the Spirit".

According to St. Thomas, the beauty of reality is a sign of the Creator's beauty. The perfections of God are known by us starting from the knowledge of created reality. All beauty is participation in divine beauty.

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The beautiful and the good "are identified in the subject, because they are based on the same reality, that is, on the form, and for this reason what is good is praised as beautiful" (Summa Theologica).  

The beautiful implies a form that arouses admiration and refers to the intellect, while the good implies a form that attracts and refers to the will. We could say that the enjoyment of beauty is joy in the knowledge of good: it combines knowledge and joy, involving the whole person.

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Doctor of the Church, 13th century

St. Augustine

Speeches on the theme of beauty

“He questions the beauty of the earth, questions the beauty of the sea, questions the beauty of the diffused and suffused air. Question the beauty of the sky, question the order of the stars, question the sun which illuminates the day with its splendor….  Question them! Everyone will answer you: Look at us: we are beautiful! Their beauty makes them known. This changing beauty .... who created it, if not immutable beauty ”?  So it is with every work of art.

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St. John Paul II in the Letter to the Artists wrote: "For this reason the beauty of created things cannot satisfy, and it arouses that mysterious nostalgia for God that a lover of beauty like St. Augustine has been able to interpret with unparalleled accents: " Late you I loved, beauty so ancient and so new, I loved you late! ""

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Doctor of the Church, 4th century

St. John of the Cross

Ascent to Mount Carmel

This is the true purpose of art: to elevate us to the contemplation of God, making us discover - look at - the beauty that hides behind beauty.

"Whenever you listen to music or other pleasant things, breathe sweet aromas, savor delicious flavors or try delicate touches, if immediately, at the first stimulus, your thoughts and affection are directed to God, drawing greater pleasure from him than from the feeling of which one rejoices only because it was the cause, then it is a sign that those sensory enjoyments benefit the spirit and elevate it ”.

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Doctor of the Church, 16th century

San Giovanni Damasceno

Speeches in Defense of Sacred Images

“God promised David that he would build a temple for him by his son Solomon and make him a dwelling place for his rest (2 Sam 7,11ff.). Solomon built it and made the cherubs, as the book of kings says, and surrounded the cherubs with gold and for all the chiseled walls around he engraved with the chisel cherubs and palms inside and outside (1 Re, 6, 23.28s.) - he does not say sideways, but around - and also oxen, lions and pomegranates. But, perhaps, is it not much more honorable to adorn all the walls of the house of the Lord with the shapes and representations of the saints, instead of animals and trees? Where is the law that orders: "Don't make a fool of yourself?" (Deut. 5,8) In reality, Solomon, who had received the gift of wisdom, made the figures of cherubs, lions and oxen without representing God - this in fact the law forbids. And so neither do we represent God when we build the image of the saints. "  

First Discourse, 20)

"God ordered to build a wooden ark not subject to corruption, to gild it from inside and from outside, and to place the tablets inside it (Ex. 25, 10s.15), the rod (Num. 17.25 ) and the golden urn containing the manna (Ex. 16:33), in memory of past events and as an anticipatory image of future ones. Who can ever say that these are not images and heralds with a powerful voice? In addition, they were not next to the tabernacle, but before the gaze of all the people who, looking at them, turned their veneration and worship to God who had worked through them. It is evident that they did not worship them, but through them they were led to the memory of miraculous events and venerated God, operator of wonders. They were images placed in remembrance, honored not as gods but as bearing the memory of divine power. "

(source: First Discourse, 17)

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Doctor of the Church, 7th century

Fra 'Beato Angelico

Great Christian artist of the early Renaissance (I do not leave any writings)

Of him they said:

Pius XII

In a speech delivered during the celebrations for the fifth centenary (1955) of Beato Angelico, Pope Pius XII said:  “It is true that to be art, an explicit ethical or religious mission is not required. As an aesthetic language of the human spirit, if this reflects in its total truth, or at least does not distort it positively, it is already in itself sacred and religious, inasmuch as it is the interpreter of a work of God; but if the content and purposes are also those that [Blessed] Angelico assigned to his own, then he will rise to the dignity almost of a minister of God, reflecting a greater number of perfections ".

The very famous Renaissance artist MICHELANGELO, seeing in Fiesole an "Annunciata" by the hand of Fra Angelico, after having looked at it and gazed at it once, said:  "It is necessary that this Holy Man saw her like this in Heaven, since she portrayed her so beautiful".   (Source: "Of the Lives of the Illustrious Huomini" by S. Domenico, Bologna, 1620, p. 415-416)

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Great Christian artist of the early Renaissance

Theological documents

What the Official Documents of the Church say about Sacred Art

CATHECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

On June 28, 2005, Pope Benedict XVI presents the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, returning to the topic: “Image and word thus illuminate each other. Art always "speaks", at least implicitly, of the divine, of the infinite beauty of God, reflected in the Icon par excellence: Christ the Lord, Image of the invisible God. The sacred images, with their beauty, are also an evangelical proclamation and express the splendor of Catholic truth, showing the supreme harmony between the good and the beautiful, between the via veritatis and the via pulchritudinis ” .

BENEDICT XVI 

In the Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis, of 22 February 2007, Pope Benedict XVI highlights the essential and necessary relationship between beauty and liturgy in the celebration of the Divine Mysteries: "The liturgy ... has an intrinsic link with beauty: it is veritatis splendor ... Beauty, therefore, it is not a decorative factor of the liturgical action; it is rather a constitutive element of it ”.

But it is above all in the memorable speech addressed, on November 21, 2009, to the artists gathered in the Sistine Chapel, belonging to all the arts and  from all over the world, that Benedict XVI deals extensively with the theme of beauty.

Recalling the tenth anniversary of John Paul II's Letter to Artists, Benedict XVI proposed an in-depth reflection on beauty and its relationship with the experience of faith: "Beauty ... precisely because of its characteristic of opening and broadening the horizons of human conscience. , of sending it back beyond itself, of looking out over the abyss of the Infinite, can become a way towards the Transcendent, towards the ultimate Mystery, towards God. great questions of existence, with the fundamental themes from which the meaning of living derives, can take on a religious value and turn into a path of profound interior reflection and spirituality ... In this regard, we speak of a via pulchritudinis, a way of beauty which at the same time constitutes an artistic and aesthetic journey and an itinerary of faith, of theological research ”.