The Beauty that Pierces the Heart: Joseph Ratzinger’s Christological Understanding of Beauty

Art, Beauty, and the Magisterium¹

The Pope is your friend.… We need you. We need your collaboration in order to carry out our ministry, which consists, as you know, in preaching and rendering accessible and comprehensible to the minds and hearts of our people the things of the spirit, the invisible, the ineffable, the things of God Himself. And in this activity of transposing the invisible world into accessible and intelligible forms you are masters. It is your task, your mission; and your art consists in grasping treasures from the heavenly realm of the spirit and clothing them in words, colors, forms—making them accessible.²

The words that Blessed Paul VI addressed to artists during the Second Vatican Council is just one of many instances of the fruitful dialogue between the Church and the world of art that has left so many astonishing traces in our history. From the beginning of Christianity, we can witness an alliance between the Gospel and art, a relationship that encompasses the first paleo-Christian symbols, medieval art, the Eastern Orthodox icon tradition, the great works of the Renaissance, and all the other artistic expressions that followed up to today. From where does such an enduring and fruitful relationship come? Why is it that the Church and artists have engaged in this unbroken dialogue for centuries?³

There are many historical reasons that can justify this privileged relationship. The prominent role that Christianity had in Western culture, the generous patronage of many Christian leaders, the work of the various religious orders, and widespread popular piety are just a few of the causes of this multifaceted phenomenon. Following St. John Paul II, I want to suggest that besides these contingent factors, the dialogue between the Church and artists “is rooted in the very essence of both religious experience and artistic creativity.”⁴

In a letter he addressed to artists on the occasion of the Jubilee, in fact, St. John Paul II—himself an artist—meditated on the connections between God’s creative activity as described in Genesis and the artist’s own work. “The human craftsman,” he wrote, “mirrors the image of God as Creator.”⁵ Certainly the two are distinguished, for while the former, the craftsman, gives form and meaning to something that already exists, the latter, God, brings something into being out of nothing, creating ex nihilo. But, at the same time, while the infinite difference between the Creator and the creature is evident, human beings’ artistic creativity expresses in a distinctive way the likeness between them and God.

A second element that justifies the substantive relationship between art and the Church is the link between the former and the mystery of the Word made flesh. While the Old Testament forbade the representation of God in images, the Incarnation, where the invisible becomes visible, introduced into the history of the world “a new dimension of beauty, of which the Gospel message is filled to the brim.”⁶ Accordingly, artists who are constantly searching for the meaning of things and who are striving to make present the spiritual reality that their souls intuit, could not but find in Revelation a never-ending and engaging source of inspiration. That is why the Sacred Scripture has become an “immense vocabulary”⁷ (to use an expression of the playwright Paul Claudel that was dear to St. John Paul II) which artists, both Christians and not, have used to produce their beautiful works, be they pictorial, architectural, or musical. These artistic expressions of the biblical word, in turn, have greatly benefitted the Church and her children, for whom art has become a nourishing source of education and help in their journey of faith.⁸

Finally, there is another element that represents the culmination of the close relationship between artists and the Church. Even when its subject is not explicitly religious, art has the power to point in a special way to religious experience. For instance, St. John Paul II noticed that “in so far as it seeks the beautiful, …art is by its...