There was a time when Christians knew that beauty saves. Not in the superficial sense of decoration or aesthetic preference, but in the deep, ontological sense: beauty as revelation, beauty as knowledge, beauty as participation in the life of God. Cathedrals lifted our eyes. Icons opened windows into the Kingdom. Chants bent time into prayer. The saints were not merely inspirational figures, but illuminated lives — burning bright with the radiance of divine glory.

But somewhere along the way, many Christians lost confidence in beauty. Not everywhere, and not in every tradition, but enough that in much of the modern West, beauty became optional, sentimental, or inaccessible. The senses were treated with suspicion. Worship became an instrument of communication rather than doxology. Architecture was stripped to utility. Music became entertainment or sentiment. For many Christians, beauty no longer revealed God; at best, it decorated the idea of God.

And yet, in the Christian East — both Orthodox and Eastern Catholic — beauty never ceased to be understood as a mode of revelation. The East preserved what the West often abstracted: that beauty is not something added to Christianity after the fact, but a manifestation of Christianity’s very heart.

Today, as Christians in the West confront a world that finds dogmatic certainty foreign and moral argument unpersuasive, beauty may be the bridge that leads the soul back to God.

How We Lost Beauty

There were several contributing factors in the loss of beauty in the West. None are total explanations, but together they form a pattern.

1. Suspicion of the Senses

At various points in Western Christianity, especially under the influence of certain strands of pietism and rationalism, the senses became spiritually suspect. A spirituality dominated by fear of idolatry and concern for purity of doctrine easily grows anxious about visual and sensory engagement.

But the early Church never believed the senses were enemies of God. The Word became flesh. The invisible God became visible. As St. John of Damascus famously wrote in defense of icons during the iconoclastic controversy: “I do not worship matter, but the Creator of matter, who became matter for my sake… Through matter He accomplished my salvation.”

Damascene’s point is not poetic flourish — it is theological realism. If God reveals Himself through matter, then material beauty participates in His mystery.

2. Worship as Information Transfer

In many Western ecclesial settings, worship gradually became oriented toward teaching and exhortation — that is, toward the delivery of information. The sermon became central. Music became a prelude to instruction. Architecture became functional.

This shift made beauty seem unnecessary. If worship is primarily didactic, then beauty is an embellishment. But if worship is ascent into the Kingdom, as the East insists, then beauty is indispensable.

St. Maximus the Confessor put it bluntly: “The Church is an image of the world… and the world is a Church.” Worship is not a meeting or a lecture. It is participation in the cosmic liturgy.

3. The Rise of Utility

Modernity taught us to measure everything by utility: productivity, clarity, output. Beauty does not submit to these metrics. It cannot be monetized without distortion, nor justified by practical results. Beauty exists because God exists — and God is not useful, but glorious.

Hans Urs von Balthasar lamented this modern loss when he wrote: “Beauty is the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach… yet it is beauty that slips in through the cracks.” When beauty is dismissed, truth and goodness soon lose their splendor. Christianity becomes correct, but not compelling.

4. The Fear of Idolatry

Some Christians feared that beauty would distract from God. But the opposite danger also exists: without beauty we forget how to recognize Him. C.S. Lewis once quipped that theology may rightly teach us that God has no body, but beauty teaches us that God has a face. Beauty is what enables the soul to say, “It is good to be here.”

5. Loss of Symbolic Literacy

Modern Western culture also lost the ability to read symbols. A rationalistic world seeks explicitness; symbols communicate through resonance. The fathers of the East never abandoned symbolic knowing. Their liturgy assumes that human beings do not merely reason, but behold.

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite wrote: “The divine is known by unknowing… by rays of divine darkness.” For Dionysius, symbols are not arbitrary. They are pedagogical — they train the soul for encounter.

What We Lost with Beauty

When beauty was diminished, Christianity became harder — not intellectually, but imaginatively. God became an idea or a doctrine rather than a presence. Faith became assent rather than participation. The soul could affirm Christianity without being moved by it.

Gerard Manley Hopkins saw this tragedy in the natural world:

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil…”

But Hopkins also saw the numbness of modernity:

“And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell…”

Without beauty, we no longer see the world as charged with God.

St. Augustine prayed: “Late have I loved You, Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved You.” Notice Augustine names God as Beauty. Not as an attribute of God, but as God Himself. When a faith community loses beauty, it loses not merely aesthetics — it loses a mode of encountering God.

What the West Can Learn from the Christian East

To recover beauty, we need not invent it. We can receive from traditions that preserved beauty as revelation.

Icons: Theology in Color

In much of the West, religious art became representational — imitation of visible nature. Icons never took that turn. They remained stylized, theological, eschatological. An icon reveals a saint not as they were historically, but as they are in Christ.

The Seventh Ecumenical Council declared that “the honour paid to the image passes to the prototype.” This is not aesthetic theory but sacramental ontology. Icons are not religious decoration; they are windows.

Pavel Florensky, the Russian Orthodox priest-philosopher, wrote that the icon “is a witness to the coming transfiguration of the world.” Beauty here is not nostalgia — it is eschatological.

Chant: Prayer That Breathes

Eastern chant — Byzantine, Slavic, Arabic, Syriac — is not performance but prayer. Its purpose is not to stir emotion but to open stillness. The voice becomes instrument. Instruments are not absent because they are forbidden, but because they are unnecessary. The human voice alone is sufficient for doxology.

Chant teaches a forgotten truth: beauty does not require spectacle to reveal glory.

Liturgy as Ascent

Alexander Schmemann famously wrote: “The liturgy is not a classroom… it is the entrance of the Church into the risen life of Christ.” In the East, the priest does not welcome the congregation as host; he summons them to attention: “Wisdom! Let us attend!” Liturgy is not horizontal fellowship, but vertical ascent.

St. Maximus described the liturgy as “the cosmic liturgy,” in which creation itself participates. This restores awe. The West, when it remembers this (and it can), becomes magnificent — think of Chartres, the Exsultet, the Roman Canon whispered before dawn.

Mystery as Knowledge

The East never opposed mystery to knowledge. Mystery is knowledge — knowledge that cannot be exhausted. Pseudo-Dionysius wrote: “The more the mind ascends, the more it becomes aware of the unsearchable depths of the divine.” Mystery protects humility. It guards against mastery of the sacred.

Thomas Aquinas agreed: “We are united to God as to one unknown.” For all of Aquinas’ clarity, he ends in unknowing. And at the end of his life, after a mystical vision, he declared his own work “as straw.”

The West does not lack mystical instinct — it simply subordinated it to clarity. The East subordinated clarity to glory.

The Sacramental Imagination

In the East, the world remains sacramental. Bread becomes Body, wine becomes Blood, not by legal formula, but because the world is already capable of bearing God. Incarnation changes ontology.

Florensky once remarked: “The purpose of the icon is not to depict the world, but to show the world transfigured.” The East never accepted the secular–sacred divide. The West did not invent that divide either — but it often conceded to it.

When beauty is restored, the world becomes permeable to grace again.

Western Voices Who Agree

None of this means the West is barren. On the contrary, the West contains some of the greatest theologians of beauty.

St. Thomas Aquinas defined beauty in terms of clarity, proportion, and radiance (claritas, consonantia, integritas). Beauty for Aquinas is not subjective — it is metaphysical. It reveals being.

Benedict XVI insisted that beauty is essential for evangelization:

“We must learn to see Him. If we do not know how to see the beautiful, we will not be able to evangelize the world.”

Von Balthasar’s magnum opus begins with a warning:

“Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the old world refused to understand itself… and the modern world… has forgotten.”

Dante’s Divine Comedy is arguably the greatest sustained theological meditation on beauty in Christian civilization. Hopkins’ poems are incandescent with sacramental vision. Even Augustine — so often claimed by the West — cries out to God as Beauty.

The West never lacked beauty. It simply lost confidence in its ability to reveal God.

Why Beauty Matters for Evangelization Today

We live in an age that is suspicious of truth claims and exhausted by moralizing. People do not trust institutions. They do not respond to argument. They are wary of certainty.

But they are starving for beauty.

Beauty does what argument cannot: it awakens longing. And longing awakens prayer. And prayer awakens communion.

Many people who have left the Church did not leave because they stopped believing in God. They left because they could no longer find Him in places that felt stripped of reverence, silence, transcendence, or awe. They left because their souls were no longer addressed.

Beauty addresses the soul directly. It does not coerce; it attracts. It does not argue; it invites.

Von Balthasar once wrote, “The beautiful is the last thing the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good.” Beauty protects truth and goodness from becoming abstractions. It makes them luminous.

Recovering Beauty Today

Recovering beauty does not require grand cathedrals or massive programs. We can begin simply:

• by lighting candles before prayer

• by restoring silence to worship

• by chanting psalms rather than merely reading them

• by contemplating an icon rather than analyzing it

• by reading Scripture aloud, slowly, until it becomes music

• by keeping the liturgical seasons as consecrated time

• by listening for the voice of God in the ache of longing

Beauty begins not with architecture but with attention.

Hesychasm — the spiritual tradition of watchfulness and inner stillness — teaches that true beauty begins in the heart. The Jesus Prayer does not require spectacle, but it carries glory.

The recovery of beauty is not nostalgia. It is not a return to the past. It is the recognition that the world is still charged with God, and always has been.

Conclusion: The Pastoral Invitation

We do not need beauty because we miss aesthetics. We need beauty because we miss God. The soul was made to behold glory. Without beauty, Christianity becomes either moral effort or intellectual exercise. With beauty, it becomes doxology.

If you have been wounded by a Christianity that felt gray, stripped, or disenchanted, you are not alone. Many of us are learning again how to see. If you hunger for a faith that is radiant, sacramental, and full of wonder, there is room for you here. Beauty is not for the elite. It is the language of the heart.

In the end, beauty does not distract from God; it reveals Him. And perhaps in a disenchanted age, this is the gift the Church must learn to give again — not argument, not anxiety, but glory.

— Joseph Michael Martinka