Jem Sullivan, Ph.D., is an associate professor in catechetics at the School of Theology and Religious Studies at The Catholic University of America. In her research and publications, she focuses on liturgical catechesis and the place of beauty and the arts in catechesis and evangelization. A member of the International Council for Catechesis under the auspices of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization in Rome, Sullivan has engaged actively in catechetical initiatives at the national and diocesan levels, including serving as lead staff to the U.S. bishops’ Subcommittee on the Catechism. Among her books are The Beauty of Faith: Using Christian Art to Spread the Good News and her just-released Way of Beauty: Rekindling Eucharistic Amazement Through Visio Divina. She is also the host of The Beauty of Faith on EWTN.

Sullivan spoke with the Register on July 12  about how beauty can save the world, including how, “in the digital culture that surrounds us, now, more than ever, we need to recover the place of beauty and the arts in the Church’s evangelization and catechesis today.”

 

How can sacred beauty save the world?

That’s a great question because it’s a phrase we’ve heard — “Beauty will save the world.” It comes from Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian novelist who wrote those words in his novel The Idiot. Pope Benedict XVI once noted that when we hear that phrase, “Beauty will save the world,” we may not realize that Dostoevsky was really referring to the beauty of Christ because Jesus reveals the face of God. He reveals divine beauty in the Word made flesh.

Pope Benedict XVI says, “Dostoevsky is really referring here to the redeeming beauty of Christ himself,” who we must learn to see, to know not only in words, but really, truly know him as the source of life. And then Pope Benedict XVI says, “Nothing can bring us into close contact with the beauty of Christ himself other than the world of beauty created by faith and light that shines out from the faces of the saints, through whom his own light becomes visible.” I love that quote because what it’s really telling us is that beauty will save the world because when we speak of beauty as Catholics, we’re really referring, ultimately, to Christ himself.

In the Incarnation, the invisible face of God becomes visible in the face of Jesus Christ. St. Paul says in Colossians 11:5 that Christ is the image of the unseen God, the invisible God. It’s interesting that the Greek word that Paul uses for image is icon. Christ is the icon of the unseen God. In his incarnation, Jesus makes the invisible God visible so that we might see and believe in him. So this movement from what is invisible to the visible, back to the invisible is really the basis for why beauty will save the world.

Here’s why beauty will save the world: The Catechism tells us that beauty is the visible form of truth and goodness. And so the Church always holds together this well of unity — truth, goodness and beauty together, three transcendentals or properties of being. If we’re looking to share the goodness and truth of the Christian faith, of our Catholic faith, which is what the Church does in evangelization, then we cannot overlook beauty.

We might speak the truths of faith that will get the attention of some people. We can speak of the goodness of the Christian moral life, and that may attract maybe fewer people. But when we point to something that is beautiful, that communicates the faith in visual or auditory forms, we’re really inviting people to go from just knowledge and understanding Christianity, the Gospel, to a personal experience of this radiant love of God made visible in Jesus Christ, as St. Paul says, who is revealing the face of the invisible God.

So beauty is a visible form of truth and goodness. And that is why beauty will save the world, because it is through beauty that we come to goodness and truth, and that saves us.

 

So the beautiful sacred art and liturgy is essential to the faith.

We know from a historical perspective, over 2,000 years of the history of the Catholic Church, there has never been a time when there are no expressions of beauty and sacred art. From the early Christian catacombs of Rome, to the Byzantine Romanesque basilicas, to the great Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages, to the sacred art of the Renaissance and the Baroque spanning the 14th to the 18th centuries, all the way down … the arts have always found a home and have flourished in the Catholic Church.

Beauty is part of our everyday human experience. Whether it’s the beauty in the form of arts that we could go and appreciate, or beauty in the natural world all around us, or the beauty of the human person made in the image and likeness of God with sacred worth and dignity — the dignity of each human life. Beauty in all of these forms are important for our spiritual journeys.

So the beauty of art is not simply for entertainment, or a dose of culture, or of an aesthetic uplift. Rather, beauty is really a path. Popes in recent years have been saying beauty is a path that can lead us to God, who is the Source of all beauty, the Divine Artist, as it were.

Look at the beauty, the harmony, the order of the created world all around us. And so to your point about connecting art, literally the prayers of the Mass, the beauty of the church building, the beauty of sacred music that we sing and pray with, the beauty of the community gathered to worship God — these are all paths leading us to the divine beauty that comes from the hand of God, the Divine Artist, and, of course, to Christ himself, who was made present in his word and sacrament in the Eucharist, the source and summit of the Christian faith, of the Catholic faith.

I would say that in the presence of what is genuinely beautiful, we are led on the path from seeing, to contemplation of some aspects of our Catholic faith, and then from contemplation to adoration and praise and worship of God. That’s how art and liturgy connect.

 

Then beauty can bring people into a deeper faith. Might it also bring people into the faith that are not Catholic and experience this?

There are many, many stories of people who are not believers, who are atheists, perhaps, or just secular people, and something about the beauty that they encounter either in nature or in a work of a beautiful work of art, a piece of beautiful music, brings them closer to God in some way that was unexpected.

That’s the interesting thing about beauty: It takes us by surprise and has a hold on our attention for however long we’re engaged in the encounter with beauty. But it leaves us changed. It leaves us transformed. 

We can say that the Catholic faith, the Christian faith, responds to the deepest longings of the human heart for truth, for goodness and for beauty. And we know that the search for truth, goodness and beauty is written by God on our hearts. That’s what the Catechism (319, 2500-02) says. Of all the creatures that God created, God made human beings with this capacity for beauty.

So it’s a way in which it calls us out of ourselves to gaze on something that is reflective of God, or God’s own beauty, and then leads us to this praise and worship and adoration. So beauty is disarming. It takes us off guard. It can remove many of the obstacles that a person who may be outside of faith would be struggling and wrestling with and helps us to experience something of God’s love and mercy as it takes the form of the beautiful.

 

That answers why so much beautiful art is “at home” in the Catholic Church.

It’s interesting to note that, for centuries, the Catholic Church was the principal patron of the arts. Go to Europe, and you see all these amazing, beautiful churches. That’s because the Catholic Church was the principal patron of the arts. Think of all those great, treasured masterpieces that even secular people come in by millions and flock to see — Fra Angelico's Annunciation, Michelangelo’s Pietà, da Vinci’s Last Supper, Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew. The list goes on and on and on. Now, we’ve lost that cultural role in society, where the Church is the one supporting and allowing for the flourishing of sacred art.

These are beautiful expressions of the Gospel, of the Bible, and anyone can appreciate them. Somebody who’s an atheist, somebody who is a nonbeliever, can stand before these beautiful works of art and appreciate their beauty. Beauty draws us out of ourselves.

 

Please share an example of how encountering sacred beauty helps people turn to faith or deepens their faith.

It’s an embarrassment of riches. Let me give you two examples. One is the great Gothic cathedrals from the Middle Ages. These cathedrals very quickly came to be seen as catechisms in stone and stained glass because what the faithful saw, the beauty of these cathedrals, was the same faith that they were professing in the words of the Creed. So the cathedral is not only a functional building that happened to have some really beautiful art and architecture, but it was a space that was telling the story of salvation history. The people were mostly illiterate at the time. What they could not read in the Bible, they were now able “to read” on the walls and the beautiful stained-glass windows and all of the sacred architecture.

 

And the other example?

I used to be a docent at the National Gallery of Art many years ago, and I had many good conversations with visitors. I was giving a tour of the Renaissance galleries one time. All of the Renaissance art is Christian in theme: There’s the Madonna and Child, the Annunciation, the Birth of Jesus, the Crucifixion, the stories of the saints. It’s all the Gospel in the form of the beautiful. We were standing in front of one really beautiful, rare painting of the expectant Madonna and St. Joseph.

A young lady in the tour group started talking about the painting. She got very excited about it. In a few minutes, she’d taken over the tour, which was fine. And after the tour, I said to her, “How often do you come to the gallery?” What she said really got me thinking. She said she was born and raised Catholic, been through Catholic school, all the sacramental preparation programs, first Communion, confirmation; she went to university and drifted away from her faith. But because she loved art, she would go to a different museum every Sunday instead of going to church. As a Catholic, I couldn’t help but feel this disconnect between faith and culture.

The good ending to the story is that she did say that she was coming back to the Church, but it was the sacred art, among other things, that had sown the seeds of faith for her return to the Church.

 

How do you see the rise of popularity of Latin Mass, especially among the young and young families, as part of beauty touching hearts?

We live in a visual culture, for better or for worse. Whether we like it or not, we’re surrounded by a culture that communicates, informs and retains us through visual means.

In this age of information, with its dominant visual culture, the beauty of the Church’s liturgy and the artistic treasures of the past are not just reminders of a legacy from the Church’s past, but they’re relevant today, now, as an antidote to our visual culture with its fragmented images of the human person, its distorted images of the meaning of human life.

In this visual culture, we’re faced with an ironic situation. In the past 40, 50, 60 years or so, as American society and culture has become increasingly dominated by images and sound, with television first and then internet, social media, now artificial intelligence, we began to see less and less artistic expressions of faith in our churches and in the beauty of the liturgy. Churches were deprived of sacred images precisely at the moment when popular culture was becoming more visual, more image-centered. That’s ironic, and that’s the background for understanding why Catholics are drawn to what is beautiful in the Mass. Whenever the Mass is celebrated, whether it’s in Latin or in the vernacular, in a way that evokes the beauty, the majesty, the mystery of the liturgy, people will be attracted to that Mass.

That’s what we should really recover for the Church because people are looking for it, whether it’s the young families that are going to the Latin Mass or it’s the Novus Ordo that’s celebrated with reverence and beauty. When the Mass is celebrated with beauty in mind, with the sacredness of what is being celebrated, that will attract people.

 

In light of the National Eucharistic Congress and Revival, how do you connect beauty with the Eucharist?

I just wrote a book called Way of Beauty: Rekindling Eucharistic Amazement Through Visio Divina. It takes 12 works of sacred art focused on the Eucharist and leads a person through a reflection on the Eucharist through these works of art. One of the things that people say to me as I talk about the book is that “beauty is really leading us closer to the Lord.” It can be a path, especially in this visual culture of ours, where we’re immersed all day long in images.

 

Is there anything in Pope John Paul II’s “Letter to Artists” that applies beauty to everybody?

Very interestingly, he said, “Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term.” But “all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece.” I really love that line from the 1999 “Letter to Artists” because it reminds us that we can experience beauty in many forms. The beauty of the natural created world, the beauty of the human person made in the image and likeness of God, the beauty of the arts, music, painting, sculpture, stained glass, mosaic, poetry, literature, film, the list goes on. But we are all artists in one sense. As people of faith, we are called to craft a masterpiece out of our life for God. That’s what the saints do, isn’t it? The saints are masterpieces of God. Their holiness has radiated out into the world, reflecting the face of Christ.