"Beauty will save the world." The phrase is probably one of the most quoted — and most misunderstood — in all modern Christian thought. It is attributed to Dostoevsky, carved on festival pediments, brandished as a cultural slogan. But what does it mean? Can a statue, a Bach fugue, a stained-glass window really save a world threatened by evil, violence and despair? And if so, which beauty are we talking about — the beauty of magazines, or the beauty that made Saint Augustine weep?
This article does not tell the story of Christian art: for that, see Contemporary sacred art, Paleochristian art or the mosaics of Ravenna. Nor does it deal with the question of devotional images, addressed in Why does the Church use images?. Its subject is more fundamental: the theology of beauty itself. What is beauty? Why does the Catholic tradition make it, with truth and goodness, one of the three transcendentals of being — that is, one of the very faces of God? And how did the Church turn the via pulchritudinis, the "way of beauty", into a path of evangelisation for the 21st century?
The Catholic answer rests on a decisive distinction. Taken for itself, as an absolute closed in on its own pleasure, beauty saves no one — it can even become an idol. But as a sign, as a ray that points back to its source, beauty is a call: it awakens nostalgia for the infinite, disarms hardened hearts, and leads, beyond the work, towards Him who is Beauty in person. "This world in which we live needs beauty in order not to sink into despair"[1], said Paul VI to artists, in the name of the Church of the Council. The phrase of Dostoevsky, rightly understood, does not promise salvation through aesthetics: it proclaims that Christ, "the fairest of the children of men"[2], is himself that beauty which saves.
Where does the phrase "beauty will save the world" come from?
A phrase from Dostoevsky — but from whose mouth?
The phrase comes from the novel The Idiot (in Russian Идиот), published in serial form by Fyodor Dostoevsky between 1868 and 1869[3]. It is spontaneously attributed to the hero, Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, a Christ-like figure of disarming goodness whom society takes for an "idiot". But the text is subtler than it seems: it is not Myshkin who utters the phrase. It is another character, the young Hippolyte Terentyev, consumptive and rebellious, who hurls it at him as a question, half mocking, half pleading:
"Is it true, Prince, that you once said the world would be saved by beauty? Gentlemen," he cried to the company, "the Prince maintains that beauty will save the world!" — Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, Part Three, Chapter V[4]
A crucial detail: Myshkin does not answer. He remains silent, embarrassed, and the conversation moves on. Dostoevsky, true to his method, never delivers his own thought directly through the mouth of a character; he sets ideas in tension and leaves the reader unsettled[5]. In the novel, then, the phrase is not a triumphant thesis: it is an open question, suspended over a book that ends in disaster — murder, madness, the ruin of all those whom the "beautiful prince" tried to save.
An ambiguous beauty in Dostoevsky himself
To read the phrase as aesthetic optimism would be to betray Dostoevsky. For him, beauty is never neutral: it is a battlefield. In The Brothers Karamazov, Mitya confesses this dizzying intuition:
"Beauty! I cannot bear the thought that a man, even one of lofty heart and high intelligence, begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom. [...] Beauty is the battlefield where God and the devil fight, and their battlefield is the heart of man." — Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Book III, Chapter III[6]
The beauty that saves is therefore not just any beauty. A seductive beauty, closed in on itself, can lose the soul as surely as ugliness. Dostoevsky senses what the Catholic tradition puts differently: only beauty ordered to truth and goodness is redemptive; cut off from them, it becomes a trap. This is exactly the distinction Benedict XVI would later draw between "authentic beauty" and "deceptive and illusory beauty"[7].
Solzhenitsyn: the relay of a dissident
The phrase might have remained a literary curiosity without a second Russian prophet. Winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, Alexander Solzhenitsyn — who could not travel to Stockholm for fear of being unable to return to the USSR — devotes part of the text addressed to the Swedish Academy to meditating precisely on this phrase of Dostoevsky, which he admits he first found absurd:
"Dostoevsky once let slip the enigmatic phrase: 'Beauty will save the world.' What does it mean? For a long time it seemed to me a mere phrase. How could that be possible? When in bloody history has beauty ever saved anyone from anything? [...] But there is a special quality in the essence of beauty, a special quality in the status of art: the conviction carried by a genuine work of art is absolutely indisputable." — Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize address (published in 1972)[8]
For Solzhenitsyn, where the arguments of truth and the exhortations of goodness dash against totalitarian lies, the work of beauty gets through: it convinces without demonstrating, it touches where propaganda can do nothing. Beauty would then accomplish, "for this particular case, the work of all three" — truth, goodness and beauty meeting at the end[9]. It is this testimony, come from the Gulag, that carried Dostoevsky's phrase to the heart of 20th-century Catholic thought.
Adopted by the popes
It is John Paul II who brings the phrase definitively into the language of the Church. In his Letter to Artists of 4 April 1999 — the first pontifical document addressed entirely to creators — he writes:
"Beauty is a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence. [...] In this sense it has been said with profound intuition that 'beauty will save the world'." — John Paul II, Letter to Artists, 1999, no. 16[10]
Ten years later, Benedict XVI takes up the thread before hundreds of artists gathered beneath Michelangelo's vault in the Sistine Chapel[11]. Dostoevsky's phrase then becomes a programme: the via pulchritudinis, the way of beauty, as a path for reaching contemporary man — weary of discourses, yet still capable of being seized by a work, a song, a light.
What is beauty? The answer of tradition
Before asking whether beauty can save, we must know what it is. Christian thought did not merely admire the beautiful: it thought it through with a metaphysical rigour inherited from the Greeks and brought to its summit by scholasticism.
Beauty, a transcendental of being
At the heart of the answer lies a bold thesis: beauty is not a mere subjective ornament, a matter of "taste" varying from one person to another. It is, with the true (verum) and the good (bonum), one of the transcendentals — those properties belonging to everything that is, to the very extent that it exists[12]. Every being, because it is, is one, true, good and beautiful. To grasp the idea, a simple image: they are like three windows open onto the same reality. Truth is being insofar as it offers itself to the intellect; goodness, being insofar as it attracts the will; beauty, being insofar as it delights the one who contemplates it. Three rays of a single light.
This doctrine has an immense theological consequence. If beauty is a transcendental, then God, source and fullness of being, is Beauty itself — not one beautiful thing among others, but the subsistent Beauty of which all created beauty is but a reflection. This is what tradition calls beauty as a divine name.
Saint Thomas Aquinas's definition
The most famous word on beauty comes from Saint Thomas Aquinas. In the Summa Theologiae, he defines it in a formula of perfect concision:
"Beautiful things are those which please when seen." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 5, a. 4[13]
"Seen" here means not the eye alone, but all contemplative knowledge. The beautiful is that whose mere apprehension gives joy — not because we possess it (that would be the desired good), but because we behold it. Thomas adds that beauty requires three conditions, which have become classic:
"Three things are required for beauty. First, integrity or perfection: for what is unfinished is ugly. Then due proportion or harmony. Finally radiance: which is why we call beautiful the things that have a bright and luminous colour." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 39, a. 8[14]
Integrity (integritas): the work or being lacks nothing of what it should have. Proportion (proportio or consonantia): the parts agree with one another and with the whole. Radiance (claritas): the form shines forth, makes itself visible, "gleams" before the intellect. This last word is decisive: for Thomas, the beautiful is splendour — the truth of a thing become luminous. Hence the formula taken up after him: beauty is splendor veri, the splendour of truth.
Beauty and goodness: two inseparable faces
Tradition refuses to separate the beautiful from the good. John Paul II states it precisely in his Letter to Artists:
"Beauty is in a certain sense the visible expression of the good, just as the good is the metaphysical condition of beauty." — John Paul II, Letter to Artists, 1999, no. 3[15]
A beauty nourished by evil, which would make vice desirable or cruelty seductive, is not beauty in full: it has the appearance without the truth. That is why the Catechism ties beauty to truth and recalls it to its vocation: sacred art is "true and beautiful when it corresponds by its form to its proper vocation: to evoke and glorify, in faith and adoration, the transcendent Mystery of God"[16]. Outside this ordination, the beautiful degrades into mere ornament, or tips over into the idol.
Beauty, a name of God
If beauty is a transcendental, it necessarily leads to its origin. The whole Christian mystical tradition has seen in the beautiful not a detour, but an epiphany: a place where God shines through.
Pseudo-Dionysius: "God is Beauty"
At the turn of the 5th–6th centuries, a mysterious author long confused by tradition with Dionysius the Areopagite — hence his name of Pseudo-Dionysius — devotes, in The Divine Names, decisive pages to beauty as a name of God. God is named "the Beautiful" (in Greek to kalon) because he is the source from which all splendour springs:
"The Beautiful beyond all is called Beauty because of the beauty it communicates to all beings according to what each can receive; it is the cause of the harmony and splendour of all things, spreading upon all, like light, the rays of its beautifying source." — Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, The Divine Names, Chapter IV[17]
This intuition irrigates all medieval theology: the beauty of the world is a language, a mute word by which the Creator makes himself known. The Catechism repeats it: "From the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator"[18].
Saint Augustine: "Late have I loved you, O Beauty"
No voice has sung this longing for divine Beauty with more fire than Saint Augustine. In Book X of the Confessions, looking back on his lost years chasing created beauties, he lets escape the most famous cry of spiritual literature:
"Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! And behold, you were within, and I was outside, and it was there that I sought you. [...] You were with me, and I was not with you." — Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book X, Chapter 27[19]
The whole Augustinian journey lies in this reversal: the beauties of the world are real, but they are not the goal — they are arrows pointing elsewhere. To love them for themselves is to stop at the signpost instead of taking the road. To receive them as signs is to let oneself be led towards the Beauty that founds them. John Paul II quotes precisely this passage to express the "secret nostalgia for God" that beauty arouses[20].
The beauty of Christ: a paradox
But Christian beauty holds a paradox that neither Plato nor the Greeks had foreseen. On the one hand, Christ is announced as "the fairest of the children of men"[21]. On the other, the prophet Isaiah describes the suffering Servant as a man "with no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him"[22]. How to hold both together?
The Fathers of the Church meditated on this knot with boldness. For Saint Augustine, commenting the verse of Psalm 44 on Christ "fairer than the children of men", the Saviour is "beautiful in Heaven, beautiful on earth [...] beautiful on the cross, beautiful in the tomb"[23]: his beauty is not denied by the Passion, it is fulfilled in it. On the Cross, what shines is not harmony of forms, but the splendour of love going to the very end. Christian beauty is therefore not the aesthetics of prettiness: it can wear the disfigured face of the Crucified, because true beauty is that of total gift. Hans Urs von Balthasar made it the centre of his work: the "form" (Gestalt) of Christ, even in his abasement, is the supreme revelation of God's Glory[24].
The via pulchritudinis: the way of beauty towards God
From these foundations a pastoral conviction is born: if beauty is a reflection of God, then it is a path to him. Tradition speaks of three ways of the soul towards its Creator — through truth (the way of intelligence and philosophy), through goodness (the moral way of conscience), and through beauty: the via pulchritudinis.
A way for those whom arguments no longer reach
The value of this way is that it reaches man by another access than reasoning. One may resist a demonstration, refuse a moral demand; it is harder to defend oneself against a beauty that seizes. This is Solzhenitsyn's experience: beauty "convinces" where argument fails. Pope Francis made it an explicit directive of evangelisation:
"Proclaiming Christ means showing that to believe in and to follow him is not only something right and true, but also something beautiful, capable of filling life with new splendour and profound joy, even in the midst of trials. [...] Every form of catechesis would do well to attend to the 'way of beauty' (via pulchritudinis)." — Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 2013, no. 167[25]
Beauty is therefore not an optional ornament of faith: it is one of its doors. A careful liturgy, a well-sung chant, a welcoming church sometimes preach better than a thousand words.
Balthasar and "glory": restoring forgotten beauty
The great Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) built the entire first part of his trilogy, The Glory of the Lord (in German Herrlichkeit), on an alarmed observation: modern thought has expelled beauty from the realm of truth. Truth and beauty have been separated, reducing beauty to a matter of taste, and truth to a matter of proof[26]. Yet, he warns, a truth no longer found beautiful soon ceases to be loved, then believed. His project: to put beauty back at the beginning of theology, by showing that Revelation is first a form that imposes itself by its radiance — the Gestalt of Christ — before being a system of propositions.
"We call 'beautiful' only that before which we stop, by which we are seized and ravished out of ourselves." — after Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord[27]
Benedict XVI: distinguishing true beauty from false
The via pulchritudinis has a trap, however, and Benedict XVI named it forcefully. Not all beauty uplifts: there is a narcotic beauty, which flatters the senses, imprisons in the moment and closes man in on himself. Before the artists of 2009, the pope distinguishes the two:
"There is, however, a deceptive and illusory beauty [...] which does not open man upwards, but closes him entirely in on himself, and ends by enslaving him and depriving him of hope and joy. It is a captivating and hypocritical beauty [...]. Authentic beauty, on the other hand, opens the human heart to longing, to the deep desire to know, to love, to go towards the Other, towards what is Beyond the self." — Benedict XVI, Meeting with Artists, Sistine Chapel, 21 November 2009[28]
The criterion is therefore clear: true beauty decentres; false beauty encloses. One opens a window, the other holds up a mirror. And it is of the first, and of it alone, that we can say it "saves".
Beauty in the liturgy and sacred music
There is one place where beauty is not a luxury but a theological necessity: the liturgy. For the liturgy is the act by which the Church renders to God the worship due to him — and one does not address the infinitely Beautiful with ugliness. It is also the place where beauty becomes the soul of music and worship: chant, light and ornament do not decorate prayer there, they carry it.
Worship, the natural summit of beauty
Throughout her history, the Church has mobilised for the liturgy the most beautiful things men knew how to make: the architecture of cathedrals, the gold of reliquaries, the light of stained glass, the colours of liturgical vestments, and above all chant. This expenditure is not waste: it is the equivalent of Mary of Bethany's perfume poured over Christ's feet, that "useless" gesture which Jesus defends against calculators ("Leave her alone!", John 12:7). Liturgical beauty is an act of adoration, not decoration: it says, through the senses, that He whom we celebrate is worth infinitely more than all.
Sacred music, beauty at prayer
Among all the arts, music holds a unique place in worship. The Second Vatican Council affirms: "The musical tradition of the universal Church is a treasure of inestimable value, greater even than that of any other art, especially because, as sacred song united to the words, it forms a necessary or integral part of the solemn liturgy."[29] Chant does not adorn prayer from outside: it is prayer, because it carries the sacred text into the flesh of the voice and the flight of melody. Saint Augustine said it in a formula become proverbial:
"To sing is the mark of one who loves." — Saint Augustine, Sermon 336[30]
From Gregorian chant, which Vatican II recognises as "the proper chant of the Roman liturgy"[31], to the polyphonies of Palestrina, from the cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach to the meditative chants of Taizé, sacred music illustrates the via pulchritudinis in its purest state: a beauty ordered not to spectacle, but to the lifting of the soul towards God. Its function is not to move for the sake of moving, but to make pray.
The danger of ugliness: when worship forgets beauty
The reverse of this greatness is vigilance. When the liturgy neglects beauty — through laziness, false humility, or a misplaced concern to "be of its time" — it does not merely become less pleasant: it weakens what it signifies. Benedict XVI, still a cardinal, warned of it: a faith that loses the sense of beauty gradually loses its power of attraction and ends by doubting itself[32]. Deliberate ugliness in sacred matters is not a virtue of poverty: it is often an impoverishment of meaning. Conversely, the pursuit of beauty must never slide into aestheticism — beauty for beauty's sake, the concert instead of prayer. The golden rule remains that of the Catechism: liturgical beauty is "true" when it serves "the transcendent Mystery of God"[33], not the performance of men.
So, will beauty save the world?
There remains the question of the title, which must now be settled without evasion. The Catholic answer is neither a naive "yes" nor a disillusioned "no": it is a "yes, rightly understood".
It is not beauty that saves, but the One it reveals
Strictly speaking, no created beauty saves: neither a symphony, nor a cathedral, nor a sunset redeems a sin or raises the dead. The only Saviour is Christ. But Christ is "the fairest of the children of men", the Beauty of God made flesh. When we say that beauty will save the world, we are therefore saying, in truth, that incarnate Beauty — the Word — saves the world, and that all authentic beauty, by pointing towards him, shares in its own way in this work of salvation. Beauty does not save in place of Christ; it opens the door through which he enters.
Beauty disarms and prepares the heart
Experience confirms it: beauty can do what argument cannot. It breaches defences, suspends irony, awakens nostalgia. A man closed to all preaching may be overwhelmed by a Requiem, seized by an icon, disarmed by the purity of a face. Beauty does not convert on its own — but it prepares the ground, it makes the soul available, it reopens the question of God where it seemed closed. It is in this precise sense that the popes speak of a way: not a shortcut, but a real road.
Beauty and hope against despair
Finally, beauty is a weapon against despair, the sickness of our time. "This world in which we live needs beauty in order not to sink into despair"[34]: Paul VI's phrase is not sentimental. Where everything pushes towards cynicism, a gratuitous beauty testifies that reality is not absurd, that there is order, meaning, hidden glory. It is a promise: if the world is still capable of so much beauty, then it is not abandoned. Beauty is thus the visible face of hope — a foretaste, in time, of the definitive splendour which the blessed will contemplate face to face[35].
False promises: aestheticism, idol, exploitation
But the danger must be restated, lest a truth turn into illusion. Beauty betrays as soon as it is cut off from its source. Three perversions threaten it. Aestheticism first: making beauty an absolute, enjoying the work without ever letting oneself be led beyond — stopping at the arrow. Idolatry next: worshipping the beautiful creature instead of the Creator, as the beauty of the golden calf symbolises in Scripture. Exploitation finally: putting beauty at the service of lies or power, as totalitarian aesthetics did. In all three cases, beauty remains seductive, but it no longer saves: it encloses. This is the whole meaning of Dostoevsky's warning — beauty is "the battlefield"[36] — and of Benedict XVI on "deceptive" beauty[37].
The conclusion is therefore not a slogan, but a lucid hope. Yes, beauty will save the world — on condition of hearing in it the Beauty that has a name, a face and wounds, and of receiving all beauty here below for what it is: not an end, but a call.
To go further
- Contemporary sacred art (20th–21st century) — how the Church reconnected with modern artists, from Matisse to Gaudí.
- Why does the Church use images? — the theological foundation of the Christian image.
- Paleochristian art and The Christian symbols of the catacombs — the first beauties of Christianity.
- The mosaics of Ravenna and The mosaics of Hagia Sophia — light and gold as visible theology.
- The Mystic Lamb of Van Eyck — a summit of beauty at the service of dogma.
- The Stations of the Cross in art — the paradoxical beauty of the Passion.
Notes and References
Paul VI, Message to Artists addressed at the close of the Second Vatican Council, 8 December 1965 (the Church of the Council speaking "in our voice"): "This world in which we live needs beauty in order not to sink into despair. [...] Remember that you are the guardians of beauty in the world." Full text on vatican.va.
1 34Psalm 44 (45), 3 (Vulgate): "Speciosus forma prae filiis hominum" — "You are the fairest of the children of men". Verse traditionally applied to Christ the Bridegroom by the Fathers of the Church.
2 21Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), The Idiot (Идиот), a novel published in serial form in the review The Russian Messenger from January 1868 to February 1869.
3Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, Part Three, Chapter V. The phrase "beauty will save the world" is not uttered by Prince Myshkin himself but reported — as a mocking question — by Hippolyte Terentyev. Myshkin does not answer it. French reference translation: Albert Mousset (Gallimard, "Bibliothèque de la Pléiade" collection).
4On the "polyphonic" principle by which Dostoevsky refuses to reduce his characters to his own voice: Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929; French ed. Seuil, 1970). An indispensable hermeneutical precaution before treating the phrase as the author's thesis.
5Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Book III, Chapter III ("The Confession of an Ardent Heart. In Verse"), words of Dmitri (Mitya) Karamazov: "Beauty is the battlefield where God and the devil fight, and their battlefield is the heart of man."
6 36Benedict XVI, Meeting with Artists, Sistine Chapel, 21 November 2009: "You are the guardians of beauty. [...] The way of beauty therefore leads us to grasp the Whole in the fragment, the Infinite in the finite, God in the history of humanity." Text on vatican.va.
7 11Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), Nobel Prize in Literature address (prize awarded in 1970; text written in secret in Moscow, transmitted to the Swedish Academy and published in 1972, never delivered in session). In it he meditates at length on Dostoevsky's phrase, first judged "a mere phrase", before recognising in it the indisputable force proper to the work of art. Official full text on nobelprize.org.
8Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ibid.: taking up the ancient triad of truth, goodness and beauty, he suggests that art accomplishes "for this particular case the work of all three" when the more obvious paths of truth and goodness have been cut down.
9John Paul II, Letter to Artists, 4 April 1999 (Easter Day), no. 16: "Beauty is a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence. [...] in this sense it has been said with profound intuition that 'beauty will save the world'." The same paragraph quotes the "secret nostalgia for God" and the word of Saint Augustine. Full text on vatican.va.
10 20The doctrine of the transcendentals (unum, verum, bonum, to which later tradition adds pulchrum) goes back to Aristotle and was systematised by scholasticism: cf. Thomas Aquinas, De veritate, q. 1, a. 1; Summa Theologiae, I, q. 5 and q. 16. On the addition of beauty and the debates it raises: Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism (1920), and Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas (1956).
12Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 5, a. 4, ad 1: "Pulchra enim dicuntur quae visa placent" — "Beautiful things are those which please when seen." Beauty is tied there to the formal cause and to knowledge, distinct from goodness which relates to appetite.
13Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 39, a. 8: "Ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur. Primo quidem integritas sive perfectio [...]. Et debita proportio sive consonantia. Et iterum claritas." — integrity (or perfection), due proportion (or harmony), radiance (or clarity). The founding passage of Thomist aesthetics.
14John Paul II, Letter to Artists, 1999, no. 3: "Beauty is in a certain sense the visible expression of the good, just as the good is the metaphysical condition of beauty."
15Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2502: "Sacred art is true and beautiful when its form corresponds to its particular vocation: to evoke and glorify, in faith and adoration, the transcendent Mystery of God, Beauty of truth and love, surpassing and invisible."
16 33Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (Syrian author of the 5th–6th centuries, long wrongly identified with Saint Paul's disciple, Acts 17:34), The Divine Names, Chapter IV, §7: God is named "the Beautiful" (to kalon) as cause of the harmony and splendour of all beings, spreading his light like the sun. Reference edition: Complete Works of Pseudo-Dionysius, trans. Maurice de Gandillac, Aubier, 1943.
17Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 341: on the beauty of creation as a reflection of the infinite beauty of the Creator; cf. no. 32 ("From the [...] beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Author") and Wisdom 13:3–5.
18Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book X, Chapter 27 (38): "Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi! Et ecce intus eras et ego foris [...]. Mecum eras, et tecum non eram." — "Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new..." French reference translation: Arnauld d'Andilly / Pléiade.
19Isaiah 53:2: "He had no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and his appearance had nothing to attract us." Description of the suffering Servant, applied by Christian tradition to the Christ of the Passion.
22Saint Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms, commentary on Psalm 44 (Hebrew 45), verse 3 ("Speciosus forma prae filiis hominum"): "Pulcher ergo in caelo, pulcher in terra; [...] pulcher in ligno, pulcher in sepulcro, pulcher in caelo" — "beautiful then in Heaven, beautiful on earth; [...] beautiful on the cross (lit. 'on the wood'), beautiful in the tomb, beautiful in Heaven" (our translation). The full litany also lists the Virgin's womb, his parents' arms, miracles and scourges. Source: Enarrationes in Psalmos.
23Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord (Herrlichkeit, 1961–1969; French ed. Aubier), notably vol. I, Seeing the Form. The "form" (Gestalt) of Christ, even in the kenosis of the Cross, is presented there as the supreme manifestation of God's glory (in Hebrew kabôd, in Greek doxa).
24Pope Francis, apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, 24 November 2013, no. 167: "Proclaiming Christ means showing that to believe in and to follow him is not only something right and true, but also something beautiful [...]. Every form of catechesis would do well to attend to the 'way of beauty' (via pulchritudinis)."
25Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. I: modernity separated beauty from truth and goodness, relegating beauty outside knowledge; Balthasar warns that "a truth no longer loved or kept as beautiful" ends by losing its power of conviction. Programme of a "theological aesthetics".
26A formula synthesising the Balthasarian thesis (The Glory of the Lord, vol. I) that the beautiful is what "ravishes" and "seizes" the beholder (Entrückung), tearing him from himself to turn him towards the contemplated form.
27(source introuvable : benoitxvi2009-faux)
28 37Second Vatican Council, constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium on the liturgy (4 December 1963), no. 112: "The musical tradition of the universal Church is a treasure of inestimable value, greater even than that of any other art, especially because, as sacred song united to the words, it forms a necessary or integral part of the solemn liturgy."
29Saint Augustine, Sermon 336, 1: "Cantare amantis est" — "To sing is the mark of one who loves." A formula taken up by liturgical tradition to found the place of chant in prayer.
30Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, no. 116: "The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy: therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services."
31Joseph Ratzinger (future Benedict XVI), "Contemplating Beauty", message to the Rimini Meeting (Communion and Liberation), August 2002: the beauty that wounds the heart and opens it to transcendence is presented there as a path of knowledge of God, complementary to argument. Text reprinted in On the Way to Jesus Christ (Ignatius Press, 2005).
32On the bliss of Heaven as direct contemplation of divine Beauty, cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1028 (the beatific vision) and 1 Corinthians 13:12: "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face."
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