The aesthetic dimensions of Christian worship encompass not only written liturgies and rubrics but also the ways in which the liturgy is brought to life. This article addresses the rich and varied ways that these aesthetic dimensions are realized, including the liturgical expressions of time and space, the visual and the aural, the cognitive and emotional, the eternal and the culture-bound.
The term aesthetics derives from a Greek root meaning “of or pertaining to things perceptible by the senses, things material (as opposed to things thinkable or immaterial)” (O.E.D.). Since the 18th century, the term has come to designate the theory and interpretation of the beautiful in art and in nature. Liturgical aesthetics comprehends both the modern and classical meanings of the term. Thus the scope of this article includes the concept of beauty in relation to prayer and ritual as well as reflection on the sensible signs and various “languages” of worship such as time, space, sound and silence, movement and gesture, sacramental sign-acts, and the artistic environment.
Relations between beauty, the human senses, and the worship of God is both obvious and difficult to trace in their complexity. Liturgical worship requires corporately shared forms into which a community of faith enters to give expression to adoration, praise, thanksgiving, and petition. Because liturgy is more than texts and rubrics governing the correct performance of ritual acts, the “poetics of liturgical celebration” is of primary importance. The study of literary qualities of texts is only one strand in such a poetics. Since the mystery of God’s self-communication in Word and sacrament is always in and through specific forms, the poetics of liturgical celebration constitute a simultaneously theological and anthropological inquiry. Poetics as the study of how living discourse utilizes the powers of language is here applied to the broad range of liturgical utterance and to the arts of ritual enactment.
Liturgy possesses great formative and expressive power over human imagination, thought, emotion and will. Speaking theologically, we may say that, over time, Christian liturgy forms persons in the paschal mystery that it signifies and at the same time brings to communal expression the lived experience of the gospel. From a phenomenological or anthropological point of view, liturgy may be said to form human persons (and communities) in specific symbol systems and fundamental ways of being in the world. At the same time, liturgical rites become the means of expressing primary identity and passional self-understanding. Both the formative and expressive dimensions of liturgy require structure and particular elements—words, actions, symbols, music, and related art forms. But what gives such elements and the structure of the rites life is style—a particular way of celebrating the rites. As Aidan Kavanagh has observed, “ … the artful symbolism which is the liturgy is never secured in the abstract or in the general. It is accomplished in specific acts done by people in certain places at given times” (“The Politics of Symbol and Art in Liturgical Expression,” in Symbol and Art in Worship [Concilium: Religion in the Eighties, no. 132], Luis Maldonado and David Power, eds. [New York: Seabury Press, 1980], 39). Liturgical aesthetics investigates what is signified and experienced and how it is so signified and experienced in actual worshiping assemblies.
If Christian liturgy is understood as a complex of communal sign-actions and texts brought together in symbolic patterns about the Scriptures, the font, and the Table, then liturgical aesthetics studies the perceptual elements and the art of ritual enactment which render these human activities alive with significant form. If Christian liturgy is understood as an epiphany of the mystery of the divine self-communication, then liturgical aesthetics must address the question of how the style of celebration opens access to understanding and participation in that which theology cannot explain but can only comprehend in wonder and adoration. Both conceptions of liturgy and both methodologies are necessary.
Liturgy and Aesthetics: Historical Ambiguities
The matrix of artistic creativity for pre-Reformation cultural life in the West was the Christian liturgy. Liturgical art was, to a great extent, the fountainhead of popular art, and the cultural imagination was permeated with biblical stories and liturgical images. Such a historical period furnishes ample evidence of the power of liturgy to shape and receive cultural modes of perception. By contrast, the prophetic side of Christianity has from the beginning been suspicious of human imagination, voicing objection to the dissociation of the aesthetic from the ethical or the holy. The words of Amos echo in other historical periods: “Take away from me the noise of your song; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream” (Amos 5:23–24). Furthermore, the iconoclastic impulse to resist the uses of art emerges in the name of holiness to guard against idolatrous confusion of images with the divine reality they are to represent or express.
At the outset, Christianity had considerable reservations about the arts and a relatively unadorned liturgy. The immoralities of songs in the context of pagan rites provided good reason for such suspicion. The pattern of life that was associated with music and the other arts of the theater was cause of great concern to the church. There was an asceticism in the earliest monastic movements that regarded the ease and even the sensuality of the post-persecution church as apostate. While the prophetic biblical traditions feared idolatry, the use of music, for example, seemed at home in the chanting of psalms. But the traditions springing from the philosophy of Plato also influenced the early church. Aware of the enormous emotional power of music, poetry, and dance upon the human psyche, such traditions regarded artistic endeavors as traffic with the ambiguities of sensuality. The strictures against flute-playing in Plato’s Republic emerged in the Christian assembly’s initial resistance to the use of instruments in worship. The mistrust of matter and images itself led to a chaste role of iconography in the early buildings. Gradually, especially in the East, the idea of the icon as an image that mediates but does not contain the sacred, emerged.
The theological and philosophical suspicions of art and of the aesthetic power of liturgy surfaced virulently again with some of the Reformers of the sixteenth century. The systematic destruction of images and religious art in places such as Zurich in 1524 at the hands of the Zwinglian town council testify to the fear of external rites, material form, and visible symbols. The suppression of all music in the liturgy seems even more extreme, especially at the hands of such an accomplished musician as Ulrich Zwingli. Yet such a reduction of the aesthetic dimensions of Christian worship among the Reformers resulted from an enormous drive to purify and to spiritualize worship forms in a period when the aesthetic and symbolic profusion of the Roman rites seemingly overwhelmed the central mystery of God’s gracious acts and the primary symbols of faith. The sixteenth-century simplifications were partly a result of a new stress on Scripture as a primary source for liturgical norms arising in that period; but they also depended upon an opposition between reason and emotion, alongside a dualism of spirit and the physically sensate. Luther was not such a liturgical purist. In fact, as the liturgical iconoclasm of the Reformation grew more extreme, he spoke, even while defending simplification of the rites, of his eagerness to “see all the arts, especially music, in the service of him who gave and created them.” The liturgical aesthetics of the three magisterial Reformers—Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli—show a remarkable range of differences among themselves respecting the material forms that worship employs. None of them refers substantially to the earlier traditions which struggled with these same tensions, namely those of the early patristic figures, most especially St. Augustine.
It was St. Augustine who asserted that, despite human sin and limitation, divine providence could yet work through the human experience of beautiful things to illuminate the ground of all human perception and understanding in God. For Augustine, the recognition of truth and beauty in and through the created order (the physical and the sensual) revealed a divine lure turning human beings away from desires linked with sensuality and mortality to the love of God. Before him, Basil, in his treatise On the Holy Spirit, had argued that honor given an image would move on to its origination in God. In contrast to the early theological suspicion of the arts and to the more extreme views of the Reformation, there has been an alternative tradition from Augustine to Aquinas, rediscovered in later historical and cultural periods—as with the nineteenth-century Oxford Movement and neo-Thomist revivals associated with Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson —which regarded aesthetic activity and its liturgical bearing as defined in light of the relation of God to all human perception and to the goodness of the created order itself.
The history of styles of celebration and the “ceremonial” employed in liturgical rites have shown wide extremes in the history of the church, especially in the West. This fact shows that the aesthetic dimensions of Christian worship are an ingredient in any change, whether of complex elaboration over time or of dramatic reform and simplification. The last third of the twentieth century is witnessing one of the most extraordinarily complex periods of reform and renewal in the history of the Western churches. The emergence of liturgical aesthetics as a discipline is partly a necessary outcome of these developments.
Liturgy as Art: Symbolic Form and Mystery
Any consideration of liturgical aesthetics must begin with the acknowledgment of this ambiguity in the long history of Christian faith and artistic expression. Still there remains the fact that liturgy itself employs cultural forms in imaginatively powerful ways. Liturgical action does not simply use art, it is art—dialogue with God in symbolic form. To speak of liturgical aesthetics, then, is to refer to that which is an ingredient in the enactment of the rites, both sacramental and nonsacramental. There is an intrinsically aesthetic character to all liturgical celebrations and environments. This fact is at the heart of what liturgy is, according to the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council. The liturgical assembly is the articulation and expression of the saving mystery of God in Christ, and of the nature of the church. The symbolic action of the liturgy is also an experience and manifestation of the church and participation in the mystery of the triune life of God which animates the world. Such manifestation and participation are always in and through specific cultural forms: language, symbol, ritual sign-acts, music, gesture, visual and tactile environments.
Explorations in the domain of liturgical aesthetics, therefore, seek to interpret and understand the various relations between beauty and holiness in particular liturgical contents. Bearing in mind the ambiguities of the human imagination per se and the possibilities of mistaking the symbol for the reality symbolized, liturgical aesthetics proceeds on the assumption that there is an ultimate connection between beauty and the reality of God. Liturgical aesthetics is based on the fact that liturgy is a complex art form and that right praise and thanksgiving to God require the engagement of the full range of human emotion, intellect, and will. Liturgical worship employs corporate shared forms that invite and engender fully human participation, neither exclusively cognitive (mental) nor exclusively emotive or volitional.
The symbolic value and the beauty of the various elements of the liturgy derive from the material and form of each, while the sacredness or holiness derives from the mystery of the events celebrated “in, with, and through” Jesus Christ. These principles are based on the claim that God has created all things and called them good and has become incarnate in Jesus Christ, gathering a historical human community—always culturally embedded and embodied—for worship and service in the world. Liturgical aesthetics is thus rooted and grounded in the doctrines of creation and incarnation. All things are rendered holy by virtue of creation and the redemptive action of God and are to be so regarded and brought to expression in communal worship of God. Liturgical worship respects the difference between creature and Creator, employing the things of earth to signify the glory and mercy and justice of God. This calls for a fundamental religious sensibility oriented to splendor and to appropriate sobriety and awe in the use of language, symbol, gesture, and the various languages of the rites.
Yet there is also a permanent tension involved in the use of material objects, the domain of the senses, and the imaginative powers of human art. This is because human beings are not in full harmony with the created order, nor is any human community or culture congruent with a fully transformed world. Our liturgies remain “east of Eden” and captive to the limits of human cultural perception as well. In short, Christian communities remain sinful and culturally bound. This means that whatever significant form is realized in liturgical celebration conveying the self-giving of God, we still “see through a glass darkly.” Hence liturgical aesthetics must always point to an eschatological self-critique of the use of forms. This permanent tension in liturgy as art is but a reflection of the situation of faith—we live in a good but fallen creation, between the initiation of redemptive history and its consummation. Any given liturgical aesthetic belonging to a particular time and culture requires a counterpoint in a religious sensibility oriented to that which transcended culture, that “which eye has not seen, nor ear heard,” which God has prepared for the children of earth.
The eschatological reservation concerning the cultural embeddedness of all aesthetic dimensions of Christian liturgy will be made more explicit at the end of this essay. To a discussion of various languages and the aesthetic dimension of all liturgical rites enacted we now turn.
Time and Space
From the beginning, Christian liturgical celebrations involved the use of cultural modes of communication, language itself being a primary instance. The words and texts employed in the liturgy operate within a complex of nonverbal phenomena. The sense and force of the words employed in worship depend radically for their range and depth upon the nonverbal features of the rites and how they are enacted. The meaning of a sung text, for example, has a greater aesthetic range than the same text recited. The same text or gesture—or their combination—has a different connotative range in different seasons or feasts during the church year.
Among the primary nonverbal languages that constitute the poetics of liturgical celebration is time. Because liturgical rites are temporal, unfolding the juxtaposition of text, symbols, and ritual acts over time, participation is itself a temporal art. Within the duration of a single liturgical rite, for example, a eucharistic celebration, the meaning of the texts and the symbols are cumulative and dramatic rather than self-contained. Each text or gesture or liturgical subunit may possess its own determinate sense, but the significance and the broader radiations of meaning can only be discerned in light of the whole pattern. Worship may be impoverished, of course, by lack of coherence or structural dislocation, illustrated by the proliferation of sequences in the Renaissance period. Thus the poetry of an Entrance hymn or a festival Gloria may be fully grasped only after its connection with the praise and thanksgiving of the eucharistic prayer is sounded. The remarkable complexity and aesthetic power of images in the Exsultet at the Easter vigil do not fully unfold until the temporal process of reading and hearing the whole sequence of readings is completed and the baptismal covenant is sounded. Liturgy is a temporal art and is, in this sense, properly analogous to music, to drama, and to dance. This is why liturgical participation requires a sense of the “dance” and the “drama” of the rites, even when these art forms do not appear explicitly. The temporal art of liturgical celebration is in this respect intrinsically musical and dramatic.
The language of time also works in the accumulative associative power of specific elements within a rite. Thus, the aesthetic range and significance of eating and drinking together take time. In everyday life, we come to understand the multiple levels of meaning of such acts only after we have had meals together on birthdays, after funerals, on anniversaries, and through the changing seasons of human lives in a wide range of ordinary circumstances. Symbols deepen as human beings mature with them. The source of the inexhaustibility of primary symbols is located here. At the level of texts, the same is true. The same antiphon or full responsorial psalm, when used in different seasons of the year, yields a different range of potential value and force in texts (hymns, psalms, prayers, and lections).
The language of time also involves discipline in cycles of the week, the day, and the year. The aesthetic depth of liturgical participation is related to the experience of feasts and seasons. The liturgical year is a treasury of the church’s memories of who God is and what God has done. The temporal cycles of day, week, and year intersect with the sanctoral cycle of holy men and women to form a powerful hermeneutical pattern.
A second nonverbal language is that of space. Because the liturgical assembly occupies a place and arranges the furnishings in that space, a pattern of acoustic, visual, and kinetic perception is set up. The places form environments that house the action of the liturgy. Each space and its interior arrangement may be said to possess specific aesthetic properties, encouraging specific kinds of actions and discouraging others. Some spaces invite a static and sedentary approach to God—in fixed auditoria, for example. Others invite freedom of encounter and movement or uncluttered contemplation. The visual focus of the room has a profound effect upon the poetics of textual images and the function of vestments, vessels, gestures, and the uses of light within the liturgy.
There is also the history of the use of the building and the interior spaces which influence the tone and style of the liturgical celebration. So in a space where families have gathered for generations, where weddings, funerals, and rites of passage have taken place, where the very sound of sung prayer has given association to the action itself, the aesthetic values of the space may dominate or even conflict with the actual style of celebration. At the same time, how we arrange furnishings—altar, ambo, font, musical instruments, presider’s chair, the paschal candle—bears strongly upon what can potentially be brought to expression within the assembly.
Sound and Sight
Within the temporal-spatial setting, the acoustic and visual domains come into play. The art forms of music, whether congregational, choral, or instrumental, depend in larger measure on the properties of the building and the arrangement of the space. The relationship of sound and silence is crucial to music, but it is also part of the intrinsic music of the rites themselves. So all liturgical utterance has pitch, rhythm, intensity, and pacing. The silences between words spoken and sung are as important as the sounds themselves, for together they create the primary acoustical images of praise and prayer. Analogously, the pace, intensity, rhythm, and tone of ritual actions are part of the hidden music of the rites enacted.
The aesthetics of sound and sight are not ornamental to liturgy but are intrinsic to the very nature of liturgical celebration. Thus music is not to be conceived primarily as something “inserted” into the rites. Rather, explicit music should seek to bring to expression the implicit music of the rites. The implicit music is at one and the same time related to the juxtaposition of texts, ritual acts, and symbols, and to the specific rites in their context. The actual acoustical experience of prayer or of preaching may carry more force than the semantic context of the actual words. Thus fully articulate musical liturgy is more festive and generates a greater range in levels of participation. At the same time, the style and quality of music must be judged appropriate to the nature of the rites and the nature of the assembly.
Following Vatican II, the United States Bishop’s Committee on the Liturgy published documents pertaining to the aesthetic dimensions of Christian liturgy. Music in Catholic Worship (1972, 1983) and Liturgical Music Today (1982) present complementary sets of guidelines concerning music in the liturgy and provide a theological groundwork for integrity in liturgical music. The earlier document deals with the role of music, both instrumental and choral/vocal in various rites, while the latter proposes criteria for planning and conducting liturgical celebrations.
The whole liturgical environment is to be served by the arts—this is the primary concern of a third document, Environment and Art in Catholic Worship (1978, English/Spanish edition, 1986). Particular emphasis is placed upon the liturgical assembly as a servant to God’s created world and its calling to be “sign, witness, and instrument of the reign of God” (par. 38). Precisely because the assembly seeks to remember and to cultivate the redemptive power of God, it must nurture a climate of wonder, awe, reverence, thanksgiving, and praise. Therefore liturgy must seek what is beautiful in its total ethos as well as in the specific objects, gestures, sign-actions, music, and related art forms employed.
In these documents, the acoustic, visual, and kinetic dimensions of liturgical celebration are integral to one another. The confluence of these arts in liturgy enables the assembly to discern the presence of God in the whole of the symbolic actions. The materials and the form are to reflect the beauty and dignity of the rites they intend to serve. Special focus is devoted to the climate of hospitality, the experience of mystery, the reality, and efficacy of the range of symbols through word, gesture, and movement. A paragraph in Environment and Art concerning the concept of the beautiful in Christian liturgy is especially noteworthy:
Because the assembly gathers in the presence of God to celebrate his saving deeds, liturgy’s climate is one of awe, mystery, wonder, reverence, thanksgiving, and praise. So it cannot be satisfied with anything less than the beautiful in its environment and all its artifacts, movements, and appeals to the senses.… The beautiful is related to the sense of the numinous, the holy. Where there is evidently no care for this, there is an environment basically unfriendly to mystery and awe, an environment too casual, if not careless, for the liturgical action. In a world dominated by science and technology, liturgy’s quest for the beautiful is a particularly necessary contribution to full and balanced human life (par. 34).
Liturgical Aesthetics and Human Emotion
The relation between liturgy and human emotion is complex, but it is evident that Christian worship forms and expresses particular patterns of emotional dispositions in human beings. Music, poetry, dance, symbolic actions—all these have to do with the affective capacities in human life. Liturgy may be regarded as a time and place where the language, sign-action, and symbols concerning the divine shape and express deep human emotions as gratitude to God, hope, repentance, grief, compassion, aversion to injustice, and delight in the created order. The Christian life itself is characterized by the having of such emotions and they’re having become wellsprings of attitude and action in life. The language of Scripture, prayer, and the sacraments have to do with elemental features of human existence: emotions linked to birth and death, suffering, sin, and oppression as well as with desire, joy, hope, and happiness. These deep emotions are not simply named or described in the language of liturgy; they are evoked, portrayed, sustained, and refined in the rites.
Holy fear, repentance, and amendment of life depend upon sharing deeply in the mystery of prayer and ritual action as in the shared meal of the Eucharist. The language of the liturgy in descriptive, ascriptive, and performative force shapes us in particular affectional ways of being by addressing God and being open to God. So eucharistic participation points toward a life of gratitude and self-giving. The very fourfold action of taking the bread and cup, blessing God over them, breaking the bread, and giving the gifts presents the pattern which the eucharistic community is to live out in daily life.
To learn gratitude to God or awe or love of God and neighbor one must learn to pray with the church. The graciousness, the holiness, and the love of God create the possibility of authentic worship. But the experiential power and range of liturgy is required in turn for the deepening of such dispositions. The integrity of the art of common prayer and ritual action requires that such gratitude, awe, and love is not confined to the liturgical event itself. That is, these religious affections are not simply aesthetically held states of feeling. Yet without the aesthetic dimensions of participation in and through the forms, no sacramental self-understanding in life can emerge. As Environment and Art rightly observes: In view of our culture’s emphasis on reason, it is critically important for the Church to reemphasize a more total approach to the human person by opening up and developing the non-rational elements of liturgical celebration: the concerns for feelings of conversion, support, joy, repentance, trust, love, memory, movement, gesture, wonder. (par. 35)
Christian liturgy that seeks emotional and symbolic authenticity and depth must always pay attention to the materials and the forms employed. Language that is only clear or cognitively precise with no overplus of poetic meaning will diminish the power of the symbols to hold together multiple levels of meaning. If the ritual actions are perfunctory or merely efficient, the texts and symbols will be diminished. If the music is always immediately accessible and without surprise or tension or durability, the texts wedded to such music suffer reduction in imaginative power and metaphoric range. The quality of texts, gestures, movements, and the form of the symbols is critical to levels of participation. Attention to each element and to their interrelation in the whole pattern of the liturgy is necessary to the power of liturgy to draw us, as church, into the gospel proclaimed and the saving mystery enacted. This is what leads Joseph Gelineau to say, “only if we come to the liturgy without hopes or fears, without longings or hunger, will the rite symbolize nothing and remain an indifferent or curious ‘object.’ Moreover, people who are not accustomed to poetic, artistic, or musical language or symbolic acts among their means of expression and communication find the liturgy like foreign country whose customs and language are strange to them.”
Liturgical Style and Culture
The question of style is not a matter of mere technique. If it were so, we could produce awe-inspiring liturgical rites by manipulating lighting and symbols. But the aesthetic dynamism of authentic liturgical celebration is the opposite of manipulation and magic; it is the opening of the mystery of the realities signified, proclaimed, and ritually participated in. This “opening” is a matter of faithfulness and attentiveness to the whole environment of worship. Each unit or element of the liturgical assembly, and each “sub-rite,” invites a particular quality of disposition that is appropriate to the nature of the rite and its context. This goes together with the honesty and integrity of materials and the aesthetic adequacy of the forms. Both the leaders and the assembly as a whole share mutual responsibilities for the art of the liturgy. The presider and other specific ministers become focal points and representations of the prayerful participation of the assembly. Activities of gathering, singing, praying, reading, listening, bowing, touching, eating, and drinking all require a heightened sense of receptivity and active participation as a community of mutuality. The cultural variables here are many, since different cultures exhibit differences in behavior in the course of such activities.
The church’s teaching and catechetical approach to preparing the worshipers—both long-term and immediately in the room of celebration—can not neglect the aesthetic dimensions of specific cultures. The study of liturgical forms and teaching the primary symbols of faith must create a hospitable environment. Assisting the worshipers to participate fully in the musical forms, for example, requires sensitivity to the range of musical styles available to the people. Giving the assembly a model of good “performance practice” in responsorial psalmody, the hymns or sung responses can open up new dimensions of the cultural heritage. The problems of musical participation raise all the issues of liturgical participation. Creating appropriate spaces of silence for reflection on the readings and in relation to the sign-acts and symbols is part of the nonmanipulative art of the liturgy.
The poetics of celebration requires examination of the specific cultural context of the assembly. In our post-conciliar period, new emphasis is being placed on the modes of expression indigenous to the social and cultural history of the people. If the liturgy is to signify the divine/human interaction, then modes of appropriating and sharing the basic symbols must be mediated in and through the language, music, visual, and bodily style of the people. The aesthetics of liturgy thus demands that we know the differences between, for example, patterns proper to a North-American cultural tradition formed principally in Northern Europe and patterns that are Afro-American or Hispanic.
At the same time, the symbolic action points to realities that are in tension with all inherited cultural assumptions and patterns of behavior. The permanent tension in the poetics of liturgy is between the necessity of local cultural modes of perception (expression and interpretation) and the common culture of Christian faith and life. Only by maintaining this tension can we also assert specifically Christian faith and life over against the assumptions of much postmodern and technological culture. Though each subculture has its own integrity, there is a manner of celebration which is Christian, stemming from the particular claims of the paschal mystery. There is a way of enacting the rites which is ultimately the human reception of what God has done in creation and in Jesus Christ. This has been referred to by Gelineau and others as the “paschal human in Christ”—a manner enacted in particular cultural languages that evidence “both reserve and openness, respect and simplicity, confident joy … and true spontaneity.… ”
Afterward
Liturgy belongs to the created world and thus is an art, for the created order belongs to God. The aesthetics of authentic liturgy concerns the intrinsic means, not simply the eternal decoration, or the rites themselves. Without such aesthetic considerations as honesty of materials, quality of craft and performance, appropriateness, proportionality, and integrity within the liturgy of the art forms and the people, the whole of the liturgy is diminished in its symbolic power.
Yet, lest we take delight only in the beautiful forms we have managed, and not discern the enabling grace of God in and through the forms, the final word must be eschatological. All artistic effort is itself proleptic as well as participatory in God’s creativity. The mystery celebrated is never exhausted or fully contained in the liturgy. Liturgical rites authentically celebrated point beyond themselves to the eschatological vision and the “heavenly liturgy” of Christ of which all earthly celebrations are but hints and guesses. This way all attention to the aesthetics of Christian liturgy is but a servant of the vision of a created order transformed and reconciled to the life of God. There all that is creaturely will be permeated with light, dance, and song. Insofar as we experience the prefigurement of that reality in particular times and places, the aesthetics of liturgical celebration become congruent with the holiness and the beauty of the triune life of God, at once incarnate in the world and yet transcendent in glory beyond all created things.