Below is an expanded version of a presentation I gave for a panel on the role of beauty in worship. You can watch the full panel, which included presentations by Fr. Patrick Cardine and Nazo Zakkak, at Orthodox West Music.
Our faith is strengthened by learning about Christianity. But upstream of learning is something else. Why do we want to learn about the faith in the first place? Some people would say the answer has to do with the truth of our religion: we recognize that Christianity is correct and so we want to learn about it. But that doesn’t quite get to the heart of things. There are millions of people who simply don’t care whether Christianity is true, and still many others who, while having been raised in the faith and never ceased recognizing the truth of Christianity, simply don’t care to learn more the faith, or even to practice it. What makes us care about the truth of Christianity, and want to learn more about it?
We could ask the same question regarding action. Our faith is strengthened through obedience to God as we internalize the norms of piety through good habits, right action, and virtue. But why is someone incentivized to live a life of piety in the first place? Some people would answer that it has something to do with future rewards. But that is only partially correct. What is it that makes the idea of heaven attractive in the first place—so attractive that we would give up the temptations of this world to prepare for the age to come through faith, piety and obedience?
The answer to all these questions, of course, is beauty. Beauty is the splendour of the good and the radiance of the true, which is another way of saying that it is through beauty that we find Goodness and Truth desirable.
This is encapsulated in a famous story narrated by the Russian Primary Chronicle, a twelfth century text recounting the early history of the Slavic peoples a couple centuries earlier. The narrative tells how the pagan Prince Vladimir of Kiev (958-1015), desired to know which was the true religion. He sent envoys to visit the various countries of the world to observe their religion. For the envoys, the beauty of the Christian worship at the Hagia Sophia cathedral was absolutely decisive.
When we journeyed among the Bulgars, we beheld how they worship in their temple, called a mosque, while they stand ungirt. The Bulgar bows, sits down, looks hither and thither like one possessed, and there is no happiness among them, but instead only sorrow and a dreadful stench. Their religion is not good. Then we went among the Germans, and saw them performing many ceremonies in their temples; but we beheld no glory there. Then we went to Greece, and the Greeks led us to the edifices where they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty.
This story demonstrates how the Holy Spirit uses beauty—and particularly the beauty of Christian worship—to bring people to Him. Upstream from our desire to learn about and practice the faith is the awareness that Christ is desirable, that the life and worship he calls us into is beautiful. And that is as true today as it was in the ninth century when the events recounted in the Russian Chronicle took place. Indeed, as I talk to people who converted to the faith, or who have chosen to remain in the faith since childhood, it isn’t primarily that they were convinced by a rational argument, nor that they merely wanted to find a way to be better people, though of course both these factors often come into it. The primary reason people converted or persevered is because the Holy Spirit worked in their hearts to bring awareness of the beauty of Christ.
The beauty of our faith can take many forms. It reaches some of us through the attractiveness of Christian metaphysics, which draws all aspects of existence—from the longings of the unquiet heart to the movement of distant galaxies—into harmonious and elegant patterns, giving a lovely unified meaning to all the particularities of the cosmos. Others may be inspired by the beauty of a wholesome and well-ordered life over and against the brokenness of a life devoted to passion and addiction. The beauty of Christianity reaches still others through the communal aspects of church, as people from unstable backgrounds experience wholesome relationships and healthy social connections. And, of course, one primary way Christ’s beauty reaches us is through worship, including the invitation that worship offers for transitioning into a slower and more contemplative life.
Worship As a Tutelage in Beauty
When discussing the power of beautiful worship to lure our hearts to Christ, we must be careful in how we frame this. It isn’t just that beautiful worship is a utilitarian tool for bringing people into the fold, as if elegant liturgy functions as the ultimate evangelistic technique. Viewed merely pragmatically, we might be justified introducing electric guitars and fog machines into worship if that could be shown to be as effective as a traditional Mass or Divine Liturgy. But Christian saints and thinkers throughout the ages have taught that transcendent worship is actually formative in what we come to find lovely, because it nourishes us in rightly-ordered affection, inspiring us with a sense of what Psalm 96:9 calls “the beauty of holiness.” And this is true regardless of whether we initially find worship beautiful since the beauty of transcendent worship doesn’t just entice; it also tutors.
Let me explain by way of analogy. Just as visiting different restaurants, combined with education about cuisine and habits of right eating, can impact what dishes someone finds delightful, and just as exposure to, and education about, different types of music can be formative in the songs someone finds desirable, so Christian worship forms our sense of what is attractive, honing our desire for the primal beauty of God over the counterfeit delights of this world.
This is a particularly difficult concept for moderns to understand. Given that affection contains an emotional element, and given that we are inculturated to think of emotion as outside our control, it’s easy for moderns to assume that our affections are autonomous and independent of volition. It’s part of the air we breathe that we just can’t help the things we’re attracted to, because “I either like this or I don’t.” If you attend to the discourse on musical preferences, for example, it’s very common to hear the trope that everything is merely a matter of taste, and one person’s taste is no better than someone else’s. Within this thought milieu, one of the most counter-cultural positions we can hold is that there is actually such a thing as good and bad taste, and that our preferences can grow in maturity. Through struggle, good habits, education, and exposure to certain types of stimuli, our affections (including what we consider beautiful and rewarding) can change, and our desires can move from being disordered to rightly ordered.
One of the reasons moderns are uncomfortable acknowledging that our habits and choices can impact our tastes and preferences is because the worldly mind tends to assume that choices are always an outgrowth or expression of desire, rather than also a way to train our affections toward the Good, True, and Beautiful. As modern people, we may instinctively assume that kneeling to say a prayer of repentance comes as a result of feeling penitent; but in the biblical understanding, it is the other way around: we kneel in order to become penitent. Similarly, a man does not kiss his wife merely when he feels affection toward her; rather, he also kisses his wife in order to cultivate affection.
Counter-cultural as this may be, in all aspects of life we see instances of how our tastes—including what we enjoy—can evolve based on the choices we make and the stimuli we expose ourselves to. If you think of the joy a wine connoisseur or an art critic feels in the presence of a particularly special specimen of his craft, we know that those feelings have been honed by years of training, hard work, and struggle. Or consider attraction to the opposite sex. We know the choices a boy makes when he is young—from what types of music and stories he allows to form his imagination to decisions that either reinforce piety or the passions—are part of what eventually determines what sort of woman will attract him. The enjoyment a man derives from having a relationship with a modest and virtuous woman is organically related to the work of becoming virtuous himself. But just as one who has not worked to appreciate good literature may puzzle why another would prefer Milton over comics, so a man who has not worked to cultivate virtue may find it hard to understand why another would enjoy having a relationship with a modest and virtuous woman.
The point is that what gives us joy, what we are attracted to, what we consider beautiful, is often downstream from habit-forming behaviors and struggle. The sobering reality is all the choices you make day end and day out (including everything you allow to enter your mind and imagination), is gradually influencing what you find attractive, and what you will enjoy. Every choice you make is training your heart to find something beautiful. If you give yourself a diet of images from Instagram and the mall, while chasing thrills at amusement parks and rock concerts, that will train your heart differently than a diet of classical music, good literature, long walks, and Christian worship.
When we allow our lives to be transformed by Christian worship, then not merely our minds, but also our affections, become sanctified so we learn to delight in what is truly beautiful, ultimately in God Himself. As worship forms our affections, we become less susceptible to the counterfeit beauty of the world and the flesh, or the fake transcendence of UFOs and psychedelics, or even the incomplete beauty of romanticism that would merely stop at transient beauties without following it through to the Source.
Some people get uncomfortable when I teach that virtue involves the healing of affections and the re-ordering of desire, or when I explain that a saintly person actually enjoys being holy. Contemporary thinking about ethics lingers under the shadow of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who taught that duty involves suppression of human feelings. Still others have been influenced by the long shadow of twentieth-century Protestant fundamentalism, with its legalistic emphasis on the constant suppression of human desire. One person, influenced by these traditions, objected that an emphasis on learning to delight in God’s beauty, or too much focus on the loveliness of worship, veers close to the type of modern Christianity that seeks to make faith fun.
But what I’m suggesting is as far removed as you can get from a worldly hedonism. The Christian life involves self-denial; but crucially, suffering and asceticism—perhaps especially periods of fasting—are invitations to direct the unquiet heart to God alone, and thus to seek His beauty over merely derivative beauties or worldly comforts. Consider the ultimate case of self-denial: martyrdom. No one endures martyrdom unless he or she is truly convinced that the life on the other side is beautiful. But sometimes it takes training to find God beautiful, and worship and holy living are key parts of that training. God has provided the resources in His church to retrain our affections. Through worship—and everything that means as the sacramental life permeates from the altar to our lives and throughout the parish—divine beauty can gradually seep into the nooks and crannies of the heart, sculpting the cadences of the mind and forming our affections at the deepest level of our being. The prayers of preparation recognize this. What do we pray at the beginning of the Divine Office? We ask God to “kindle my affections.” Or think of the pre-communion prayer attributed to St. Ambrose where we ask God for the renewal of good desires. As these prayers suggest, our goal is not just to be ethical, but to have our affections kindled so we come to delight in the good.
The affective aspect of ethics distinguishes Christianity from Buddhism. In the Eightfold Path laid down by The Buddha, he associated suffering with desire; consequently, the way to eliminate suffering is to eliminate desire. By contrast, Christianity cultivates and nourishes desire. The reordering of desire is central to sanctification, which is why the standard in passages like Psalm 119 is not someone who merely obeys God’s commands, but someone who derives joy from them—a man or woman whose affections have been honed to delight in the ways of God.
When Beauty Becomes a Burden
The promise that our affections can be reordered offers hope to those who may initially find traditional worship tedious, repetitive, and unnaturally slow. Learning to perceive the beauty in liturgical regularities is similar to finding delight in the commonalities of our daily routines, or in recognizing the joyful constancy of the planets. Chesterton famously reminded us that the very monotony of the sun—doing the same thing over and over again—is the truly extraordinary option. Maybe we think it would be more exciting for the sun to do something different, like performing a little dance at noonday or occasionally deviating from its course. However, what is even more glorious is that the sun achieves the almost unthinkable feat of doing the same thing again and again: perfectly timed rising and setting with the consistency of an expert ballerina’s fouetté en tournant. If we find it difficult to conceptualize the celestial movements as a glorious dance, then the problem is not with the sun and the planets but with ourselves. Through texts like the Psalms, as well as writings from recent mystics like G.K. Chesterton, George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and others, we can feed our hearts with images that help us perceive the universe anew, so we approach the celestial movements for what they truly are: a perfectly choreographed and beautiful dance. Similarly, if you find your spouse dull, or if you become bored loving your children through the humdrum duties of family life, the problem is not with your family but with yourself. What is needed is the reordering of affection. And a good place to start is to take stock of the art, music, literature, and images, with which you are feeding your heart. Are you listening to music that draws you into greater stability, or feeds a sense of restlessness? Are you feeding your imagination on a diet of literature and art which shows how order, stability, and the commonalities of daily life are worth fighting and dying for, or are you filling your mind with images and ideas that make you pine for another type of life?
As humans, we cannot escape from the seduction of the lovely and sublime. Because we have an intrinsic longing for the transcendental attributes of being—namely goodness, truth, unity, and beauty—we must be nourished by beauty or else we shrivel up inside. But our desire for beauty is like the needle on a compass: it can point to true north, which is God and his uncreated energies, or it can veer off toward substitutes. Specifically, if we are not formed by the beauty of worship, then we risk becoming malformed by the counterfeit beauties of this world. Just as we can acquire dispositions that enable us to delight in what is good, true, and beautiful—ultimately God Himself—it is also possible to corrupt ourselves so that heavenly joys would be torment. We catch something of the latter in the figure of Saruman in Lord of the Rings. We see Saruman move from a sophisticated and noble wizard to someone who ends up being revolted by the beauty of the elves, so that he would have hated the joy of the undying lands (the elf heaven).
Or we might think of Milton’s Satan, whose hatred of earthly beauty paled in comparison to his much greater revulsion of heavenly beauty. In Book IX of Paradise Lost, Satan is surveying the land of his exile and recognizes his inability to delight in the natural beauties that surround him. But as much as he hated the beautiful hills, valleys, and rivers of his earthly exile (so that the more he sees, the more he feels torment within), he yet preferred these to the suffering he would undergo if faced with the beauties of heaven.
With what delight could I have walked thee [earth] round,
If I could joy in aught, sweet interchange
Of Hill, and Vallie, Rivers, Woods and Plaines,
Now Land, now Sea, and Shores with Forrest crownd,
Rocks, Dens, and Caves; but I in none of these
Find place or refuge; and the more I see
Pleasures about me, so much more I feel
Torment within me, as from the hateful siege
Of contraries; all good to me becomes
Bane, and in Heav’n much worse would be my state.
Paradise Lost, like C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, explores the paradox of becoming so corrupted that one prefers misery to the infinite pleasure of the beatific vision.
We see this principle played out in how people react to the beauty of worship. In the contemporary world, not everyone has a reaction similar to the envoys of Prince Vladimir: many modern men and women look askance at the ritual, ceremony, and formalism of traditional worship because it lacks the spontaneity that the worldly mind has come to associate with authenticity. Consequently, the beauty of ancient transcendent worship is often experienced, not as joy, but as aversion. A couple anecdotes will illustrate my point.
A friend told me that he had a Protestant relative who visited a Byzantine Church during Lent when they were doing the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete. Afterwards he went home and felt he had to listen to some of the, so called, “old hymns,” just to shake it off. He sensed this ancient service had a type of magic about it, but he experienced it as bad magic. The other anecdote comes from a recent encounter with an old friend. While riding in the car together, we were sharing some of our favorite songs on Spotify. I put on the St. Patrick’s Orthodox Choir and their album of hymns. My friend was a good Christian man yet, as a modern evangelical, he was accustomed to a different type of worship music. His reaction to the choir surprised me. He asked me to turn it off, but not because he thought it was slow and boring, and not because he wanted something more exciting with a stronger beat. Instead, he said the music made him uncomfortable because it was a window into a world that he had no connection with. The Orthodox worship music seemed to resonate with something deep inside him, but whatever that something was, he didn’t want that part of him awakened just then. But he was honest enough to add, “maybe that’s bad.”
In both cases, the problem was a matter of disordered affection—an inability or unwillingness to find true beauty attractive, or even a tendency to perceive true beauty as uncomfortably seductive and disruptive.
Consider the slow pace and pauses in ancient worship that I have discussed elsewhere. The pauses in prayer, the periods of stillness and punctuated inactivity, or the practice of melismas (again, embellishing syllables with melodic adornment, so that a single syllable is stretched out over multiple notes), may appear annoyingly inefficient and may thus be received, not as a joy, but as aversion. This is perhaps especially true today, as much of our fast-paced modern lifestyle nudges us to find slow worship burdensome. Consider that as the pace of life increased throughout the twentieth century, and the relentless march of consumer capitalism transformed time itself into a commodity, the speed of church services increased, with elements of worship hurried up, and ancient periods of silence truncated or eliminated completely. Pastor Rick Warren reflected this mood when he wrote in 1995, “Almost all churches need to pick up the pace of their services.” He went on to lament that “there is a lot of ‘dead time’ between different elements.” As a solution, he exhorted ministers to “look for ways to save time in your service.”
I understand where Pastor Warren is coming from, given his desire to achieve worship that is “seeker-sensitive” to fast-paced modern Americans who grow bored quickly. But my challenge to pastors following this model of contemporary worship would be to reflect whether they are merely colluding with cultural pressures that malform our affections in a type of reverse catechesis. Does fast-paced-concert-style worship run the risk of creating a situation like Milton’s Satan found himself in, where true beauty has become a burden?
Disciplining the Heart Through Worship
The alternative to the fast-paced model of worship advocated by Warren is to view church, not as something that should be tailored to the modern lifestyle, but as an opportunity to actually challenge our cultural preoccupation with efficiency and haste—to discipline the heart toward a different ethos. Understood in this way, the periods of stillness in traditional worship are not “dead time,” but an invitation to a slower and more contemplative life. As we submit to this counter-cultural ethos, our aesthetic faculties as well as our spiritual dispositions can be reformed. No matter how addicted a person may be to noise, haste and the freneticism of the modern lifestyle, it is possible—through habits that shape the mind, body, and soul— to train one’s affections to love quietude and stillness. Habits of worship are central to that retraining.
But retraining our affections is hard work, both for the individual as well as the church body. Achieving beauty in worship does not come easy: it is resource-intensive and labor-intensive to have a lovely church, a good choir, and altar servers who participate in an orderly and elegant manner. Similarly, it takes struggle and work for the laity to participate in the liturgy with intention and understanding. And above all, it takes struggle for an individual previously catechized in the fast-paced lifestyle of modernity, to find the slower and silent ethos of worship attractive. But the fruit of that struggle is a heart that can delight in God’s beauty, both now and in the age to come.