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Fra Angelico, The Annunciation, 1425–1426, tempera on poplar panel, 190.3 x 191.5 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
The Word of God and the Way of Beauty: Dei Verbum and Via Pulchritudinis
Michael Peppard
Let me be clear up front: Dei Verbum, the Vatican II document about divine revelation, did not include one word about beauty or the arts. It was focused on the text of Scripture—part of a broad conciliar effort to make Roman Catholics in pulpits and pews more devoted to biblical texts as a mode of divine revelation. Looking back on its sixtieth anniversary, we can say that the effort was largely successful in two ways and disappointing in another. There have been vast improvements in the knowledge of the Bible through priestly formation and a dramatic increase of biblical proclamations in liturgy, especially on Sundays and Solemnities, when it matters most. Yet the rates of Bible reading outside of Mass by regular Catholics and their concomitant degrees of scriptural knowledge have not increased very much, especially regarding the Old Testament.
Even when today’s Catholics self-report Bible reading, it is most frequently the same texts that will be proclaimed at the Mass they are about to attend. They have deepened their encounters with liturgically prescribed Scripture but not necessarily broadened the pool from which they draw. In other words, today’s church-going Catholics often know the Gospels quite well, but not much else from the Bible. Despite the stated hope that through the new lectionary “the treasury of the word of God will be opened up in such a way that nearly all the principal pages of the Old Testament will become familiar to those taking part in the Mass on Sundays,” the fact remains that enormous and influential portions of the Bible’s core are missing from liturgical proclamation. The Bible of the Sunday Mass is one that lacks the epic stories of Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, Rachel, Leah, Esau, Joseph, and Aseneth. Indeed, many Catholics raised during the Vatican II era are more likely to know about Joseph’s “coat of many colors” not through the Bible, but through the Broadway musical that re-imagined its story—and was produced the same year as the new lectionary.
Then should Catholic leaders just give up on trying to make this people of the Word into a people of the Book? As a Catholic and professor of Biblical Studies, I’m not waving the white flag yet. But perhaps my reference to Broadway—to biblical imagination in the arts—is more than just a cheeky line.
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That same Catholic in the pew who does not read the text of Scripture often spends substantial time looking at the art in their church, not to mention the biblical art in the local museum. That same Catholic student in the classroom who skipped the reading assignment for Jonah on the syllabus often becomes immersed in the diverse history of the Jonah cycle in Christian art—and only then will return to read the textual story.
If Dei Verbum needs an update, perhaps it would be to include the role of the arts in biblical revelation.
For almost the entire history of Roman Catholicism, the visual arts have been crucial ways of mediating the Word of Sacred Scripture. Dei Verbum maintains the Catholic “both-and” of Scripture and tradition, but biblical art is a mode of revelation that is neither Scripture nor bound by sacred tradition. Rather, artworks breathe new spirit into what Dei Verbum calls “the living tradition of the whole Church” that “must be taken into account along with the harmony which exists between elements of the faith” (§12).
The arts can be a mode of biblical evangelization through wonder and beauty. In the words of Pope Francis:
Every form of catechesis would do well to attend to the “way of beauty” (via pulchritudinis). … So a formation in the via pulchritudinis ought to be part of our effort to pass on the faith. Each particular Church should encourage the use of the arts in evangelization, building on the treasures of the past but also drawing upon the wide variety of contemporary expressions so as to transmit the faith in a new “language of parables.” We must be bold enough to discover new signs and new symbols, new flesh to embody and communicate the word, and different forms of beauty which are valued in different cultural settings, including those unconventional modes of beauty which may mean little to the evangelizers, yet prove particularly attractive for others.
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Francis was echoing a rich, under-appreciated document from the Dicastery for Culture and Education, “The Via Pulchritudinis, Way of Beauty” (2006), which outlines a map for evangelization through beauty. Emphasizing the beauty of creation, the arts, and the liturgy, Via Pulchritudinis offers practical, pastoral proposals for biblical evangelization.
As excellent as that exhortation is, Catholics probably do not need an official document to understand that their encounters with Scripture have been shaped by visualization and artistic imagination. To wit, here’s a question I have often asked rooms full of Bible-reading Christians: “Where was Mary when she met the angel Gabriel and received the message of her miraculous pregnancy?” Those brave enough to answer usually say, “at home.” But the text does not tell us anything at all about the setting of this famous event. Literally no information is provided about the circumstances of the Annunciation, except that it happens in Nazareth (Luke 1:26–28). Was she at home? In the synagogue or temple? Drawing water from a well? Reading? Weaving? Ancient and medieval art offer all of those options. Our imaginations fill out the scene: we see her room, her clothes, her posture, the tilt of her head, something she’s holding in her hand. Most of this famous scene has been generated by artistic visualization, in between Scripture and tradition.
Beyond these acts of biblical imagination—what the Jesuits have called “composition of place”—biblical art has also served an interpretive function. For example, the oldest artistic depiction of the story that we typically call the parable of the “Good Samaritan” encodes an allegorical interpretation in its portrayal. This comes from the Codex Purpureus Rossanensis (also called the “Rossano Gospels”; Fig. 1), an early Byzantine manuscript that contains precious and unique biblical illustrations. In the text of Luke, Jesus tells the story about a hypothetical Samaritan, but this artist has portrayed an emerging homiletic interpretation (e.g., that of Augustine) of the Samaritan as Jesus himself. The top of the page titles the parable “the one about the man who fell among thieves,” thus focalizing our attention less on the textual Samaritan’s mercy and more on our need for salvation from the roadside ditch.
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Figure 1
Folio 7v from the Rossano Gospels, 6th century. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. CC0 Public Domain Designation.
Other examples of biblical art find clever ways to resolve textual problems in an episode. Consider the famous post-resurrection encounter between Jesus and Mary Magdalene in the Gospel of John. John states that, after first speaking to the angels, Mary Magdalene “turned around” or “turned backwards” (20:14) and beheld Jesus standing there, whom she did not yet recognize. After he says her name, the text continues, “she turned and said to him” or “having turned, she said to him” (20:16). Although Mary was already looking at Jesus, she “turned” when he called her by name. Could this be a literary seam in the text? The second turning interrupts the smooth flow of the text, just as the slight bump of a seam interrupts the smoothness of a textile. One major commentary suggests that the second turning is “meaningless in view of [the first turning]” and “perhaps a scribal error.” Others interpret the first turning as physical and the second as spiritual, a proposal which has merit in John’s narrative world of double meanings.
Alternatively, inspired by artistic visualizations, one might also view the first turning as a partial turning and the second turning as complete. This interpretation, endorsed by some major commentators, is well represented in the history of Christian art. A clear example is Rembrandt’s portrayal of Mary Magdalene’s first turning as partial, a glance over her shoulder, in Christ and Saint Mary Magdalen at the Tomb (Fig. 2). Some biblical translations bring this imagination back into the text itself, by rendering verse 14 as “She glanced over her shoulder” and verse 16 as “She turned toward him.” It seems that the artistic solution to a textual problem has bounced back to influence versions of the text itself.
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Figure 2
Rembrandt van Rijn, Christ and St Mary Magdalen at the Tomb, 1638, oil on panel, 61.0 x 50.0 cm, Royal Collection Trust. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, CC0 Public Domain Designation.
Artistic versions of New Testament events have often been drawn from typological interpretations of the Old Testament, which had been cultivated through centuries of sermons, biblical commentaries, liturgies, and artworks. A ready example is the presentation of Mary as the New Eve. Such an idea flowed from the biblical identification of Jesus as the “Second Adam” or “New Adam” in the theology of Paul (1 Cor 15:45–49; Rom 5:12–21). But since the story of the Garden of Eden dramatizes Eve’s role, too, early Christian theologians found in Mary a resetting of humanity’s relationship to God. If the biblical Eve was known primarily for disobedience, Mary became known for her obedience to God’s will at the Annunciation (“Let it be done to me according to your word”). Medieval composers of poetry and music enjoyed expressing this idea of reversal through a Latin palindrome: the sin of Eve (Latin Eva) was reversed by the Annunciation’s “Hail” (Latin Ave). The widespread medieval chant, Ave Maris Stella, makes the claim explicit in its opening lines: “Hail, star of the sea, dear Mother of God and ever-Virgin, happy gate of heaven. Receiving that Ave from the mouth of Gabriel, establish us in peace, changing the name of Eva.”
Visual artists juxtaposed Eve and Mary as well, especially through the scene of the Annunciation. Fra Angelico’s fifteenth-century Annunciation positions Mary and Gabriel in a colonnade directly adjacent to the Garden of Eden (article cover image). The rear tips of Gabriel’s wings and the heel of his foot are still leaving Eden, as he crosses the threshold of space and time toward Mary in a single step. The beams of light, which carry the dove toward her, originate from the sunshine over Eden; the “let there be light” (fiat lux) of God’s creation is recapitulated in the new creation of the Incarnation (“let it be done to me,” fiat mihi). The glorious colors of Mary’s dress seem plucked from the abundant flowers of Eden’s paradise, highlighting their contrast with the subdued grays of Eve’s garment. But beside their clothes, Eve and Mary look quite like twins separated at birth, embodying the twin realities of suffering and grace. The visualization and artistic mastery of Fra Angelico show how much the “way of beauty” can bridge the gaps between Scripture and tradition in Catholic interpretation.
Artists often draw us in first through wonder—we marvel at the vision, dexterity, subtlety, or grandeur—and only later does verbal teaching supplement the artwork. If we read Scripture attentively, we see that this, too, is a biblical way of revelation. In the story of the Exodus, the God of Israel grabs their attention by multiplying “signs and wonders in the land of Egypt” (Exod 7:3), and only later delivers the textual teaching of the Torah. The ministry of Jesus often follows the same pattern: his healings and miracles and “signs” draw in the listeners before the words are offered as a supplement. Sometimes the wondrous events wordlessly speak for themselves. In the Acts of the Apostles, Peter and Paul follow this pattern, by which a wondrous event (at Pentecost or through a healing) creates the conditions for receptivity to the Word. In the Areopagus speech to the Athenians, Paul begins with the via pulchritudinis of natural theology—the beauty accessible to everyone—and the speech does not even get to a scriptural citation or prooftext, except those of Greek poets (Acts 17:22–31). With any artwork or wonder, the concern of idolatry arises. The catalyst for Paul’s speech was his distress that “the city was full of idols” (17:16). In concert with Paul, the Wisdom of Solomon describes a careful balance of reverence for creation and Creator: if from “joy in the beauty” of natural wonders people have “thought them gods, let them know how far more excellent is the Lord than these; for the original source of beauty fashioned them. … For from the greatness and the beauty of created things their original author, by analogy, is seen” (Wis 13:3, 5 NABR). The document Via Pulchritudinis calls this process an “ascendant dialogue” (§III.1)
As I admitted at the outset, the role of the arts in the dissemination and interpretation of God’s Word was not discussed in Dei Verbum, but subsequent decades have witnessed increased engagement on the topic from various Vatican offices and papal teachings in diverse venues. There has been a striking continuity across the post-conciliar pontificates on this topic, while each pope has emphasized different aspects of the via pulchritudinis. At the closing of the council, Pope Paul VI addressed artists directly: “The Church has long since joined in alliance with you. … You have aided her in translating her divine message in the language of forms and figures, making the invisible world palpable. … This world in which we live needs beauty in order not to sink into despair. It is beauty, like truth, which brings joy to the heart of man and is that precious fruit which resists the wear and tear of time.”
Pope John Paul II was more detailed and effusive about the role of the arts in evangelization. His 1999 “Letter to Artists” is among the most eloquent defenses of the arts in Christian theology and culture. Regarding the Bible specifically, he notes that “Sacred Scripture has thus become a sort of ‘immense vocabulary’ (Paul Claudel) and ‘iconographic atlas’ (Marc Chagall), from which both Christian culture and art have drawn” (§5). He does not ignore the temptations of idolatry, but in fact offers a pithy summary of how the iconoclast crisis was resolved. The key to settling the controversy was “the mystery of the Incarnation: if the Son of God had come into the world of visible realities—his humanity building a bridge between the visible and the invisible— then, by analogy, a representation of the mystery could be used, within the logic of signs, as a sensory evocation of the mystery” (§7).
Then-Cardinal Ratzinger sounded a similar note, when recounting the legend of how Christianity spread to Russia. After Russian ambassadors from the tenth-century ruler Vladimir of Kiev had attended a liturgy at Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, they reported that they did not know whether they were on earth or in heaven—and were convinced God dwelled there. Ratzinger concludes that what convinced the ambassadors of the Russian prince “was not a missionary style argument whose elements appeared more convincing to those disposed to listen than those of any other religion. No, that which struck home was the mystery in itself, a mystery that, precisely because it is found beyond all discussion, imposes on reason the force of truth.” While those remarks had concerned the beauty of the liturgy, many years later, as Pope Benedict XVI was speaking in commemoration of the Vatican Museums, he praised the evangelistic power of artworks:
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One could say that the artistic patrimony of Vatican City constitutes a kind of great “parable” through which the Pope speaks to men and women of every part of the world, and so from many cultures and religions, people who might never read one of his Discourses or Homilies. …
The language of art is a language of parables, endowed with a special universal openness: the “via Pulchritudinis” is a path to guide the mind and the heart to the Eternal, to elevate them to the heights of God.
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The link between beauty and truth runs throughout magisterial teaching. For Pope Francis, the connection between the Word of God and beauty also harkens back to Pope Paul VI: the chief effect of beauty on humanity is hope—and especially hope for the poor. In his 2025 homily for the Jubilee of Artists, whose Gospel lection was the Beatitudes (Luke 6:17, 20–26), his opening summary was clear: “As artists and representatives of the world of culture, you are called to be witnesses to the revolutionary vision of the Beatitudes. Your mission is not only to create beauty, but to reveal the truth, goodness and beauty hidden within the folds of history, to give voice to the voiceless, to transform pain into hope.”
During the new pontificate of Pope Leo XIV, the time is ripe for further reflection on the relationship between artistic visualization and the Word of God. Unlike his immediate predecessors, he will lead a society already in a post-print culture and moving toward a post-textual culture. The spread of handheld technologies of all kinds has decreased people’s desire for text as the primary mode of learning and engagement. The dramatic expansion of visual memes, short-form video and, in particular, the shocking acceleration of realistic video production through A.I. combine to signal that we may finally be moving out of the Gutenberg era. Already Christians encounter the Bible through videos like The Bible Project or the vastly popular biblical reimagining of The Chosen. Recently, user-generated A.I. recreations of Bible scenes—“filmed” like first-person hand-held POV social media posts—have been some of the most viral biblical content of all.
We do not know where this imagistic “via technologica” will lead. Like the first apostles who were astounded that the Holy Spirit had been poured out on unbaptized Gentiles (Acts 10:45), future modes of evangelization will surprise us. Yet Pope Francis was open-minded about the power of spiritual imagination to surprise, and his 2023 address to a conference of Catholic artists presents an appropriate concluding challenge:
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We need the genius of new language, powerful stories and images, writers, poets and artists capable of proclaiming to the world the message of the Gospel, of allowing us to see Jesus. … Your work helps us to see Jesus, to heal our imagination of everything that disfigures his face or, worse, attempts to domesticate it. To domesticate the face of Christ, in the sense of trying to define it and enclose it within our preconceptions, is to destroy his image. Yet the Lord always surprises us: Christ is always greater; he is always a mystery that in some way escapes us whenever we try to fit him into a frame and hang him on a wall. He always surprises us; and when we do not sense that the Lord surprises us, something is wrong: our hearts are diminished and closed. This, then, is the challenge facing the Catholic imagination in our time. It is a challenge entrusted to you: not to “explain” the mystery of Christ, which is ultimately unfathomable, but to enable us to touch him, to feel his closeness, to let us see him as alive and to open our eyes to the beauty of his promises. Because his promises appeal to our imagination: they help us to imagine in a new way our lives, our history and the future of humanity.
Micheal Peppard
Michael Peppard is professor of theology at Fordham University and the author, most recently, of How Catholics Encounter the Bible. He received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Yale University, with prior degrees from Yale Divinity School, its Institute of Sacred Music, and the University of Notre Dame. He offers commentary on current events at the nexus of religion, politics, and culture for venues such as Commonweal, where he is a frequent contributor, and leads campus conversations at Fordham as a faculty member of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies.
12. Data on this topic is not easy to find, since sociologists of religion who focus on Catholicism rarely investigate Bible reading—a revealing fact in itself. The “Faith Matters Survey,” a major study of overall U.S. religiosity in 2006, shows Catholics as self-reporting the lowest level of Bible reading among Christian denominations, with over 70% responding “never” or “occasionally.” This was not included in the resulting book, Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), but the data was provided to me by David Campbell via personal communication. A contemporaneous study of Hispanic and Latino religiosity found that only 27% of Hispanic Catholics read Scripture weekly, while 78% of Hispanic Evangelicals did; Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and Pew Hispanic Center, “Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2007), 18. In the U.K., two sociological studies of whether Catholics read the Bible “regularly” (1948 study, pre-Vatican II) or “weekly” (2005 study) found the same low number: only 4% of Catholics self-reported doing so; Clive D. Field, “Is the Bible Becoming a Closed Book? British Opinion Poll Evidence,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 29 (2014): 506–7.
13. Studies of Base Communities and Small Christian Communities (SCCs or CLCs) do find deeper engagement with lectionary excerpts for the coming Sunday Mass, but not much Bible reading beyond that; e.g., Mark M. Gray, Michal J. Kramarek, and Thomas P. Gaunt, “Faith and Spiritual Life of Catholics in the United States” (Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, 2021). For more, see Michael Peppard, How Catholics Encounter the Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), Introduction and ch. 8.
14. Lectionary for Mass, Second Typical Edition, Introduction (Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, 1998), §106.
15. Andrew Lloyd Webber, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1970).
16. Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, §167.
17. The facsimile edition is Codex purpureus Rossanensis. Rossano calabro, Museo dell’Arcivescovado: vollständige Faksimile-Ausgabe im Originalformat der Handschrift (Roma: Salerno editrice; Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1985). Accompanying commentary is Codex purpureus Rossanensis. Rossano calabro, Museo dell'Arcivescovado. Commentarium (Roma: Salerno editrice; Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1987).
18. Augustine, Quaestiones Evangeliorum 2.19.
19. Ernst Haenchen, John 2: A commentary on the Gospel of John (Hermeneia; Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984), 209.
20. tunc conversa corpore … nunc corde conversa (“first turning in body, now turning in heart”), in Augustine, Tractates on John 121, PL 35, pp. 1956–1957. Cf. Michael Peppard, “Mary Magdalene’s Turn: Text Criticism and Reception History of John 20,16,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 96 (2020): 563–81.
21. E.g., Francis Moloney, The Gospel of John (Sacra Pagina; Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998), 528.
22. Rembrandt, Christ and Saint Mary Magdalen at the Tomb (1638), Royal Collection Trust, London; cf. Kasper Bro Larsen, Recognizing the Stranger: Recognition Scenes in the Gospel of John (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 196–197.
23. New Living Translation.
24. For more examples of this, see Peppard, How Catholics Encounter the Bible, chs. 5–6.
25. My translation from Latin: Ave, maris stella, Dei mater alma, atque semper virgo, felix caeli porta. Sumens illud Ave Gabrielis ore, funda nos in pace, mutans Evae nomen.
26. Pope Paul VI, “Address to Artists,” December 8, 1965.
27. Pope John Paul II, “Letter to Artists,” April 4, 1999.
28. Joseph Ratzinger, “Eucharistia come genesi della missione,” XXIII Eucharistic Congress of Bologna, September 20–28, 1997, published in Il Regno 19 (1997): 588–589. Translated in Via Pulchritudinis §III.3.C.
29. Pope Benedict XVI, “Address at Screening of the Film Art and Faith: Via Pulchritudinis,” October 25, 2012.
30. This connects to the opening call of Dei Verbum: that “by hearing the message of salvation the whole world may believe, by believing it may hope, and by hoping it may love” (DV 1).
31. Pope Francis, “Homily for Jubilee of Artists and the World of Culture,” February 16, 2025.
32. Pope Francis, “Homily for Jubilee of Artists and the World of Culture,” February 16, 2025.
33. Pope Francis, “Address to the conference The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination,” May 27, 2023.