Church architecture must be true, and truth will be beautiful. The word “truth” applies not only to propositions but also to reality. A person can be true or false, but succeeding (or failing) to become the idea God had of him when he was made. Something is beautiful when it becomes what it is supposed to be and shines forth (splendor) its essence. We use the word beauty in close connection to truth when we see an act of generosity or humility or kindness and say, “That was a beautiful thing to do.” It was a true thing. The person is beautiful for acting fully, with integrity, proportionate to his being, acting as a full human being. The saints grow more beautiful. In fact, the reason to become a saint is to become beautiful at last: the relationship between “beautiful” and “beatific.”
The task of the architect is to build true buildings: churches that display the inherent truth in matter, which is that all things exist to be building blocks for the Heavenly Jerusalem. The church building displays to the world its potential. Plato said that the splendor of truth is beauty. He meant that beauty is truth’s luster or brilliance. But splendor does not exist in the abstract—it must be concretized, made real, made hypostatic. The splendor of God is the beauty of Jesus. And architecture is evangelical insofar as it offers to the world something better than the ambiguous beauty it knows. It offers Christ’s beauty, which the world seeks. The Christian is an icon of Jesus’ splendor repeated in each glorified face, and the church building must also be an icon of Jesus’ divinized humanity. Anthropos is the cosmic priest of the visible world, and he adds the splendor of created matter to the celestial praise of God when he offers it up in “reasonable worship” (Rom 12:1—logiken latreian). (The Spiritual Animal-Sacramental Nature of Church Art and Architecture by David W. Fagerberg)
Illustrated Architecture Dictionary
Symbols in Sacred Architecture and Iconongraphy
The Institute of Sacred Architecture
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