Introduction
The most beautiful building I have ever entered is the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis. Its mosaics shimmer like galaxies fixed into stone, light catching on millions of tiny fragments to form a vision of the sacred. Standing there, I felt no need to summon belief in God; the beauty itself was enough. Human hands had made this wonder, layering devotion into glass and mortar until the whole building seemed to sing.
I have felt something similar in places that were never meant as houses of worship. The Guardian Building in Detroit — a skyscraper dedicated to finance — rises in Art Deco splendor, its arches and murals as grand as any cathedral. Both structures, one sacred and one secular, bear witness to the same human instinct: to give form to our highest values through beauty. Religion has been one of the richest vessels for that instinct, not because it proves the divine, but because it reveals the human capacity to create what inspires reverence.
The Absent Christ
The Gospels never tell us what Jesus looked like. There is no description of his height, his hair, his eyes, or his voice. The writers did not think it important — or perhaps they assumed everyone already knew, or perhaps they believed his words and actions mattered more than his appearance. Whatever the reason, the effect was profound: Jesus entered history without a face. That silence left a blank canvas for the imagination of centuries, and Christians, artists, and cultures have been painting upon it ever since.
As a naturalist, I hold only a few convictions about Jesus himself. I believe he was a real person, a first-century Jew who lived and died under Roman rule. I believe he was an apocalyptic prophet, proclaiming that the kingdom of God was near. My own suspicion — though it can never be proven — is that he was a Pharisee, a voice within that interpretive and legal tradition. Beyond those few points, everything else is conjecture. The Jesus who comforts, terrifies, inspires, or consoles — that Jesus is not the Jesus of history but the Jesus of art, literature, and culture.
And so the earliest depictions of Jesus bear little resemblance to one another. In the Roman catacombs, he appears as a youthful figure, clean-shaven, often carrying a lamb on his shoulders. He is the Good Shepherd, drawn from parable and rendered with tenderness. Sometimes he resembles a magician, working wonders with a wand. This Jesus reflected the needs of a community still forming its identity: a protector, a wonder-worker, someone close enough to touch.
As Christianity moved into the Byzantine world, the face of Christ changed. He became the bearded philosopher, stern yet compassionate, haloed with divine authority. Icons portrayed him not as one of many shepherds but as Pantocrator, ruler of all. His eyes seemed to follow the worshipper across the space of the church, demanding reverence. Here was Jesus as wisdom incarnate, reflecting the culture’s values of stability, authority, and the marriage of Greek philosophy with Christian theology.
Later still, Renaissance artists gave him pale skin and European features, embodying their own ideals. Modern depictions expand the gallery even further: the Black Christ of liberation theology, the Indigenous Christ of the Americas, the androgynous Christ who embodies universality, even the muscular “quarterback Christ” of American revivalism. Each portrait reveals less about Jesus of Nazareth and more about the culture that needed him. With no fixed features, he becomes endlessly adaptable, a mirror for our hopes and fears. We need God to look like us, to carry our burdens and embody our ideals. The absent Christ becomes the human face of beauty — created by us, for us.
The Beauty of Suffering
If the Gospels gave us no description of Jesus’s face, they gave us plenty of detail about his death. The crucifixion, described with brutal clarity, became the most enduring image of Christian art. For the first generations of Christians, it was too shameful to depict — the Romans reserved crucifixion for the lowest of criminals, and to honor a crucified man was scandalous. But over time, the cross shifted from disgrace to glory. By the Middle Ages, it dominated cathedrals, icons, and altarpieces. Today, no other image of Jesus is as recognizable as the crucifix: the body nailed to wood, the suffering made visible.
Why do we need this image? Why, out of all the stories of his life — the healings, the parables, the resurrection — is this the one we cannot stop reproducing? I believe it is because suffering is the most universal human experience. We do not all preach or perform miracles, but we all suffer. To see Christ on the cross is to see our own pain reflected back at us — sanctified, made meaningful, lifted into the realm of beauty. Religious art lingers on the crucifixion not to shock us but to console us, teaching that anguish can be borne, that it belongs to something larger than ourselves.
This is not only a Christian instinct. In Buddhism, the very first of the Four Noble Truths states simply that “life is suffering.” Suffering is not an accident or interruption of life but its most basic condition. The task of religion, East and West alike, has often been to help us face this reality without despair. Where Buddhism offers the path of mindfulness and compassion, Christianity offers the crucifix. Both traditions recognize that to be human is to ache, to lose, to die — and both have created beauty to help us endure.
Each culture reimagined the crucifix to suit its own needs. Medieval artists emphasized torment: blood flowing from wounds, ribs straining through flesh, eyes closed in agony. These images taught endurance: if Christ suffered so terribly, then so must we. Later depictions softened the scene, showing Christ serene even in death, his hands more open in blessing than in pain. In Latin America, the crucifix became a symbol of solidarity with the oppressed: Christ suffering with the poor, his body bound to their bodies. In African American churches, a Black Christ on the cross stood as a sign that God knew intimately the pain of injustice. Each crucifix is both local and universal, particular and shared.
What is most striking is how art turns pain into beauty. The Isenheim Altarpiece shows a Christ so grotesque in his suffering that it seems unbearable — yet the very scale and detail of the painting compels awe. Salvador Dalí’s Christ of Saint John of the Cross reimagines the crucifixion as a geometric dream, Christ floating in impossible perspective. Both works unsettle and inspire, showing how human creativity transforms anguish into vision. In this way, crucifix art is not only devotional but deeply artistic: it makes suffering bearable by turning it into something luminous.
For me, this is the clearest example of religion as human art. As a naturalist, I believe Jesus was crucified under Roman authority — an execution like countless others in history. What makes his death different is not divine mandate but the way humans have chosen to depict it. The crucifix is beautiful not because God ordained it but because people, confronted with their own pain, refused to let suffering be meaningless. They made art of it. They lifted it into beauty. Just as Buddhism teaches that suffering is the root of life, Christianity shows how suffering can be shaped into meaning. Religion, at its best, does not erase suffering but transforms it, reminding us that our wounds can still give rise to wonder.
Prophets and Saints
If the crucifixion shows our need to see God share in our suffering, then the saints, prophets, and holy figures reveal another instinct: our need for companions and exemplars. Human beings have rarely been satisfied with a distant or abstract divinity. We want intermediaries — people close enough to us to feel real, but holy enough to inspire us. Saints in Christianity, bodhisattvas in Buddhism, prophets in Judaism and Islam, demigods in the ancient world: each tradition populates its gallery with figures who stand between heaven and earth. Their presence tells us that the sacred must not only rule but also walk among us.
What strikes me is how these figures are portrayed as embodiments of beauty. The golden icons of Orthodox saints, the radiant statues of Hindu gods, the intricate mandalas that depict bodhisattvas — all present holiness as something luminous. Even when ascetics are remembered for their austerity, like the Desert Fathers, their sayings and stories carry an austere beauty of paradox and simplicity. “Go sit in your cell,” one saying goes, “and your cell will teach you everything.” These fragments are not arguments but art, phrases honed into the beauty of wisdom.
In literature, the saints and prophets often appear less as remote figures than as voices we can still hear. Kahlil Gibran’s Jesus, Son of Man is a perfect example. Written as a series of fictional testimonies from people who might have encountered Jesus — disciples, bystanders, even enemies — it presents a Christ refracted through many human perspectives. The book is not history but art: a chorus of voices shaping Jesus into poetry. What matters is not whether Gibran’s characters really lived, but the beauty of their imagined witness. In his The Prophet and The Madman, too, Gibran crafts spiritual wisdom in lyrical form, blending parable with poetry. His works endure because they make religion beautiful, not because they make it provable.
The same can be said of saints’ lives written across centuries. The Vitae of martyrs, miracle-workers, and visionaries were often embroidered with legend — dragons slain, voices heard, wonders performed. Their purpose was not to satisfy modern historians but to inspire the imagination of ordinary believers. Each story was an act of religious art, shaping ideals of courage, devotion, and compassion. These tales filled the gap between doctrine and daily life, showing not only what to believe but how to live beautifully.
When I read these works or stand before these images, I do not feel compelled to ask whether they are historically accurate. Their power lies elsewhere. They are works of human creativity, crafted to make holiness visible and desirable. The saints, prophets, and holy figures are mirrors in which we glimpse our best selves: courageous, faithful, enduring. They are beautiful not because they are divine, but because humans have made them so. Religion here is less about metaphysical truth than about aesthetic truth: the ability of story and image to inspire us to live more fully.
The Aesthetics of the Everyday
Not all beauty in religion is monumental. Sometimes it appears in the simplest things: a ray of light through a window, a circle painted around a head, a loaf of bread on a table. What distinguishes the religious imagination is its ability to notice the ordinary and declare it holy. We call the slanting shafts of sunlight “godrays,” halos of brightness that seem to descend from beyond, though we know they are only the play of light and dust. We paint those same halos around the heads of saints, not because their skulls glow, but because we want to see their wisdom and compassion made visible.
This impulse reaches into the objects of daily life. Bread and wine, the most common elements of a Mediterranean meal, become the Eucharist. Water, necessary for survival, becomes baptismal. Fire, so ordinary in a lamp or hearth, becomes the eternal flame at a shrine. In each case, what is striking is not the object itself but the transformation of perception. We see more than flour and grapes; we see communion. We see more than water; we see new life. Religion has always been the art of taking what is at hand and lifting it into beauty.
Architecture and ritual amplify this transformation. A candle flickering in a dark church feels different from the same flame in a kitchen. Incense wafting through a sanctuary feels different from smoke rising from a campfire. The objects are the same, but the frame changes them. By gathering together, by telling stories, by repeating gestures, communities turn the everyday into the sacred. Religion teaches us not just what to look at, but how to look — how to see the world as charged with meaning.
This aesthetic of the ordinary is not confined to religion, of course. A sunset, a garden, a family meal can stir the same reverence. But religion codifies and sustains these experiences, building rituals that ensure they are remembered and shared. The “godrays” we name in nature become the halos in art, and eventually the light in stained glass. What begins as perception becomes tradition, and tradition becomes beauty carried across centuries.
For me, this is one of the most compelling reasons to remain religious without being spiritual. I do not need to believe that light beams are divine or that bread turns into flesh. What matters is that humans have found ways to make these simple things beautiful, to lift the ordinary into art. This is religion as aesthetic practice: the transformation of the everyday into symbols that inspire us. The power lies not in heaven blessing these objects, but in human imagination choosing to see them differently.
The Head of Christ
In the 1640s, in a workshop once thought to be Rembrandt’s, a series of small paintings known as the Heads of Christ were produced for private devotion. One of these survives in a Flemish collection: a tender portrait of a man with soft features, olive-toned skin, and thoughtful eyes turned slightly away. It is not the triumphant Pantocrator of Byzantine mosaics or the muscular redeemer of the Renaissance. Instead, it is quiet, intimate, and approachable — a face meant for prayer. The painter may not have known what Jesus looked like, but he knew what believers wanted: a savior who seemed near, human, and compassionate.
I find myself drawn to this face. Unlike the grand mosaics of a basilica or the monumental crucifixes of medieval altars, this image is small enough to hold in a private room. It is a Christ not enthroned but encountered. The tenderness of the portrait suggests that holiness can reside not only in glory but in gentleness. It is art designed to meet the viewer’s gaze and whisper that the divine is not beyond reach.
In this way, the Head of Christ of the 1640s is not so different from Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ of 1940. Sallman’s Jesus — reproduced in the tens of millions — became the face of American Protestant devotion, appearing in classrooms, kitchens, and chapels. His Jesus was light-skinned, soft-haired, and deeply American in character, a cultural construct as much as a theological one. And yet it, too, served the same purpose as the older painting: to give believers a face they could look toward, a form they could love.
Neither painting gives us the historical Jesus. As a naturalist, I believe Jesus was a Jewish prophet crucified under Roman authority, likely with features very different from either of these portraits. But both the Flemish devotional image and Sallman’s mid-century Jesus reveal something more important than history: our human longing to imagine the sacred in forms that look like us, to turn our yearning into beauty. They are mirrors of culture, not windows into fact — and that is precisely what makes them powerful.
For me, these portraits remind me that religion’s greatest gift is not certainty but art. In them I do not see God revealing himself to humanity; I see humanity revealing itself through God. The sacredness of these works does not come from divine authority but from their ability to inspire tenderness, reverence, and belonging. The Head of Christ, whether in a Dutch workshop or an American print shop, is beautiful not because it tells us who Jesus was, but because it shows us who we are and what we most need to see: a face turned toward us in compassion.
In Closing
The Basilica mosaics, the Guardian Building, and even a modest Head of Christ on a small panel or a Sunday school wall share a common thread. They are all works of human imagination that take what is ordinary — stone, glass, paint, story — and shape it into something that moves us beyond ourselves. They remind me that the sacred is not given from above but made here, among us, through the art we create.
To be religious but not spiritual is, for me, to honor this work. I do not look to these mosaics, portraits, or poems as proof of God’s existence. I look to them as proof of ours. In their beauty, I see humanity’s greatest achievement: the ability to make meaning visible, to embody longing in art, to transform suffering into vision. Beauty is our divinity, not because it descends from heaven, but because it rises from human hands and endures in human hearts.
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