Part of the essence of art is its expressive value, the message of a work. "If an artistic work stands in need of a verbal explanation, it loses its own proper value and merely serves to provide the senses with a purely sensual pleasure and to give the spirit the pleasure of a futile game."(16)
The authentic artistic work is in itself sufficient to communicate vividly and intelligibly the thoughts and emotions of its author; by its comeliness and grace it is able to address people's reason and emotions, and it inspires in the soul the desire for "what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived: the magnificent things that God has prepared for those who love him."(17)
Hence, in an authentic work of art, we will not only find the individual aspects of the content presented as perfectly as possible in their formal expression, but there will also be a harmony of arrangement of these aspects -"Beauty consists in a harmonic relation of the parts"(18) so as to meet the demands of truth and intelligibility, of content and form.
Particularly in sacred art, form is filled, even determined, by content. Aesthetic frenzy, which places beauty above truth and form above content, is alien to it. For beauty to appear and shine, an essential wisdom, intensely seeking expression and form, is required.(19)
Thus neither an art which completely rejects and abandons concrete objects and renounces any intellectual content, nor an art which strives towards the decomposition and dissolution of everything that has form, i.e., the destruction of the traditional formal order, is suitable for sacred art.
"If art properly interprets religious realities or is intended to be 'sacred' art, then one may expect it to avoid any falsification, any desecration, any attack on people's sentiments, on the truths of their faith, on the virtues which represent their ideals. This respect of human beings in what lies closest to their hearts is fundamental to the dignity of art."(20)