Beauty that Endures: Michael Bursch Speaks on Sacred Architecture (Video)
by Tacy Kratt ‘27
The Saint Benedict Institute’s opening lecture of the year, “Beauty, Ever Ancient, Ever New: Foundational Principles of Sacred Architecture,” drew a packed crowd of Hope College students, faculty, and community members. The September lecture was given by Michael Bursch, a West Michigan native and Notre Dame graduate who specializes in traditional church designs in his work as a sacred architect.
Bursch spoke about the classical principles of beauty that guide his work. These principles are embedded within an “Aristotelian-Thomistic worldview” that understands beauty as a transcendental value with the identifiable qualities of integritas, consonantia, and claritas.
Integritas—integrity or wholeness—is the first principle of beauty. Sharing a variety of images, Bursch pointed out how the arches and domes prominent in many older buildings evoke this visual sense of integrity and security that is often missing in modern architecture, which replaces them with jarring angles and visual abnormalities. In the context of churches, Bursch explained how architecture that revolves around the tabernacle possesses this integrity in a metaphysical sense, since the Eucharist is the culmination of worship and the completeness of God’s love.
The next principle of beauty is consonantia—proportion or harmony. Using images and music, Bursch demonstrated how both our eyes and ears perceive ratios and frequencies as beautiful, whether we have the technical language to explain these patterns or not. In many classic works of architecture, every precise detail is intentionally proportionate to some set ratio. Bursch commented that this mathematical precision is echoed in “the entire created order,” including the human body.
Borrowing from Pope Saint John Paul II, Bursch defined beauty as “veritas splendor”—the splendor of truth. In this framework, beauty arises from something revealing the essence of its being. A thing is beautiful when it points to its true identity and purpose: when it has claritas, the final principle of beauty, which signifies a clarity and intelligibility of nature. Churches are beautiful, then, when their sacred nature is evident, when the physical space reflects heavenly realities.
Bursch clarified that he does not aim to build beautiful churches just for the sake of aesthetics. Instead, he recognizes the evangelical power such places have to “touch people’s hearts and draw them to God.” His talk was an encouragement to embrace the beauty of sacred spaces and also to understand the logic of beauty within an enduring theoretical framework. More broadly, his words underscore the unique capacity human beings have to create beauty out of material goods and to do so in a way that leads others to the ultimate beauty of God.
Michael Bursch, AIA, an architect with Harrison Design in Washington, D.C., spoke on, “Beauty, Ever Ancient, Ever New: Foundational Principles of Sacred Architecture” in September 2026.
